November
A rather overcast and wet month resulted in a total of 22
photographs produced. The two main
activities were the Dean Forest Railway’s Autumn Gala, and a session on the
River Windrush north of Temple Guiting.
I had hoped to do a National Trust property, but I didn’t feel the
weather was up to it.
The DFR gala was another case of having to work in extremely
poor lighting conditions, and anything moving faster than “stationary” proved
to be a challenge in trying to keep the ISO settings low enough to produce
anything resembling a quality image. I
had chosen the Sunday to visit in the belief that there would be some sunshine,
but this was mistaken; the cloud stayed put, and I left fairly early on as I
felt what little light there was giving out.
That saying, in the end the results were, although not amazing, weren’t
too bad.
The River Windrush session was done during one of the rare
sunny intervals at a weekend. I’d been
wanting to plug the gap I had between Cutsdean and Temple Guiting for some
time; the problem was finding somewhere to park that wasn’t some miles from
either. Thanks to the “Vale Magazine”,
I’d discovered that the village hall at Temple Guiting allows the public to use
its car park; this was much closer to the starting point than either the
Snowshill or Kineton parking facilities I’d previously used. I had originally planned to walk to Cutsdean
to plug that gap as well, but felt that the ground was rather wet, so settled
for just walking to just south of Ford and returning to TG instead; this was
perhaps a good move, as the sunshine didn’t last, and as I left for home, the
clouds started to roll in.
On the sales front, I’ve been expanding the range of images
being sold on Redbubble and have been experimenting with custom mousemats,
magnets and stickers, mainly to add text to these items. I don’t want to be doing too much
customisation as this takes up time, but the magnet and sticker master files
could perhaps be adapted to other items without much in the way of change.
December (and
beyond)
Any activities undertaken will probably come down to the
weather, and with my production target for 2024 having been made, it won’t be a
massive disaster if I don’t take any photographs during the month (although I
do have an ongoing documentation project that isn’t weather-dependant that
would get me a few images). I would like
to do one more National Trust property if I can, but it may well be one I’ve
already done this year, as my original choice has now closed for the winter.
As to website work, I want to concentrate more on my railway
sites during the upcoming winter months, as they have been rather neglected in
the past few years while I’ve been working on this site. Other than a few minor formatting modifications,
and perhaps a possible fix for the page searching issue, there is nothing I
feel needs changing on this site in the immediate future, and I want to
investigate a potential source of free images for the railway sites.
I’m also at the point where my current computer could do
with replacing; I’ve had it five years and it’s starting to struggle with some
of the more powerful apps at times. This
time round, I’m considering switching from a tower unit to a laptop as I feel
this will offer more flexibility in working than a fixed systems; I propose to
look at this in early 2025
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