I'm posting extreme letterboxes (or, four nice photos for you to look at)

Having too much time on my hands

As you know, I'm a rotten photographer, and for a number of reasons, the technical side is not going to improve any time soon.  I'm therefore, going through my last twelve years of digital photography, and I'm finding out that photos which on the face of it were rejected, very ordinary snaps, can often be transformed into something quite beautiful, and sometimes very strange.  My abstracts that I recently displayed at the last display night received one of my highest number of awards.

Normal televisions have a screen ratio of 4 : 3, in other words the screen is four units wide and 3 units high.  Wide screen televisions are generally 16 : 9.

I have been experimenting with photos which I have cropped to 36 : 8, which by any standards is extreme letterbox format.  Unfortunately this blog appears to be limited to portrait and no landscape, which makes the photos smaller than they need be.

The first photograph is taken at Cockfosters.  It is in London, and everyone knows it as the northern terminus of the Piccadilly Line.  Everyone has heard of Cockfosters, but few have seen it!

The second photo is a complete contrast.  It is the furthest north that you can get on the Isle of Man, the Point of Ayre.  Possibly not in this picture, but certainly in the original, you can just see the southernmost Scottish Mountains near the Mull of Kintyre.  It's a bleak spot, the wind always seems to be blowing, and two currents meet here, making the sea extremely rough at all times.  Only seabirds really feel at home here.

This format, besides giving a wonderfully spacious feeling, almost as though you were there, is great if you are into cloudscapes

Cornwall is a beautiful English county.  In early spring the sun bounces off the fresh green leaves and the light in the narrow lanes becomes green.  Add to that, bluebells and other wild flowers and picturesque cottages, it is difficult NOT to take good pictures.

This is the Clapper Bridge near Pillaton near Saltash, which is joined to Devon near Plymouth by Brunel's giant railway bridge over the River Tamar.

Finally, part of Salisbury Plain near Avebury, between Winterbourne Monkton and Berwick Bassett.  It's one of the areas where early civilisations formed.  Places like Stonehenge and Avebury are nearby.  The farming land has traditionally been sheep, who eat almost anything plant-based, but modern agricultural methods are making the area more arable.  A popular crop is rape seed, forming yellow fields all over the Plain.

Deadman's Hill, near Marlborough

Did you think you had Privacy? Think again! Seriously, read this!!

George Orwell was absolutely correct, when in his book 1984, he talked about the Ministry of Information which knew everything about everybody.

Forget Privacy Laws, you, if you are reading this, have probably sacrificed your privacy as soon as you bought your smart phone.  I am unusual these days in not banking on line, preferring cash and cheques, and I don't link things together.  I was horrified when a colleague of mine had her phone ring to tell her that she had a certain amount of time to get to the airport to catch a plane to Sydney.  It even gave the flight number and departure time.

But this morning my wife really gave me a shock.  Smiling, (fortunately!) she asked me what I was doing at various establishments in Sydney and Melbourne.  She had discovered Google Maps.  Marg doesn't have a smart phone and she doesn't use Google Maps, although she does use Google Earth.

The list she showed me was like a bank account.  Some things seemed strange until I realised that I DID have some connection with the places on the list.  But some, I didn't.  I had walked down a city street, and my smart phone had picked up the wifi of a shop or café I had passed.  However there was one café I was surprised was on this list.  I had felt very hot on an extremely hot (40C) day, and I had gone into this café to ask them for a glass of ordinary tap water.  There was NO monetary transaction, no card, cash or cheques.  I have only ever been there on that one occasion.  But that café is on the list.

If you leave your phone switched on, you stand a very good chance of your position being known, what sort of food, drink and other things that you like.  This is just from one app!  Consider what information people have on you if several apps are connected.  I find it absolutely frightening, and more so as it is secret from our increasingly privacy conscious world.

Keep your smart phones switched off as much as possible, or you will end up like Winston Smith in the book.

SMART PHONES PLUS GOOGLE EARTH IS TROUBLE!  Let's hope it's not connected to FB.