The day has finally come. As previously discussed my other two websites are finally going away. Very shortly, links to darlingtonphotography.com and stephendarlington.com will no longer redirect here so please update any links you have. Pretty much all the content available on those sites is now here. A quick search should turn up something useful but let me know if something you liked has gone missing in action.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Sky. My entry was taken a couple of years ago on a walking holiday in Tuscany. I used my EOS300 and Fuji Sensia 100 slide film.

For those that got here via Google and those other people that don’t know me, I’ll start with a confession: I am not a wedding photographer. I am keen amateur photographer, mainly concentrating on travel and occasionally branching out into portraits. However having a reputation among friends as “the photographer” has resulted in a number of people asking me to take pictures at their wedding.

It’s something I have generally resisted. It struck me as just too high risk. Wedding pictures will, hopefully, last a life-time and I didn’t want the pressure of needing to get everything right on the day. Even if you discount all the variables around the camera, computers and memory cards, there are so many other things that could go wrong. The weather; missing shots¹; people blinking or looking on the wrong way; people inadvertently missing²; annoying things in the back-ground³. And then, since neither of these were commercial ventures, I would have to take all this into account as well as actually trying to enjoy the event as a guest, and, in one case, as a best man.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Brother and here is my entry. It was taken in Vietnam on a boat trip down the Perfume River. Ordinarily you’d be worried about two kids piloting a boat, but they seemed to know what they were doing…

Please vote for my entry in last weeks competition. I’m entry number 356.

This evening I went along to this years Turing Lecture, an annual presentation hosted by the British Computer Society (of which I’m a professional member) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. This years lecture was given by Grady Booch, someone that most people in IT will either have heard of or, at the very least, been influenced by. He started his early career working on object oriented design and is currently passionately working on a project to collect the architectures of a hundred computer systems.

The Catholic Church today caused widespread controversy when it issued a statement urging the Government to overturn a law made two hundred years ago.

Clive Adams, standing outside Saint Johns Cathedral in Norwich, read the statement: “The Catholic Church is unable to comply with the Slave Trade Act, the 1807 Act of Parliament abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. This law is incompatible with the teachings of the Bible and we cannot in clear conscience operate under such restrictions. We ask the government to consider an opt-out clause in revised legislation.”¹ Adams, an unpaid volunteer reporting to Cardinal Michael Osborn, denied that he himself was a slave.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is Peaceful. This image was taken in Desenzano, Italy. It’s one of the first pictures I ever took on slide film, this time Fuji Velvia 50.

Combining my two favourite subjects — Apple and taking the proverbial out of Dubya — how could I not post a link to this: What George W. Bush could learn from Steve Jobs.

Reading this article by David Pogue reminded me of my own search for a reliable and easy backup solution. I came to a rather different answer so I thought it might be worth detailing a little history, the options I considered and the one I eventually chose.

Ancient History

In the olden days — i.e., going back a couple of years — I split the files into four categories:

Ever since I moved over to using the WordPress content management system to host this website I have been using a relatively small number of plugins. One of my most used is Photopress which you can see in use almost everywhere you see a picture.

However, late last year I realised how much one, small part of the functionality irritated me. You could either view a full size picture in a page on its own, but I’d never managed to create a template that worked well for both portrait and landscape images. Or you could have each image pop up in another window. I wasn’t keen on that either.