Powell Cotton Museum, Quex Park Birchington in Thanet and Walk From Herne Bay Towards Reculver – Photos with thoughts about cameras and photography.

My day off today and having bought some books in Herne Bay including an American first edition of The Borrowers, we moved the car a short distance parking on the cliff road on the east side of the town and walked towards Reculver.

This was something I had never done before and the narrow strip of countryside between the shingle beach and the road is a sort of sloping cliff with countryside I found reminiscent of parts of the New Forrest.

OK with apple trees and not quite like the forest, I was playing a sort of latter-day William Tell with my newish secondhand camera. The camera is a 10 year old 5 mega pixel camera worth about £40 “Canon powershot s3 is” it’s what’s called a bridge camera, and 10 years ago it was an expensive camera costing several hundred pounds new.

The snag with cameras that were once expensive is that they have lots of configurations and a manual about as long a War and Peace, so I read a bit of the manual and then try to make it jump through hoops, then go back and look at the manual and see what I did wrong.

The advantage with cameras that were once expensive is that they have lots of configurations is that you can make them do things that cheap cameras won't do. That is providing you know which knob to twiddle.

Here is the link to the Herne Bay Reculver photos http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/917L/id7.htm as you see some of them aren’t in focus, I have just got home re read the thing and now I think I can finally set the focus on infinity, so perhaps things will be better next time.

We then went on to Quex an old favourite of ours. As I have gone back to putting up the content of my camera card on the internet again here are the links to the pictures I took there today.

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/917L/id8.htm

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/917L/id9.htm

I had a particularly good bacon and brie sarni at the café outside the front of the museum and a decent pot of tea Typhoo if you ask for it, and I tend to go for a known make of tea when it’s available.

To me there is a paradox here, which is that in the supermarket most people seem to be pretty fussy buying their Yorkshire, PG, Typoo etc but as soon as they get in a cafe they are happy to pay 50 times the price for something ghastly called English breakfast tea that appears to come from the European tea mountain and pretty near the bottom at that. 

I tried a few watercolour ideas while the youf of today tried out my camera for a bit and as I didn’t get a camera lesson I can only assume it’s one of those lumps of technology that baffles across the age barrier.

In the Powell Cotton tradition I shot a squirrel but, not in a die way as Mr Rotten would have said.

I think Percy Powell Cotton must have been a bit of a lad.

Quex, here is their website http://www.quexpark.co.uk is the largest of Thanet’s tourist attractions and makes a good day out for all ages. There is a particularly good interactive gallery and plenty of children’s stuff to do.

 King's Hall in Herne Bay was opened within a year of Westcliff Hall in Ramsgate and as you see it has been looked after.

This is today's featured insect

click to enlarge, as you can see it's obviously a wosisname