Cutty Sark - Architectural Carbuncle?

 The Cutty Sark rebuild has been given the Carbuncle Cup as the worst architectural project.The ship reopened to the public in April 2012 after a £50m refit following a devastating fire in 2007. The clipper, built in 1869, has a new design which allows visitors to move both aboard and underneath the three-masted sailing ship but the new design has obscured the Cutty Sark's distinctive shape on the quayside. Even the part of the ship we can still see includes an obtrusive lift tower looming over the deck. It is popular with visitors and we certainly enjoyed our time aboard.

 Images taken with 15 mm  Fisheye or 24mm Shift lens (first and last images).

Christmas Portraits

To finish the year, Christmas morning shots of Sadie and Meredith.

Birds at Wicken Fen

 Beautiful winter sunshine at wicken Fen this morning before the rain arrived - again!

Season's Greetings

Floods in Toft

After a night of heavy rain, the Toft to Bourn Road and Brookside were impassable to normal traffic by 7am yesterday morning. This didn't stop a few people trying to get through. This car made it but others had got stuck. The water at 9 feet is as high as I have recorded in recent years. The last image shows our personal flood problem - getting the drainage work signed off by the building inspector is not possible when you can't see the new drain pipe!

Contrast in Cambridge

I am still testing out my new RX100 compact to see the best everyday settings as mainly I will be using it as a 'grab' camera where there is no time to think about modes etc. In each of the pairs above, the lefthand image uses the built-in HDR, which takes several images and combines them in camera. This obviously only works as a jpg. The other image is a RAW image adjusted as fully as possible in the Raw converter. The greater saturation of the HDR image works well where the light is very contrasty as in the first pair but not so well when bringing out shadow areas as in the second pair.

The two images below also use the HDR mode - both into the light and work well.

Fowlmere Birds in Winter Sun

 A few more images from Fowlmere yesterday. The Moorhens were disputing territory, as alway,s so there was quite a lot of chasing and splashing. The Kinfisher looked beautiful in the low winter light on the little tree but didn't stay to fish unlike the Heron who remained there the entire visit. We were delighted to see the Water Rail - always surprised at how small they are compared to a moorhen.

An Hour in the Life of a Heron

 This Heron caught two large Perch and one small one during the hour that we spent in the Tower Hide at Fowlmere. He waded through the water up to his belly a lot of the time and sometimes actually paddled along when the feet were off the bottom.

Frost at American War Cemetery