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In December 2022, my wife, Lynn, celebrated her sixtieth birthday and our daughter and son-in-law bought her a balloon flight experience to mark the occasion. It was booked for two which meant that I was to go too.

From that point we booked our flight only for it to be cancelled twelve times! Always due to weather conditions. Initially rain and low cloud but more recently high or gusting winds.

We were beginning to wonder if it would ever go ahead and were very excited when, on Wednesday this week, July 16th, we finally got the go ahead message.

The start location had to change from Tissington to Newhaven but that was not a problem as they aren’t far apart. We put our dogs in kennels for the night so that we didn’t have to worry about getting home early for them.

At 6:30pm the crew arrived at the take off site as did we and our fellow passengers. Some nervous, all excited and happy that we were, at last, going to get our experience!

After briefings on safety and likely flight plan, we all helped to get the balloon inflated, climbed on board and at 7:25pm we took off!


Inflating our balloon

The flight was simply superb, the views incredible, the whole experience fantastic.

As it happened another balloon was also taking off that evening from the same field and would be our companion throughout.


Our companion for the evening

The wind had dropped to such a level that we made very little forward progress and when it came time to land we were barely a kilometre from our take off site.

I must say that the whole thing was amazing and special thanks go to our pilot, Tom Hook and his ground crew, Joe and Reece. They really made the event for us, being professional and entertaining at the same time.

I have created an album of photos from the evening and it can be seen here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjCndy5

Last year we had a visit, at Christmas, from my son. Usually he is in Sydney Australia and contact is made over the Internet. But this year he actually came to see us, which was brilliant.

We were not sure what to get him for Christmas because we knew that, as he was travelling around the world, he wouldn’t be able to carry anything of any size. So we asked him if there was anything he particularly wanted to do while he was here. He said that he would like to see old Trafford Stadium .

We decided to get him a stadium tour for his Christmas present. To make his life easier, I decided to take him in the car. I also decided to take my Leica M240 with me to take some photos.

Nature smiled on us and it was a foggy day! Not so good for him perhaps but photographically I couldn’t have asked for more.



Before this adventure, I knew nothing about the location of the stadium although, obviously, the name is very famous. But I was not aware that it is on the banks of the Bridgewater Canal. This meant that the opportunities for photographs were really quite good.

I have an album of my photos from the day on my flickr account and it can be seen here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBWBfY

It is very handy that Lightroom Classic stores various statistics relating to your image files making it easy to keep track of all sorts of things. The most obvious is the total number of images you have stored in your catalogue. This can then be broken down into the number of images you have downloaded in a certain period.

One thing it has helped to confirm is that in 2024 I had only taken half the number of images that I have done in previous years. And I’m not really sure why.

I certainly haven’t lost interest in photography. I do seem to have lost the impetus to take photographs.

One thing that I can identify as a contributing factor is quite simple really, I’ve been doing other things. I have resurrected my woodworking hobby having spent time clearing my garage to create a useable workshop.

Also, I’ve been trying to get back into painting, watercolours in particular. And these things take time and there’s only so many hours in a day!

So how do I get my mojo back? Well, common advice seems to be to set yourself a project and I have a few ideas. The next thing is to make a start and get my hands on my cameras!

I’ll report on my progress in the next blog post!

Since my last blog, regarding the speed of my iMac, various little things have become apparent. My guess is that the process I went through to speed the machine up revealed that, actually, there were several things not working properly but hidden by the overall slowness of the Mac. One thing that came as a huge surprise was the incredible length of time the first Time Machine backup took after moving files away from the clutches of iCloud Drive. It took 37.5 hours!!!!! In fact, it spent over 24 of those hours sat at 50.5% completed and I was starting to think it had hung. However the Activity Monitor showed that it was doing something so I just let it run.

The iMac now responds very nearly as quickly as it did when I first got it, almost four years ago. It’s so impressive.

But, and there’s always a but, I have spotted a few little things that don’t work correctly. Perhaps they never did? And one of those was that images were not always syncing from Lightroom Classic as might have been expected. This became very obvious when a collection I was working on, and was set to sync, didn’t show all the photos in it when I looked at the same collection in Lightroom Mobile. There were seven photos in the collection in LR Classic but only three of them appeared in LR Mobile.

Off to Google and there I found the answer on a website called ‘The Lightroom Queen’. It was going to involve rebuilding the Lightroom Sync Data and some people (in the comments on that website) were saying that it had fixed their problem and others were saying that it hadn’t fixed theirs. But I reckoned it would be worth a try and here is my summary of what I did because, it worked for me:

In Lightroom Classic I opened Lightroom Preferences and then clicked on the Lightroom Sync tab which brought up the following page:



Now comes the sneaky bit. The button you need to press next is hidden from view and you have to hold down the option key on a Mac or Alt on a Windows device. This will reveal a button named ‘Rebuild Sync Data’ on the right hand side of the screen below Sync Activity where I have marked it on the screenshot. This button is so well hidden that I can’t find a way to screenshot it but, believe me, it is there!

You do get warned that it will take quite some time to run and you should carry out a LR Backup when it has finished. Well, on clicking the button the first thing it did was to go to the backup screen and I thought, surely it can’t have finished so quickly! It hadn’t! I selected Back up and it did that, then automatically restarted LR Classic. Once it had restarted I could see a ‘pause’ symbol over the cloud symbol in the top right of the screen so I clicked on it and it started to sync over 6000 files.



This screenshot shows that menu now that I have successfully synced all my photos. It took approximately an hour to complete that task and, once it had finished, I did another backup. Upon restarting LR Classic I could see that my collection had the sync symbol against all the correct files and they were all there in LR Mobile too!

So, I was a happy bunny yet again.

Here’s a linky to the very helpful Lightroom Queen website if you should need it: https://www.lightroomqueen.com

Thanks for reading this latest blog. I hope it was interesting and look forward to coming up with an idea for the next one!

For the last year or so, my iMac has been slowing down. Some days it has been nigh on unusable because it was so slow. Since loading the new OS, Sonoma last week I was finding it very frustrating and reached the point where I couldn’t just accept this low level of performance any more and had to do a proper investigation to see if there was anything I could do about it.

I did have a sneaky idea that I might know what the problem was but I didn’t know what to do to correct things.

This could very well be down to the way I use my iMac and, therefore, this might not be of any use to anyone else who’s been experiencing apparently similar problems with theirs. So, firstly, let’s see what I have been doing with mine.

I use my iMac predominantly for cataloguing and editing my photos in Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop. Some internet browsing in Safari and playing music via the Apple app. I have two external hard drives attached, one for storing my photos and videos and my Lightroom catalog and backups, the other for carrying out Time Machine backups and also a second copy of my photos. I do use iCloud Drive (I have often suspected this may be at the root of my problems).

Some months ago, when I was first getting concerned about the slowness of my iMac, particularly when in Lightroom Classic, I did some Googling and came across the suggestion to move my Lightroom catalog and backups off the external hard drive and onto the desktop so that it wasn’t accessed via any cable or affected by the speed capabilities of the external hard drive. This seemed a reasonable concept so that’s what I did. And it didn’t help!

In fact, the problem got worse! I tried looking for anything that might be the culprit by keeping the Activity Monitor running and trying to identify what was running at the same time as I was trying to work. That didn’t show much but I did notice that the iMac was backing up files to iCloud Drive and increasingly I started to believe that was the cause of my problem. But I didn’t know what to do about it.

Then Sonoma came along, accompanied by much use of bad language by myself as my iMac virtually ground to a halt. I was struggling to edit four photos in three hours! It was awful! A Lightroom backup was taking over two hours and a Time Machine backup was taking in excess of eight hours!

Time to hit YouTube to see if I could come up with an answer. For a few years I have been subscribed to the channel Macmost.com. I’ve learned all sorts of things about how to make the best use of my iMac from there and really appreciate the work that Gary, the guy who runs it, has put in over the years to make it a good source of information. So I went through some of his earlier videos and found one on how to use iCloud Drive properly. I knew I had watched it before but thought it might be worth watching again.

Most of the way through the video I was thinking, well, that’s what I’m already doing so I was ready to give up and look elsewhere. Then Gary said that, if you do anything that is very processor hungry it might be better to not include that in the iCloud Drive backups. Eureka moment methinks. He suggested creating a separate folder on the computer, not on the desktop or in documents, in which to store those files which iCloud Drive wouldn’t touch. It seemed to make sense!

So, I had forgotten how to move my catalog and it’s at times like that when I can’t praise YouTube enough! A quick search and I found a video that gave me a five minute run through on how to do it which is pretty much like this: close down Lightroom Classic, create a new destination folder on the iMac then move the catalog and backups to that new folder. Then reopen Lightroom and it tells you it can’t find your catalog and gives you the choice of finding it. Once found, Lightroom opens ok! Then quit Lightroom and browse for the new folder to inform Lightroom where you want your backups to go and let it perform a backup.

Hallelujah!!! It has worked. In fact not having my Lightroom catalog and backups having anything to do with iCloud Drive has speeded up the whole machine, considerably! I’m a happy bunny! Really happy!

Now you might think that my Lightroom catalog and backups aren’t being backed up to iCloud Drive and that makes them vulnerable. Well, sort of but not really. Firstly they get backed up onto my second external hard drive via Time Machine and secondly, iCloud Drive is not really a backup facility, it’s there to give you the benefit of being able to access files from your other devices, direct from the cloud. And I never ever access my Lightroom catalog on any other device than my iMac, never! So I don’t need that benefit and I was paying a huge price in terms of performance in order to have something I didn’t need.

So, there we are, or at least, there I am. This may not help to resolve anyone else’s problems with performance issues unless they use their iMac/Mac in the same way I do. But it’s certainly worth considering whether or not iCloud Drive is your friend!

Here’s a link to the YouTube channel macmost.com that helped me, it might help you: https://youtube.com/@macmost?si=osUYXdPHmoozFCW0

Thanks for reading this, there are more words than in my usual blog posts but it needed saying!

My love and passion for Alfa Romeo cars began when my father bought his first, a Giulia Super in 1972. In 1976 I started working for them at Alfa Romeo Great Britain, at Staples Corner, North West London.



The Story of a Badge and so much more!

During the ten years I worked there I never went on any trips to the factory nor any to the museum. It took until our holiday last year to get there. Lynn, my live in events organiser, made a special effort to include a visit to the museum while we had our stopover in Milano on our way to Switzerland. We had driven by it several times but never stopped.



Our Stelvio at the Alfa Romeo site at Rho, Milano.

It was everything I dreamed it would be and I did get a little emotional on my way round, especially when I saw their Giulia Super which is in the same colour, Blu Olandese, as my father's example.



The Blue Giulia Super.

Several years ago, Alfa bit the bullet and completely revamped the museum. Apparently it had been an unloved part of the organisation for many years, somewhere not many visited and where you were basically left alone to wander round the cars which were not exactly cared for lovingly. That is no longer the case. It is somewhere they can be proud of and well worth a visit even if you are not an Alfisto like myself.

The Montreal on display was in the same colour as the one in the sales brochure of the day. Unlike my own, which was red.



The Montreal.

To enjoy my photos from there, which I had tremendous problems editing down to a reasonable album size, please click on this link to my flickr album: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAyETQ

Once again, thanks you for taking the time to stop and read my blog. Next time we travel on to Switzerland before heading home.

Well aware that our holiday was in its final stages, the next destination was to one of my favourite places anywhere, Milano. But it was going to be a long drive from Crecchio, about five and three quarter hours excluding pit stops. My first drive along the Adriatic coast and it was wonderful.

The thing that makes staying in Milano pleasurable is it is fairly flat making walking around easy. And that was welcome because it was still very hot. Temperatures were still over 40ºC in the afternoons. We have stayed in Milano several times, always in the same hotel, the Ibis Milano Centro. It's a thirty minute walk to the centre of the city.

For our first evening, Lynn had booked us in to a really nice restaurant called Osteria Del Treno that we had seen on Stanley Tucci's tv programme when he was covering Milano. It was worth it and we can highly recommend it!



Piazza della Scala

The next day we started our walk around in Piazza della Scala which brought back some lovely memories of times we have spent at La Scala for Operas. Then, of course, we visited the galleria making our way through to the Duomo. It's always an inspiring sight! We were intent on doing a bit of shopping and headed to La Rinascente, a large department store on numerous floors and also very busy. Then a wander round to the Ferrari store.



Lynn in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II



Il Duomo

From there we headed towards Brera which is one of our favourite districts in Milano. We stopped there for a bite to eat in Bar Brera on Via Brera. We had been there before several years ago. The only sour episode of the holiday happened here when Lynn was asked for change and the man tried to get inside her purse. I pulled his hand away and he beat a hasty retreat. It's the only time anything like that has happened to us in Italy.



Run!!!

After that we headed back to our hotel. It had become too hot to carry on walking round and our energy levels had dropped quite considerably. We had a rest in the afternoon looking forward to our evening meal. The next day was going to be something special, particularly for me but that is the going to be the subject of my next blog.

There are more photos from our stay in Milano here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAwQ6q

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog, I hope you enjoyed it and my photos. Here's to the next one!

We were half way through our holiday at this point and starting to head North. Our next stop was to be in the small town of Crecchio in Abruzzo. Off the beaten track but not too far from the coast making it easy to visit the Trabocci Coast which Lynn in particular has long wanted to visit.



Our car parked outside Crecchio

The motel we stayed in was very nice but the drive into Crecchio proved to be a bit further than anticipated along a twisty lane that descended quite a bit before making an upward approach to the town.

On our first visit into the town we parked up as soon as we saw a space which was actually just outside the main gates. But it's such a small place that walking round takes very little time. It's lovely! We found a super restaurant which was so nice we went there again on our second and final evening in Crecchio. It's called the Taverna Ducale and would be worth a visit if you are ever in the area!



Piazza Di Castello

The next day we drove to the coast and followed the Trabocci Coast Road. We stopped a few times to take in the views, mainly to see the Trabocci but also to enjoy the blue of the Adriatic. It's wonderful!



One of the Trabocci

I wasn't going to mention it but I will .... it was still very very hot!!



Lynn looking out over the Adriatic whilst staying in the shade!

This area may not be one of the most obvious places to visit but it really is worth it! There are some more photos on my flickr page here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAvk1H

Our next move was the long journey north to Milano and that will be where my next blog is set. Thanks for reading this one.

The heat wasn’t letting up. Consistently over 40°C every day was making touristy type things very difficult, particularly in the afternoons. However, it really was a treat to be in Puglia, the furthest south on mainland Italy that I had been.



Matera Panorama

We drove from Ercolano to Matera in Basilicata or rather a hillside facing Matera in order to get a great view. It’s a terrific view, quite a panorama. It was so hot though, without any shade, that we limited our time there to fifteen minutes. The external temperature sensor on my car could not deal with it being so hot and showed a rather bizarre -5°C, which we really knew was wrong! As we drove off and downhill, the sensor caught up with itself at 38°C.



Our Stelvio outside our B&B

Onward to Manduria in Puglia. We had a lovely surprise at just how nice our B&B in the town turned out to be. Research beforehand made us believe it would be good but the reality surpassed this. It’s an old convent which has been converted into a very comfortable place to stay. Our room was on the opposite side of the road to the main building, self contained with its own orangery.



Trulli on our way to Locorotondo

One of the most famous sights of Puglia, besides the millions of olive trees, are the Trulli. These round buildings with their removable conical roofs add significantly to the wonderful landscape. We visited the town of Locorotondo whose height commanded extensive views of the area and is also a very pleasant place to wander around.



A scene in Locorotondo

There are more photos in my flickr album here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAsUuf

After our time in Puglia we moved on to Crecchio and the Adriatic coast which is where my next blog will be set. Thanks for reading this blog, hope you enjoyed it!

Last week we walked our dogs along Yeldersley Lane near Ednaston, Derbyshire Dales and reached Pear Tree Farm. We were stopped for a chat by Ann, the owner who always enjoys seeing our two dogs. Whilst chatting I told her I had taken a photo of some of her sheep in the field next to her house during one of the lockdowns. She said she'd love to see it so I promised I'd let her.

Yesterday we took the same walk and I knocked on her door and presented her with a print of the image. To say she was delighted would be putting it mildly and she ran into the house to fetch out her friend, who was visiting, to show her the print and also to meet the dogs.

It was clear that I had surprised her and also made her very happy. So much so she offered to pay for the print, which I declined. It made me very happy too!

And this is the image, taken with my Leica D-Lux 6 in November 2020:

After a relaxing few days in Tuscany, we moved further south to Ercolano, near Naples.

Ercolano or Herculanium is an amazing site, smaller than but on a par with Pompeii. Both destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD. Being on a smaller scale it is much easier to cover the ruins in a day or less. Many people prefer it as a result.



Ercolano with Vesuvius behind

We did the right thing in visiting in the morning as, while we were there, the heat was building and by midday moving around had become very uncomfortable. I would love to go back but at a different time of year to avoid the heat.



Lynn taking a breather in the heat



The art works are incredible



Captured

You can see more photos from Ercolano in my album here : https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAqJPc

Two nights and one full day was our lot in Napoli before we travelled even further south via Matera to Manduria in Puglia. That will be the subject of my next blog. Thanks for reading this far!

After Orvieto we moved on to our favourite destination in Italy, San Casciano in Val di Pesa and the Villa Il Poggiale. This is where we spent part of our honeymoon in 2008 and we have now been there eight times. It's where we can escape from the world and fully relax. The people who work there have become like family!

But, because we're so chilled when there, I tend to forget to get the camera out unless it's the phone, just for snaps.



Lynn, Molto Felice!



Me, rilassato!

We did have one special outing however when we met up with some friends in Monteriggioni. It's a small hill top town and we had been there once before. This time was different as we met up with Bronwen and John who we hadn't met in person before, just online.



The way in and out!



Quaint, you might say.

It was incredibly hot on the day, and half way through a lovely lunch it suddenly became sweltering so we decided to move on to find some respite from the heat. Temperatures over 40°C take some getting used to as we were to find out for the rest of the holiday, as it didn't let off until we crossed the Alps into Switzerland towards the end of our trip.



Bronwen and John needed some water to combat the heat

There's a small album of photos from Monteriggioni here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjApoaU

Next blog sees us move near to Naples and a destination we hadn't visited before ....

After a few days in Bologna we travelled south to Orvieto. This started as a one day filler really on our way to Tuscany but it turned out to be delightful.



The local countryside from the city wall.

After we had booked into our hotel we had a wander around the city which is quite small and easily covered in a few hours. We had been made aware that the following day, Sunday, there was to be a parade through the streets of the city and this would affect where they parked our car and the time we would have to leave before the streets were closed.



Piazza della Repubblica and the Chiesa di Sant'Andrea e Bartolomeo

We decided that, as the parade was due to be over by 2:30 and the drive to our hotel in Tuscany was about one hour, we would stay in the city to watch the parade. And we're glad we did, it was amazing.We had no idea that there was going to be a parade while we were there so it came as a really pleasant surprise.

The reason for the parade is for the population of the city to parade the icon, normally kept in the Duomo, around the streets.



Carrying the icon.






More images from Orvieto can be seen here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAb8u1

I haven't posted anything in my blog for a while. I've been busy etc etc

In the meantime, Lynn and I had a superb holiday in Italy and Switzerland for four weeks.

I shall now post some links, over the next few posts, to my albums from the holiday on my Flickr account. Please give the link a click and I hope you like the photos.

The first link is from our stay in Bologna. It was already very hot when we arrived and was to stay around the 40° mark for the entirety of our stay in Italy. The temperature dropped by more than 10° when we eventually moved on to Switzerland.

Here's the linky: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAaNPn



The Two Towers, le due torri, which are the most stand out landmarks of the city.



Bus along Via Ugo Bassi. This road bisects the city and gives a long distance view of the Two Towers.

This month I have enjoyed attending two events, one planned and one a pleasant surprise. And both in the same week.

The planned event was the AGM of the Leica Society held, after a two year absence, in Buxton. The surprise was an invite to Donington Park for a track evening from my neighbour, Dave Robson.



Dave has been building and racing cars for quite some time in the 750 Motor Club. The 750 Formula is the longest running championship in the world, predating Formula 1! I asked Dave for a summary of his and his car’s history and this is what he told me:

“The car is SDAR/17 because I started building it in 2017. (started design in 2016 and first ran in 2018. Had various oil, clutch, gear selection, carburettor etc. problems for a few seasons and finally got it going well last year. I designed and built an earlier car (SDAR/83) which I sold to make way for this one.....you've guessed it.............built in 1983. I won the championship in 2009 & 2012 in that car. The SDAR doesn't have a specific meaning. David Alan Robson accounts for 3 letters and S is for............Special, Super, Sensational, Stupid etc!” …



…”All 750 Formula cars have to use the FIAT 1108cc engine from Punto, Uno, Seicento. They are virtually standard but have a 'mandated' sports cam. We must use a single port carburettor. Approximate power at flywheel is 95 bhp.”

Dave has retired from racing so, this season, his car is being driven by Conway Daw who has driven a Centaur 750 for a few years.



Dave talking to Conway



Conway listening to Dave

The evening was great fun although the weather, April showers, played its part in curtailing things. I was transported back to the days when I worked for Autofarm in Hertfordshire and was involved in their Porsche racing series. I’m now looking forward to an opportunity to go again!



That event took place on the Wednesday evening and the following Saturday meant a trip to the Palace Hotel in Buxton for the Leica Society AGM. This meeting had been postponed for the previous two years due to Covid and everyone was relieved to be able to get together again.

The AGM is the main event in the Society’s calendar and the best chance for members to meet up and chat over things Leica and photography in general. Friendships have been formed and kept alive at such events! It is held over two days with three speakers, an exhibition and trade/members “bring and buy”! I managed to find a customer for my father’s Sanderson Half Plate camera (from 1915).

This year the speakers were Sarah Lee, Homer Sykes and Jim Lager. We were also joined by Sir David Suchet who is the Society’s President, a keen Leica photographer and always a joy to chat to. In a short address before the prize draw he commented that this event allows him to mix with like minded people and was somewhere he could “be himself”!



Sarah Lee



Sir David

That’s it for this blog! Thanks for reading and see you soon.

Here is a link to the 750 Motor Club website: https://www.750mc.co.uk/about.htm

And here is a link to my photos from Donington: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzKf4v

p.s. the Donington photos were taken with my Leica V-Lux 114. The photo of Sarah with my Leica D-Lux 6 and the photo of Sir David with my iPhone X.

It’s been several months since my last blog update and there have been a few things happening in life that put it on the back burner. Hopefully I can now get back to a more consistent schedule but I’m going to use this month’s blog to catalogue what has been going on and getting in the way. This will probably be a much longer blog post than usual.

I guess our life has been divided into two priorities since last October. Our dogs and our health.

Let’s talk dogs. We knew that Izzy, our Entlebucher Mountain Dog bitch, would be coming into season either late October or at some point in November. We also knew that Salvo, our other Entlebucher, was due to have his rabies jab early in November. Also, we knew that this was going to be Izzy’s last go at getting pregnant because she was fast approaching five years of age after which it is frowned upon to have a first litter. Unfortunately, having a rare breed dog means that there are scarcities that get in the way. Things like scarcities of stud dogs of a suitable match for your bitch. We had reached the point where there were no suitable stud dogs in the UK so our most obvious choice was to travel to Switzerland. After contacting our friends (our dog’s breeders) near Spiez, who made enquiries with the Swiss club on our behalf, it was agreed that there was more than one suitable dog for us to visit. So far so good!



Suldtal and the Niesen

It’s always been a bit of a guessing game with Izzy as to when her season would start which was making it difficult for us to know exactly when we could travel. The end of October was not far away and just to add to the drama, we had to get Salvo’s injection done before November 6th.

Both our dogs have Swiss pet passports. Thanks to Brexit, only Swiss vets can add important things like rabies jabs to their Swiss passports. If a UK vet does the jab we would also have to pay an additional £130 for a UK health form on which they can record this. Well, as we had already determined we were going to go to Switzerland for Izzy it made sense to get Salvo’s injection there too. But it did mean we had to be there before the 6th Nov. In addition, Izzy needed to get an up to date eye test so we decided to get that done while we were there. But that would be with a different vet in Oftringen rather than the one we would be taking Salvo to in Frutigen.



Morgenberghorn and the Suld River

We departed the UK via the Eurotunnel on Nov 3rd spending the night at St Avold in France then continued to our destination in Switzerland the following day. Thanks to Brexit you are not allowed to take meat products including dog food into the EU. If your dog has a health related diet you can take up to 2kg of food as long as you have an accompanying letter from their vet. We contacted a pet shop in Calais who carried Izzy’s food in stock so we arranged to pick it up there. We had Salvo’s food delivered to our hotel in St Avold. Before Brexit we would have packed sufficient food for the whole trip. I have simplified this paragraph as it was a lot more involved getting this bit organised.

After settling in with our friends we visited the vet in Frutigen and Salvo had his injection. Easy! Izzy’s eye test proved more problematic in as much as her eyes had deteriorated a bit since her last test and that meant she would not be able to mate with the first choice stud dog. So some frantic phone calls were made to the Swiss club and, eventually, another stud dog was put forward but he was only going to be available for a couple of days and Izzy’s season had still not started. It really was getting stressful!



Autumn in Suldtal

Then Izzy came into season so it was all systems go. Then Lynn had a fall. Fortunately she didn’t break her leg but she did seriously damage the ligaments in it and then, while she was sitting with her feet up to rest it, Izzy jumped up on her bad leg. It seemed like it was just not our lucky week. More about Lynn's leg later.

As she had come into season it was possible for us to arrange for her to meet the stud dog. His owner very kindly offered to come to where we were staying but he was only going to be available for one day now. So stress levels increased again. Izzy met Nerok on the Friday and it seemed to be going well but, as had happened before, Izzy would not stand for the mating. Nerok’s owner then surprised us by offering to come back the following day even though he was preparing for a medical operation himself. This was very kind of him but neither dog wanted to perform on the Saturday. They just wanted to play like friends!



Siera, one of Fenja's puppies

Whilst we always enjoy spending time in the Alps with our friends, this was not going to turn out to be a successful time as far as breeding was concerned. Izzy did not get pregnant even though we didn’t find this out for certain until she had a scan, five weeks later. We loved helping to look after the litter of puppies that our friend’s dog Fenja had four weeks before we arrived and I did manage to get some nice photos of them which are now on the Swiss club’s website.



Ieli, another of Fenja’s puppies

Our return to Derbyshire was uneventful and Lynn’s recovery was to take priority. Walking with the dogs was, for her, out of the question. Rest was important but, thankfully, her leg started to improve. But it would be a few weeks into the New Year before she could use it normally. Then, during that period of recovery and just before New Years eve, I contracted Covid. So we were both into a period of self isolation until I tested negative on day 13 from first symptoms. What has surprised us both is that Lynn, somehow, managed to avoid the virus.



Minninglow Hill on the Horizon, Derbyshire Dales

I am over Covid and Lynn’s leg is fully recovered so we are trying to get back into our routine. But it has meant that, as far as photography is concerned, I haven’t done much for a couple of months. I haven’t got my mojo back yet although I have spent some time editing photos and scanning slides. So I decided I needed a project and, the other day whilst walking the dogs, the project just crept up on me when I saw the amount of fly-tipping and general littering out in the Dales. So I’m going to document it over the next year with a view to making a book. Even if the book is just for my own viewing the project will be interesting.



Fly Tipping in the Dales

All the best for now and I'll see you in my next blog.

This is not the blog I had planned for this month but .....

A couple of weeks ago, whilst working in Lightroom, I decided to take on a task that is going to prove invaluable to me when I'm searching through my catalogue of images. It's not a five minute job which is almost certainly why I have only played at it before now.

Keywords. They have some obvious advantages but they can be a chore unless you keep on top of them. The chore side of them is that you have to be very disciplined to make sure you apply them to every single image that you have in your Lightroom catalogue. But this can be simplified to adding just one keyword to every image when you import them. Then you can add to those once you start editing your images.

The advantages are that you can find images more easily yourself and the keywords can be exported along with an image when you upload to various social media sites such as Flickr which makes your image easier for others to find.

The way I organise my files within Lightroom is to store them by year then by camera type and then by location or subject type. The basis for this can be seen in the first screenshot from my Lightroom catalogue:



This has, I thought, worked well for quite some time but I am now finding it more difficult to remember which year I took certain photos. Which year did we go on holiday to Sicily for example, was it 2012 or 2013? So I end up having to guess and then click on a folder then try to remember which camera I was using etc etc. Sometimes my memory is up to it but most of the time it is getting more difficult.

I have watched numerous 'how to' videos and there isn't one single Best Way to organise your files. It seems everyone does it differently, which is not really a surprise. But, using the search facility for a specific keyword and then narrowing it down from there is, for me, a great way to find my image. But (again) I haven't been adding keywords religiously to every image as I edit them over the years. I'm much better at it these days but I didn't used to bother as I didn't appreciate how helpful they are. So much so that a couple of weeks ago I ran a smart collection to select all images with the keyword field blank and there were over 36000!!!!!!!!!

So, since then, I have made sure every image has at least one keyword so the smart collection now reports 0 images without a keyword:



I'm really chuffed to have got to this point. Seriously, it will make my life a lot easier. However, it leads naturally to the next phase and that is to maintain a structured hierarchy of keywords. Well, I watched a three part YouTube video series by a chap called Wayne Fox which set out his way of creating and organising a keyword hierarchy and it clicked as being the way to go for me too. Or course it's yet another onerous task to begin with and it will take me some time but Wayne sets out a good how to methodology and I'm following that as best I can. Here are two screen shots to try to illustrate this without going into too much depth:



The items preceded by a full stop make the basic structure but are not keywords themselves and will not be exported with an image. Those without a full stop are the keywords and initially appear at the bottom of the list as and when you create them. Firstly I add them to the .work in progress section which is where they have disappeared to in the second screenshot:



The next step is to move keywords from the .work in progress tab to the tab in which they belong. This next screenshot shows some of the structure inside the .places tab once I have moved them to it:



It is a long process but that's mainly because I've left it so long before making a start. But I am happy that it will be more and more useful as time goes on and my memory is more stretched.

I hope this has been interesting and really hope it might provoke some comments and questions and I look forward to your comments! Love your comments!

All the best and look forward to seeing you again next month. I might have developed a film from my Olympus OM40 by then ..........

Most of the cameras I own are inherited from my Brother and Father. Which has saved me buying them!!! But I haven’t really made much use of them, apart from my Father’s Leica M2 which is my go to film camera.

Recently I thought it made sense to dig these cameras out, one by one, and see if they were any use to me and worth hanging on to.

The first one I have dug out belonged to my Brother and was one of two Olympus cameras that he used regularly before he died in 1999. It’s an Olympus iS-1000. What we would probably refer to these days as a bridge camera and, to my eyes, quite an ugly beast.




I find it to be quite heavy for a bridge camera which will not really inspire me to use it often and that would be my first criticism of it.

The autofocus is a bit hit or miss. It hunts back and forth and then, just when you think it has nailed focus and you commit to taking the shot, it moves the focus point. Particularly when taking landscape photos when infinity focus is important. Close up it seems to be ok which probably explains why my Brother used it mostly for portraits.

Loading a film is a faff. I thought it was a duff camera to begin with as I could not get it to load a film automatically. So I did a search on YouTube and found a video by a Russian guy who had found the same problem. He showed that, if you pushed the film into the camera beyond the marked load line, it would eventually accept and load the film. I don't like that at all!

On the rear of the camera are four buttons around the LCD screen and the one I need, mode, to allow me to go manual, doesn't work no matter how hard I press it. So the camera is stuck in P or automatic mode. I don't like that!

So those four issues had me thinking that I might not go any further than the one film I had managed to load. Incidentally I found that film in my Brother's camera case and it was an Ilford Delta 400 which expired in 1999. So that was going to be interesting in itself. My real concern was how to go about developing the film as it was so old, 22 years in fact! I made contact with Dave Whenham (@elland_in on Twitter) as to the best approach and his suggestion was that I try a semi stand development.

I find in difficult to 'use up' 36 exposures just for the hell of, it having trained myself over the years to make every exposure count so it was interesting trying to find things to shoot so as to get to the end of the film. It took longer than it should! But I got there in the end and, with some apprehension, developed the film.

Actually, it turned out reasonably ok, mostly. There are quite a few totally rubbish shots but I was expecting those as I couldn't override P mode and have full control of the camera. But I have to say that I'm not completely displeased with some of the results some of which you can see below.

The first two images are taken on top of Wolfscote Hill in the Derbyshire Dales





The next image is of Lynn and our dogs, also on top of Wolfscote Hill



Some young sheep near to Minninglow Hill, Derbyshire Dales



And finally, a shot of Lynn at home in our kitchen




Many thanks to Dave Whenham for pointing me in the right direction, it certainly worked although, after I have used up the other roll of expired Ilford film, I think I'm going to go back to my favourite, Ilford HP5+ and not wait for it to go out of date!!!

Regarding the camera, I probably won't be using it very often but I'm not going to get rid of it. Every now and then I shall try it out, probably for portraits shots. We shall see!

Thanks for reading my blog this month, next month I may be trying out another Olympus camera. See you then!

I’m taking this month off from my blog but shall be back on the 24th August.

Look forward to seeing you then.

In part three of this series about digitising old family slides I am going to have a look at how the images were edited in photoshop after having had a basic edit in Lightroom.

There are three or four things I use Photoshop for with these images. Sharpening, spot and scratch healing, light levels and (possibly) hue and saturation.

When the images are imported into Lightroom it is noticeable that they are slightly soft so I apply a small amount of sharpening to them in Photoshop. Unfortunately this website software is not really up to demonstrating that as it compresses my images so you’ll just have to take my word for it!

However, it is possible to show the before and after of spot removal if we look at this slide taken at Montreux Railway Station in 1982. It's not a very exciting image but it allows me to show the process. The first image shows the slide after I have washed it and then imported it into Lightroom.



The second image shows the dots that are dirt on the slide that didn’t come off even when I had washed it with water.



The third image shows the dots have vanished as I start to use the healing brush.



The final image is the whole slide. It was originally in colour but time had not been kind to this shot so it works better after converting it to black and white.



Once I have applied a light adjustment to levels to add a little contrast and, in the case of a colour image, played around with hue and saturation, I save the image back into Lightroom. Then it’s a case of filing it in the appropriate folder with a title so that anyone looking through them in the future will have an idea where they are and who they depict. Access to my memory won’t be around forever!

It’s a huge task as there are thousands of slides to go through. Much time has been spent this month simply going through boxes of sides and binning most of them. Even when it’s a niceish image there’s really no point keeping it if I have no idea where or what it is.

Another thing I’ve been up to is recommissioning some old cameras. Some mine, some my Dad’s and some my Brother’s. I think I might show some of them in my blog next month.

Thanks for reading this time round, hopefully see you again in July!