tenthofjune

6233, Duchess of Sutherland passed by Horwich this morning with the Cumbrian Mountain Express, the first ever Duchess to work north from Bolton to Chorley. The steps to the right of the picture indicate the site of Horwich Fork signal box.

It returned later on, passing through Blackrod Station in the evening:

Ironman UK 2009 was held in Bolton this year. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to the swimming or cycing stages, but managed to catch the frontrunners as they made their first pass through Horwich.

This is Philip Graves running through Horwich with almost a seven minute lead in the first part of the marathon section. He went on to win the event.

The colours were splendid today, especially coupled with the low sunshine. Click on the images for full size versions.

I have added some photos taken today of the Blackrod Scarecrow Festival to our photo gallery.

Update – 2009 Festival Dates

The 2009 festival is taking place on 4th/5th July. (I am getting a lot of search engine hits on this post as, for some reason, there is no official website for the festival)

2010 dates are here

It was Horwich Carnival Races yesterday. Although the weather wasn’t as good as previous years, it did at least stay dry. I didn’t have time to catch all the races, but here’s a few pictures from the 3:15 women’s cycle race.

 

 

Further to my last post, I now have email confirmation from Photobox that they have removed ftp upload capability (despite still accepting logins on the ftp server and having instructions on ftp uploads on the help section):

…to be honest i’m not to sure when or why it was stopped.
I think its something to do with the new uploader software.

I will look into the FTP servers openness and have the information from the website. [Ed:I presume the word ‘removed’ is missing here]

again my apologies for the inconvenience.

FTP capability was one of the benefits of Photobox. I don’t want to have to install Photobox’s own upload software, I have a perfectly capable one of my own – it’s called a standard ftp client. When I have tried their software in the past it is slow and clunky, whereas I can just type ‘mput *.JPG’ at the ftp command line.

I wonder how many others have suddenly found this not to be working without warning.

So what does something to do with the new uploader software mean? Come on Photobox, I understand that some people like to have their hand held with an uploader applet, but why stop others from using ftp as well?

Photobox’s ftp upload service seems to be screwed again. It still lets you upload files, but whereas it normally creates a directory named ‘ftp uploads – dd_mm_yyyy’, it is not doing this and simply dumps the files in the root area, which does not appear in ‘My Albums’ and cannot be deleted either. These files also do not get logged in the photobox ‘uploads log’ .

A few hours later, the files in the root area disappear, presumably cleared out by some automatic script, but do not get moved into a sub folder as they should.

The same thing happened last November and was reported to Photobox, but took several days to get sorted.

Update (11/3)

I have just received a reply from Photobox:

Thanks for your email.
I’m afraid that we no longer offer uploads via FTP

What!!?? Since when? When did that happen? Why wasn’t I warned about this?

Strange then that their help pages still detail how to upload using ftp, even detailing which software to use. *

Also why is the ftp server (ftp.photobox.co.uk) still live and accepting logins?

It would appear that either: Photobox have pulled ftp uploads without warning, without closing down the server and without removing the associated webpages, in which case they are incompetent, or the email came from someone who doesn’t understand what ftp is. I’m hoping it is the latter.

* although they wrongly say that Mac users need to download a client when Mac OS X already has a perfectly workable ftp client built in.

Before digital photography, panoramas involved the use of a guillotine and tape, but now it’s much easier with several photo-stitching software packages available; they may be bundled with your camera or be part of a photo editing package such as Photoshop Elements. The tips for good results, however, are still the same:

1. Keep the camera level. Ideally mount it on a tripod and use one of the many hot-shoe mounted spirit levels available. Failure to do this results in ‘banana’ panoramics.
2. Do not be tempted to use wide-angle lenses ‘to fit more in’, as the distortion makes it harder to marry up the frames. Use either a standard or telephoto lens.
3. Keep foreground objects out of shot. Due to the difference in view between frames, the photo-stitch software will not be able to match up both distant and closer objects.
4. Take all frames at the same exposure settings. This will avoid obvious contrast and colour changes between adjacent frames. If you don’t have a manual mode, then exposure lock can be used. If you are using film, you also need to get them printed with the same settings.
5. Overlap the frames at least 50%. Back in the days of film, this could have seemed expensive, but with digital there is nothing lost and the photo stitching software will have a lot more to work with. Most digital cameras have a stitch assist mode where the current frame is overlaid onto the previous frame on the camera’s screen.
6. Experiment! panoramics can be vertical too.

Just been to the digital photography review site dpreview.com to find that they have been bought out by Amazon. Not sure this is good news. The press release says that dpreview will continue to operate as a standalone operation based in London. Let’s hope Amazon refrain from meddling.

I regularly get asked how many pictures can you fit on a (insert your own figure) MB flash card. As usual, the answer includes the word ‘depends’, but here is a useful little tool on Crucial’s website which works it out for you.

Update 1st Nov 2007

Crucial have for some reason removed that page and have now only got a static page listing tables.