A proper test of my new camera: London in the Winter sun. The lack of an image stabiliser coupled with the low light conditions made for some frustrations, but it wasn't as grainy as I thought when I first got it: I'd accidentally pressed the high speed button and got a high-ISO, very grainy pic. Also don't know how to use the rose properly - it's supposed to shield the lens from glare, but just ended up getting in the way of my wide-angled shots.

We weren't quite sure what the hell was going on when we started getting ushered down this covered roadway, until we ended up with a big crowd of people watching the Horse Guards doing their thing - so, a nice surprise in the end.

Up in Liverpool doing server installs, we had an afternoon off to have a wander...

The Riverside Festival on the Embankment is a bit like a large country fair - fairground rides, traction engines, crafts and stalls, food from around the world, boat races.   On the Saturday night however there's also a huge firework display, where you can sit on the river bank and watch the explosions across the water, reflected in the river.

A trip up to Liverpool, and doing the Beatles tour.

Limestone caves, accessible by boat.  Some great formations, plus interesting WWII graffiti (fascists + invasion + volcanic eruptions = time to find a safe place!).

A walk in the sunshine around Colwick Country Park

A selection of mute swan pictures collected together from various other photo pages hosted here.

Wanting to try out my new camera properly, I volunteered to travel from the south coast of England up to Dumfries in Scotland - a round trip of around 16 hours - just to install one computer. So, the plan was two days of travelling, an hour or so of installing, and the best part of a day photographing. However, as the server ended up taking from 10am to about 4:30pm due to network problems, the following were taken during an extended lunch break while I was trying to figure out what the hell was going wrong...

As the new camera has not only a 10x optical zoom (the same as a good pair of binoculars, and better than my 8x25 binoculars I carry in my backpack) but also lots of new settings for taking landscapes, portraits, action shots, night shots etc., it might look like there are a number of near-duplicate pictures as I play around with the settings. There are also a lot of photographs of birds on a river...

Another family trip to Newark to do the trip down the river we didn't get time for the first time we went!

In and around the hosting facility this server sits used to sit in.