Exmouth Boat Trip

By shendyNo Comments
Friday was a lovely evening for a boat trip up the River Exe from Exmouth - warm and sunny but with some good clouds to photograph, good company and nice food - all with some really nice live music. I've been on similar trips the last couple of summers but instead of turning round at Topsham, we went all the way up to Countess Weir (apparently) - something only possible a few times each year. This included passing under the M5 bridge, which was wonderfully lit by the evening sun. Less nice was the sewage treatment plant... As usual, we seemed to attract a bit of attention from passing boats (we even made it into the Exeter Express and Echo) - have these people never seen a naturist boat trip before? ...
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Holiday Skies

By shendyNo Comments
Back from a lovely summer holiday in SW France, I've got a few photos to share. First up we have a collection around the theme of "sky" - sunsets, stars and a thunderstorm. Our gite was in the middle of nowhere and was quite high up, so we had a fantastic view of the sky at night - almost a horizon-to-horizon view of the milky way. I want/need a fast aperture wide angle lens as my 50mm f1.4 is nowhere near wide enough to do the sky justice, and my f2.8 24-70 lens isn't really fast enough. Then we have some night-time photos I took at the gite, with the aid of a torch and SWMBO. The third part is sunsets - not so much in the early days because there simply weren't any clouds (!), but some quite good ones later on. We had one thunderstorm - I was woken by lightning just before dawn one day and thundered out to get some photos. All a...
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France 2012

By shendyNo Comments
Here are a few photos from this year's summer holiday in France. A fairly standard trip - a couple of days to drive down (staying at the lovely Auberge de la Hulotte in St Jacques d'Ambur, within sight of the Puy de Dome deep in the Auvergne), two weeks in a gite (booked via Halcyon Leisure) and then 4 nights on the way back (1 at the Hotel Le Pont Bernet in Le Pian Medoc, 2 at Hotel des Pins in l'Amelie near Soulac, and 1 at Hostellerie du Bois Guibert in Bonneval near Chartres). All of the establishments are recommended for both food and accommodation - as is the Logis de France chain. Anyway, on to the photos. A few from around the gite. Some landscapes and bits and pieces. I'm particularly pleased with the hay bales - I've been looking for a particularly photogenic set of these for ages and happened to come across these while looking for some caves (which happened...
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