Over exposed:- Photos and mystery photos, I'm back on We Love Old Ramsgate etc

So where in Ramsgate was this Carnival photo taken? You can guess the date too but I'm not really sure of that.

Apropos of the last mystery photo

 Herbie (53) in sunglasses, in King Street, in Ramsgate, in 1968, taken by local historian and author David Richards from the upstairs window of Stones Bakers - he worked there then.

so some photos of Stones Bakers 

  left to right, William John Stone, William Frederick Stone (Bill) and the last Baker in King Street, and Frederick William Stone. I am pretty sure the is grandfather left, father right and son in the middle

  David Richards (who took the carnival photo) left Fred Ewington right in the bakery 1960s

  bakery 1960s

  bakery 1960s

Ted Pitcher left Charlie Carter right. I assume this is the rear of the bakery.

 The wedding of Frederick William Stone and Annie Ethel Cashman

Well I went for an early walk in Ramsgate this morning and took one of my digital cameras, which is really a bit of an antique. Back in the day I had what I suppose now would have been regarded as a professional camera, I also had had my own darkroom. I was never terribly interested in the arts side of photography, to be honest I consider photography mostly to be a craft. And yes, you can set up your modern digital camera so you can position the subject of your photo artistically, or of course you can go on some sort of course. Anyway this digital camera like a film camera has a knob you can turn for each of the main settings. Of course you can make these adjustments on a fairly expensive modern digital camera, probably even the one on your phone, it's very like programming a remote control. But this very old a digital camera you can twiddle all of the knobs (actual knobs that turn,) on the outside of the camera while you're looking through the viewfinder. Just like an old but decent film camera had this one has a light metre showing in the viewfinder. To be honest it's a very long time I'm since I controlled a camera by twiddling the knobs in this type of way, so some fairly strange things happened.

For those interested in the technical side, it's a Panasonic Lumix FZ30.   .   .

This is what the knobs do.

Shutter speed. This is the length of time I'm the shutter is open for the longer it's open for the more the film is exposed. Or in this case the more light to to the camera sensor.

Aperture. This is a variable sized hole inside the lens, the bigger you make it the more light gets to the film and so the more the film is exposed to light.

Zoom. This is a ring around the outside of the lens that makes what you see bigger or smaller.

Focus. This is another ring around the outside of the lens and you twist it to get things into focus.

The other major adjustment was the speed of the film. The faster the film the less light it needed to expose it.

All of these adjustments had a positive and negative pay off. The faster the shutter speed the less camera shake was visible. The smaller the aperture the greater the depth of field which is the distances between which everything is in focus. The faster the film the grainier the image.

Link to this mornings photos

Onto the business of being barred from the We Love Ramsgate Facebook group I have now been reinstated so I'm posting old pictures, mystery photos and new pictures linked to there again.

I don't quite know what happened, but I don't think anyone who doesn't do it should underestimate the stresses and difficulties associated with administering a busy website where other people contribute.

That said I think with the local groups administrators do have some duty to the people who actually go out and buy or produce the local material and share it for nothing with everyone else for free.

I have just spread out a small proportion of my collection of local photographs and postcards to give you some idea of what I mean here.

There is also show a duty to the people who regularly communicate with each other, read the posts and comment.

With Facebook many of the people using it are old can't get out, particularly at the moment with coronavirus, a lot of them have plenty of difficulty just using it and understanding the business of posting commenting and dealing with digital images.

There's also a whole group of people often mentally disadvantaged who have great difficulty understanding what you can and can't legally do. This applies particularly when considering copyright and reusing other people’s text and images.

I realised many years ago when I first started posting pictures and text to the internet that once you have done so to feel that you can claim any copyright is pretty much a hopeless case and a waste of your time. So I periodically say, please say feel free to use what I put online, please say where you got it from, but most of all if it's a historic photo and I have published with an explanation giving its historical context, please put in the explanation with the pictures' so that it makes some sense.

Anyway thanks to all involved in getting me reinstated.


Next a mystery object

Do you know what this tool is for?

I did take Ramsgate photos back in the 1960s - when I was a teenager - the trouble is the really aren't much use. Here is an example of what I mean.

This is a Matchless G90 I think. In the back yard of 29 Augusta Road about 1968, I was just too young to ride it on the road I think it cost me £3 and with a lot of fudging I think I did some grass tracking in a field on it. That's the trouble with the 60s, difficult to remember if you were there.

Finally this evening's walk photos