Y returns - Tired but happy

Brian Smith got some excellent Creswell Crags pictures and on Thursday evening he put about 40 on a memory stick and said I could blog a couple.

So here are two pictures of where our ancestors lived from around 35,000 years ago onwards. I wouldn't mind living in a cave provided there was a plug for my laptop.

Earlier today, before I collected Y from the tram I managed a couple of hours trying to consolidate Mike's tutorial. A surprisingly high number of things I managed to actually 'do' and that way things do actually stick.

Particularly useful is the facility in Photoshop to lock a section of the 'curves' curve and operate on a selected spectrum of tones in a picture. Ansel Adams and the Zone System people would adore it. And it certainly follows that we snappers should make more use of the camera's on board histograms.

However, I am still not a convert to using RAW. For the sort of photography I do, and the use I make of the results, JPEGS are fine. RAW files, comparatively speaking, are enormous and such a faff to deal with. In downloading and handling terms they are around 5 times slower than JPEGs. And to what end? Unless you are keen on making big prints and exhibiting.

I'm still in the Ken Rockwell camp on this one because I can never see any difference either. Other folks disagree and they are certainly entitled to and we all get on and plough our own furrows.

Y was understandably tired when she got back, and was quite entitled to be, Ruby had been quite ill for a couple of days and off school and with Elli and little visitor Sadie to look after things are quite demanding for grannies. Anyway in Thomas The Tank Engine terms Y has been a really useful engine.

Comments.....Jill..... Thanks for your tick for the Orchid on Pine. Sounds like an American Sandwich doesn't it. I'll have mine with extra relish please. But the others have a point.

Bungus...... I think you and I met a few months after I had retired and so there is much about my working life that it never seemed necessary to tell you about. Not being reticent or anything, it just never cropped up - and vice versa I'm sure.

I certainly don't know how they date the cave-paintings so accurately either. It isn't my field and if people are academically well qualified in their speciality I tend to accept it. The 'scholarly monograph' which I linked to, from Rob's link, had obviously been subjected to peer review so was no doubt completely sound.

It seemed to me that I had also done a link to the 'grains of rice' thing, but I can't find it, - and in my own blog too !

And well done with your cat picture. 16 out of 20 from 'machiavelli too Rob'. Not being a camera-club person you can't realise that is a very high mark. Not going to be 1st, 2nd or 3rd but very respectable.

Machiavelli too Rob ....... Paul liked a rabble-rousing article of mine in Police Review and contacted me about it. He actually contacted Ben Whitaker (another chum) and a Junior Minister at The Home Office to check me out. We got together and our friendship went on from there. He persuaded me to write some stuff for both Tribune and the SWP.

I've tried to google the 3 letters myself but without immediate success. If it was really important I could ask the custodian of some of the cuttings to get them down from his loft. But it wouldn't be fair even now to identify him in this blog.

My mind is buzzing with the possible content of the suggested article. Lets just hope I get round to it before losing interest - decrepitude has this unfortunate effect ! Do you remember, I was going to do something similar with Eddy Sethna, but it never happened.

" 'tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, -
and of obstinacy in a bad one"

Lawrence Sterne - Tristram Shandy

Lovely potted biography thanks to Jesus College - much nicer than Wikipedia. Catch you tomorrow. Sleep well and have a nice weekend.

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