Radcliffe Arms Free House

Good composition and lighting. Worth spending a little time on to remove the lampposts and vehicles.

Thanks, for your supposedly improved version, but...

1. I want to keep the bus in the shot, because the service has now been axed.

2. I don't like the blacked-out windows on the cafe. (now corrected)

3. The top crop causes the eye to be directed up the road, rather than towards the sign.

But apart from that it's perfect and you love it. (-:

It can be done better! This was only a very quick, rough-and-ready job (I only had a low-res screen capture to work on) to remove the eyesores which, in an otherwise very striking and dramatically lit picture which captures the very heart and soul of Victorian/Edwardian Oxford, were bugging me. If I'd been there and that d**n car had been in the way, I'd have taken a separate shot of the cafe from close up and used that in this shot, mutatis mutandis.

I should have waited for the bus to come closer and it would have blotted out the cars.
But the truth is I didn't notice it at the time.

If the idea was that the eye be directed towards the sign, Roy might have regarded the bus as an irritation in the corner of his.

The bus is barely noticeable, so can hardly be an irritant to anyone.

You've now given the cafe a proper frontage (albeit with the fascia board missing),
but the brightness of it is now vying with the pub sign as the main point of interest.

It can easily be darkened. IMHO the picture is worth PhotoShopping properly, but for that I'd need the full-resolution original images.

Don't waste your time on an okay picture. I'm happy with my original just as it is.

So be it.

Having congratulated myself on having properly secured the loose pipework behind and sealing up the loose floor tiles under my washing machine, this morning I found water was still dripping through the ceiling below. So after some more rude words, I had another look upstairs, and found where the leak had really been (and was still) coming from - the (concealed) cistern of the upstairs WC, the adjustment screw of the ballcock in which had never been properly tightened. I've now fixed it (it took seconds), but if I'd done that sooner it would have saved a lot of time, effort and expense.

I'm going on a 3-day photographic holiday in Somerset, organised by a professional. Even using the new camera, it's unlikely to be very successful; Exmoor must be nearly as dead and dry as the countryside in the SE. I booked it months ago, in expectation of normal conditions.

I hope the professional has as much "photographular sagacity" as Roy!

Even if he has, he can't turn a brown landscape green, clear the air of dust, make the heather flower or refill the rivers and streams. My expectations are not high.

But unlike on my photographic holiday in China, 5 years ago, I won't be the least serious or well-equipped photographer in the group, but nor will I come home with comparable pictures or memories.

It was better than expected, and although the dust-dry conditions and dried-up rivers were hardly ideal, the lighting at least (sun and blue sky throughout) were, and brown grass can be turned green in PhotoShop. Many of the 'easy' pictures have already been uploaded and I'm braced for the deluge of derogatory comments from Roy. The harder ones (e.g. of Dunster, a picture-postcard place cluttered up and spoiled by cars 24/7, 365 day a year) are going to take a lot of work and time before they can be.

The new, full-frame, 3-pound sledgehammer was used for all but one of them. But what's been achieved by buying it is a good question. The results (on Flickr and Ipernity) really are indistinguishable from those taken on my much smaller, lighter and older other digital cameras.