Posts from 2014

  • Review of 2014

    A blessed year of travel, fun, new and re-discovered sights, and plenty of sore legs.

  • Treasure Hunt

    Treasure Hunt

    Kenneth Kendall hosts a British t.v. game show from the 1980s, in which Anneka Rice chases around the Swiss Bernese Oberland in a helicopter.

  • Gwatt nature reserve, Thun

    I just came across a short film I made in January and posted to YouTube at the time. Filmed with my X100 and edited quickly in iMovie, it shows the publicly accessible lake-shore nature reserve at Gwatt, some fifteen minutes’ drive from home.

  • Using CSS pseudo elements to add diagonal borders and edges to the sides of block level elements.

  • Google announced yesterday that it’s come up with a great new way of avoiding the need for website visitors to fill out the CAPTCHA; the ubiquitous “type the letters from the image into the following field” feature of many online forms. Instead, they propose a simpler interaction based on the Turing Test principle: that some choices can…

  • Travel many roads on many islands

    A lovely video of a journey on the Isle of Skye by StokedEverSince, posted to Vimeo by Calum Creasey.

  • If you have a social media account or an account at one of the photo sharing websites, you need to make sure that your photos are published using the appropriate license. Flickr allows you to offer your photos under a specific Creative Commons license which allows those downloading the photos to pass them on or use…

  • Vesuvius

    The centre of attention for visitors to the Bay of Naples is a dormant volcano. Standing massive above the plains containing Naples, Ercolano (Herculaneum) and Pompeii, it constantly draws the eye. As a photographer, it’s pretty difficult to avoid having it as a main element in any wider landscape photo in the region. Its destructive…

  • Piscina Mirabilis

    Arriving in the town of Bacoli, on the headland a few miles west of the centre of Naples, you feel a long way from the tourist crowds and certainly not anywhere historic or especially noteworthy. But look into the history of the area and you’ll find that the bay here, now surrounded by slightly shabby buildings and busy with…

  • Many will be familiar with the Time Out magazine, website and guidebooks, which have been around – according to suitable technology, of course – since 1968. But it’s although it’s taken them a while to find Switzerland, the extension to their website isn’t bad at all. It obviously focuses on the bigger cities and more well-known…

  • Internet browser Safari has long been known for trying to make the web faster and faster. One of the ways it’s done so is by having a very strong browser cache – storing pages and files locally for as long as possible. Whether Safari has the best caching amongst modern browsers or the worst is unclear. Perhaps…

  • Race The Tube

    Race The Tube

    Visitors to London may expect that travelling by Tube is quicker than going on foot. It’s certainly quicker than travelling through London by taxi or by car. But is the train actually quicker than this athlete?

  • Creux-du-Van

    Yorkshire meets Switzerland in the limestone landscape of Creux-du-Van, above Neuchâtel.

  • Blogging for myself

    A blog is usually started as a place for the author to jot notes and share them with a select few to read; often friends and family. Later, as popularity grows, it’s easy to become drawn into the goal of getting more and more readers and gaining more and more “success”. This sometimes works and…

  • Fornillo Beach

    One of a series of photos added to my Campania, Italy set on Flickr.

  • AvatarDay 6

    Barbara Hess announces the sixth of the annual AvatarDay events: a day in which she and a few helpers provide a day of free portrait photography for everyone to update their online profile photos.

  • Schlächtenwald

    There are plenty of little, almost unnoticeable roads around here, which lead up valleys and through forests to remote farm buildings and dead-ends. I like to pore over the Kümmerly + Frey maps – the Swiss equivalent of the British Ordnance Survey – to see whether there are any worth driving up.

  • Danny Macaskill on the Cuillin Ridgeline

    “The Ridge” is the brand new film from mountain-biker Danny Macaskill. For the first time in one of his films Danny climbs aboard a mountain bike and returns to his native home of the Isle of Skye in Scotland to take on a death-defying ride along the notorious Cuillin Ridgeline. Even if you’re not fussed about…

  • A steep and stony path from the mountain hamlet of Kleine Scheidegg leads to the top of the world-famous Lauberhorn, from which the intrepid author gets an unparalleled view of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau.

  • A need for weight loss, a need for fitness and a desire for reaching less accessible photo viewpoints means that I am walking further and higher than my lazy twenty-something self would’ve imagined.

  • A terrific hike and a personal achievement in the central-western Lake District on our anniversary.