A weekend stay in a lovely cottage in the land of my forebears

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!