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...

Holkham Hall is a lovely stately home with deer, lakes, and some great statues inside and out.  But I think we were most interested in the nesting house martins under the eaves of the shop.

Some pics of Jason Tribbeck's Steel Cobra project.

Visit to some lovely gardens near Haywards Heath

I'm standing on London Bridge, but the picture is of Tower Bridge. Although, typing "London Bridge" into Google maps shows the one in Arizona, which legend has it was bought mistaken for Tower Bridge...

Family trip to Newark

The original galleries created after my trip to Egypt were split into so many chunks that an index page was necessary to navigate around.  This shouldn't be the case any more, but so the page doesn't throw up broken links from search engines I'll add a few of the best pics here and you can link away to the relevant new galleries if you prefer.

• Part 1: Leaving Luxor; Edfu; Aswan
• Part 2: Temple of Isis, Philae ; Aswan High Dam; Kom Ombo; Esna; Luxor
• Part 3: Valley of the Kings; Temple of Hatshepsut; Dendara
• Part 4: Temple of Hathor, Dendara; coming home

Leaving Luxor; The Temple of Horus at Edfu; Kitchner's Island (now Aswan Botanical Gardens), with the fine collection of palm trees; and Elephantine Island (resting place of the Ark of the Covenant?).

Visiting the British Museum in 2001, not long after the glass-roofed Great Court opened.