Robert M Estall

I can recall a few dodgy shoulders and it could well have been down to sleeping in an awkward position but it certainly moved me to attending to how much and where to hang my camera gear. In those days there might be a 67 Pentax as well as a couple of Canon F1s and associated lenses. The best solution was in Morocco where I was assigned a lad to carry the lot! Lowe used to make a formidable Bum Bag big enough to hold the big Pentax lenses. These days my little kit of a Pentax K-5 and a couple of lenses fit neatly into aa very modest backpack. I did give myself over to an osteopath once when I was in real pain which was a good move. Rest it is as good advice as any, shoulders don't come good quickly. But, as I recall, trecking is kind of your thing.

2PM and I got into measures. a bit slow but it worked

I'm glad to hear Dyfed-Powys Police are investigating possibilities. We are all probably assuming this was an unfortunate case of seaside storm chasing gone wrong. So many of us have pushed our luck in that direction and I guess we will mostly continue. In Oct 1954 I went out in the only hurricane to reach Kingston Ontario and managed an award-winning shot and I was hooked. A great shame if Keith wasn't lucky on the day, but that may not be the complete story

getting a "can't find the page" message noon Tuesday 8th. Mostly curious to see what has caused my CTR to rise back above 1.5 instead of continuing its downwards path on the graph

If you have reached 65 or whatever is the current retirement age and you are in a position to NOT draw your pension you should check out how much your annual payout will increase as you delay. You can delay until the age of 75. I was still doing pretty well in my 60s and for those ten years, my pension pot increased by 10.5% per year. You wont get that rate of interest anywhere short of robbing banks! But I think things have changed. As ever, get and take good advice!

By the time you've got your head 'round it, they will have changed their name and structure again. Some bright corporate types managed to completely change their name to something clever which nobody could remember so they went back to being The Post Office having squandered a great deal of money rebranding. Must have been at least ten years ago.They are The Post Office no matter how much they insist they are a lot of other things. Consignia that was it, took a full day to recall! In my village you can access most high street banks at their counter, draw your pension, pay some bills and buy foreign currency, send parcels and even buy stamps. Most of them you don't even have to lick anymore which doesn't bode well for stamp collectors. Some years ago they even had a Christmas offer of something like twelve stamps for the price of ten. That didn't last! I can just about remember a time when you could use postage stamps as a kind of currency, usually buying modest items with stamps sent in the post when many many people didn't have bank accounts and everything depended on a brown envelope stuffed with cash at the end of the week. The village would suffer hugely if they closed our branch. In Sudbury they closed their big and busy post office and set up shop in the back of WH Smith. Progress!

I do remember quite a while ago America decided to go for Kilometres rather than miles and perhaps some extra metrification s. Canada said "we had better do this as well" So in no time at all Canada made the change but America changed their minds and stayed with miles and their odd sized gallons. So most of N. America does miles while Canada does Kilometres like most of Europe does Kilometres while Britain does miles. At least in N.America they all drive on the same side of the road. Just imagine if Canada went with all the rest of the pink coloured countries of the word map and had decided to drive on the left. All those US/Canada border crossings would have been such fun!

I too used to suffer the plight of not waiting long enough for the weather to improve and too often noted in the rear mirror that the weather had come good after I had driven half way home. So I bought a modest VW camper and made myself comfortable while waiting longer. I didn't often spend the nights in it, but I could. But Edo doesn't want to go back to driving

Edo's more of a Dog person. House and or dog sitting works well for some, but it's hard if you don't have a base to keep at least some of your "stuff" Perhaps that's the market for some of those self-storage depots spring up in so many locations. I've only visited a couple with friends shifting some stuff for them and seen them being used in weird ways.

After you have filled out your DACS form you won't hear anything from them unless they have a query. If you hear nothing, then all is well and the next thing you will hear is the gentle plop of the payment dropping into your account. It used to be a more hearty Thud but is less avery year as more photographers and artists make their claims. Only fair I guess

Last year I received my direct debit from DACS on Oct 1st which was quite a bit earlier than previous years. Direct claim

The most memorable putdown about Canadians I've read was "they shower afterwards" Specifically, it was referring to someone from Saskatchewan which is a provence I've not experienced so I can't really comment. I don't go back as often as I used to do but I'm still referred to as The Canadian by quite a few in my Suffolk Village. In fact there are several of us here. But we don't count as interesting by Edo's hall of fame. I was sent to photograph Christopher Plumber once and was pretty nervous as I was advised "He eats photographers" But he was fine, we even got on. I think he gave me a break as I let on I was also Canadian. he obligingly cocked his face a bit up and away and gave me that handsome slightly hunky look and I rattled off a few frames. Made it easy!

oooh, you're such a tease! go on, tell me yours and I'll tell you mine....

Great thinking Bill, I'll get on it! I do actually have FGM on file but don't up load it and wouldn't sell them to anyone .In Africa both females and males have had their bits below nipped and snipped to various degrees according to tribal custome. They are regarded as traditions but that's indefensible, especially what is done to young girls. I do hope we don't head in that direction with modern notions of cosmetic alteration.

These student use fees are purely nominal, lets not really consider them as revenue. But it indicates that at least teachers and instructors are informing their students that in the real world, they have to obtain licences and when they are working, more substantial fees will be required. That may sound naive, but at least its a start in the right direction. I've only had one so far but I'm more OK with this than some of the derisory fees obtained in other markets. When our son was doing design at University, I suggested he should get a student version of a couple of software programs. He and his teacher looked at me like I was unhinged. They were all running hacked versions without any payment. That was their idea of reality; I was glad he got out of there sharpish. Poor example; start as you mean to go on. So ends the lesson!

Measures just about working but achingly slow. Using Chrome to get to my .mac account through iCloud. A desperate work-around due to using an ancient Mac operating system. Sales reports working fine. More would be even more fine! Saturday morning: opening in about 5 seconds, that's a bit slow, but usable Not working again Wed 9th. Sorry problem,please try later 3 PM Wed, not working at all, not even getting to the problem message

Their you go there John, Johnnie5 clearly knows his onions. Without his techy knowledge, I think upgrading the CPU is the least worthy of your options. These days, RAM is cheap and the first upgrade to consider. I think back to the days I managed to get my database to start up in a RAM disk and suddenly I was running at warp speed (as they did in startreck) If you have a big old-fashioned desktop you can pull stuff in and out. My old Mac G4 had lots of room for drives and cards, now that so many of us have iMacs or iMac look-a-likes, we have fewer options

My i7 iMac should be faster than my wife's 15 iMac (both 27") but I'm not entirely convinced. She pushed the boat out and installed a SSD which boots a lot faster but otherwise I don't see a lot of difference. She swears at hers more than I do at mine.

I haven't suffered sales quite that miserable, but they are certainly nothing like they used to be. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, that's for sure. That's not just a moan; as you say, it is a great damper on shooting new material. I used to make a good living out of stock photography and I'm now finding it hard to go out and do photography just for the love of it. You might well respond: "well, that's your problem"

I do a lot of cooking but hardly ever reach for the camera. Too busy last minute stirring of the sauce and getting all the plates to table still hot. Jane insists she has never had a burger and means things to stay that way. Total abstinence in that area seems a bit extreme, but I'ld agree , getting those monsters into one's gob looks a real problem

A continuing trickle of zooms gives you that warm feeling that some people are at least taking a closer look and there may be a few sales coming. But the sales will as likely come from non-zoomed images. Interesting, but we're never going to know all the details. At some agencies, one has no idea at all.

Sure English ale should be cellar cool and lager fridge cold. The Australians go a step further and keep the glasses in a glass-fronted cooler just behind the bar so they can grab a glass and fill it in one swift move and hand it across the bar as near to freezing as they can manage. Cold Guinness rather than cool sounds wrong, but I don't see any harm in it. if that's what Scousers fancy, fair enough. Nobody wants "warm" beer, that's just silly talk.A cold lager on a hot day is perfect, a cool ale in front of a fire in a winter pub is excellent too.

"upbeat" lighting is pretty well a must. That leaves a lot of down-time for photographers. I'm often amazed how many photographers upload scenics with very poor lighting. Surely they can see it's not going to excite buyers? People who look at my stuff often remark that I get good skies. No I wait for good skies! Dull day? camera stays in the bag. As others have said, you can move in and do details, but there's no substitute for good interesting lighting. That doesn't mean clear blue skies. You can only rescue so many shots with post processing.

Back in 1963 I lived in Headington in Oxford doing Photography at the Tech/Art Scool. More recently I kept hearing about Oxford Brooks and thought they must have built a whole new University. Turns out it was my old college evolved and upgraded in several stages to become Oxford Brookes University. Some wags in The Dreaming Spires down the hill refer to it as The Early Learning Centre. How cruel! But to be fair, they have some reason to take a few shots at the "campus" at the top of the hill, I just checked the web-site for Brookes and the first images used are from the wonderful architecture down in the famous colleges.

We have a couple of properties in Ipswich. Renting through agents is no safe guarantee of reliable tenants. One of the smart marina area flats turned into a pop-up brothel one Christmas-time which sounds amusing but did cause a big headache. We only found out through the police who readily accepted that we were not the culprits. Deposits can be a hazard; landlords are obliged to put the sums into a Government approved scheme but there are still some cling to the practice of absconding with deposits for one excuse or another. You are in the fortunate position where you can carefully photograph your accommodation after you have solved the basic problem of getting accepted as a tenant. Hope that happens soon.