Monday 10 October 2011

Dover Castle Pictures 9th October 2011


The weather forecast yesterday wasn’t encouraging and the old question of what you do, when you have children, a wet weather forecast and you want a day out in this area raised its ugly head, like the square root of minus one. 

The idea being that everyone, adults as well as children wind up feeling as though they have had some sort of weekend break, so Dover Castle was elect. The idea being to do the parts of it that we don’t usually do, church, roman lighthouse, and the tunnels that are just open, requiring no guides or safety elf.

As it was it didn’t rain, so we spent a fair bit of the time outside. I used my large digital camera that has virtually no delay between pressing the button and taking the picture, so there are a lot of photographs, about 500 I think.

The problem was lunch, English Heritage for the most part have greatly improved their cafés and although the price is high the quality is usually ok, they also normally have a range of sandwiches that children will eat.

This means ham without mustard, cheese without an exciting spicy chutney and so on, yesterday they only had the dreaded “adult” sandwiches at around £4 a go, or something that looked like expensive school dinners. The children at the next table were exclaiming about the worst ever lunch and trying to remove the offending ingredients from their sandwiches. Mine opted for a bag of crisps each at 95p a go. I tried the pie and it was reminiscent of school dinners.

What seems to have happened is the healthy option degenerated into something institutional and the only institutional food that children will eat, sos – buger and chips has gone.

Next time we will take our own sandwiches and just drink their tea which while expensive is palatable, as are their jam, cream and scones. 

With so many pictures I am bound to get some flack: Why don’t I edit them? Why do I publish the bad ones? Why do I put 100 on a page? So my recommendation is to avoid looking at them altogether.

I should point out that at the time of writing this I haven’t even seen the pictures, the computer is processing them while I am writing, the camera was supposed to rotate some of them automatically, something it doesn’t always do and I will look at them when I get time, just like anyone else who wants to.

Here are the links to the pages of pictures







6 comments:

  1. Michael, You say, " Mine opted for a bag of crisps each at 95p". How big was the bag?

    I never eat at places like this because I will not pay their inflated prices as a matter of principle. Consequently, I either take sandwiches or eat at home.

    The only exception for me has been an occasion about 4 years at the Science Museum where we got a good meal at a good price. I don't know what their restaurant is like today.

    On the subject of your photos, Michael: They are in the main underexposed. But this does not matter to me because I can fix them with a click of the mouse.

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  2. Michael, I have just re read your blog. It was not 95p per bag of crisps, but rather 95p was the total for several bags of crisps?

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  3. John it was 95p per bag and my fault for not doing a packed lunch, I though doing it this way would be interesting for people who read the blog, but the price was too high.

    The under exposure seems to be a feature of digital slrs, partly I think light getting in through the viewfinder and effecting the metering.

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  4. Michael, My Film SLR measures the light coming through the lens itself and I thought that this also applied to Digital SLR.

    So it was indeed £0.95 for a single packet of crisps, in which case I hope it was a large packet.

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  5. John all of the slrs that measure light coming in through the lens also measure the light coming in through the viewfinder, essential the light meter is in a box with a mirror and prism in it an a lens at each end, the viewfinder lens and the lens that the light goes through to take the pictures.

    The bags of crisps were of average size i.e. one portion.

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  6. The trick is not to use the 'P' (programme) mode in DSLRs' i.e Auto this is the dark side of digital and leads to this sort of problem. . Use the A for aperture - this sorts out the WB/light/ISO and allows for any old school bracketing. You can do this very quickly and look through the lens - hence TTL to see what's selected take shots/job done.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.