Winter Pastimes

One thing one can do, if one is a sad individual, is shelter from the winter freeze indoors spending hours and hours redesigning a Web site. For some time now, I’d been thinking that the colours on our site were looking a bit dated and I wanted to give it a facelift. I’d also been checking out a few of our favourite photographic professionals’ Web sites and noticed that an awful lot use various shades of grey as backgrounds. I suspect the theory is that coloured backgrounds run the risk of clashing with some of the colours in a photograph whereas grey, being neutral, does not. Grey displays photographs well, even monochrome. Whilst having no pretentions, in the face of such esteemed experience and logic, who am I to argue? After a little effort, most of which was a CSS exercise, welcome to our new Web site design. I’m satisfied and I hope you like it.

However, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy as they say and, after all, I freely admit to getting stir-crazy pretty quickly. Since this is the most interesting winter I can remember weather-wise, another pastime that presents itself is photography. In common with the council which has not been taking its refuse collection lorries out on the roads (largely because it hasn’t been taking its gritting lorries out on the road either as far as I can tell), we haven’t been taking our car out much. Instead we’ve been walking to and from town shopping armed with rucksacks. How very green of us in a less-than-green season. I did, however, manage to swap my shopping rucksack for my camera rucksack on one sunny day to try and capture the essence of our local winter scenery. Remembering to dial in between ½ and 1 stop over-exposure to compensate for the glaring snow, here’s a few results.