John Betjeman at St Pancras Station

As I was standing on St Pancras Station I was approached by a train driver who offered to show me the new statues that have been recently placed there. It was John Betjeman who led the campaign against pulling the Victorian station down. I have used this as the cover picture for one of my albums on Picasaweb. Picasa 3 now enables you to add text to your photos which is a great improvement

New Year's Day

In Greek mythology, Janus is the God of beginnings and endings and so Janus, after whom January was named, has two faces, looking forward and looking back. My posts have not been very regular during the last few weeks and my New Year's resolution is to blog more regularly.
I have been given a wonderful Christmas present. My first video camera is a little gadget like a mobile telephone called a Flip video. The new version of Picasa, Picasa 3, has a new feature that enables you to store your videos with your other pictures and to edit them.

No.2 Picasaweb

No.2 in my list of top social web sites must be Picasaweb, where you can see my albums. Half of the albums in my online collection are private family photos while the public albums enable me to share photos with friends and acquaintances. Albums can be plotted on the world map and captions can be added. Picasa is easy to use and does two jobs in one, the organisation and the simple manipulation of pictures. I can now update my web albums automatically by using Picasa 3. Picasaweb has completely changed the way in which I take photos and my enthusiasm for photography at home and on holiday.

A Video from Antarctica

I was able to experiment with the video setting on my digital camera. With a memory card of only 256Mb the videos that I could take were very short. We crossed the Antarctic Circle at 66 degrees south and here is my first video of our party at 69 degrees 32 minutes south, a record for the ship that was made possible because there was less pack ice in the sea in King George VI Sound this year.
Inside the Antarctic circle there is 24-hour daylight at some time during the year. As we were only just inside the circle after the summer solstice, we missed the 24-hour daylight but the pack ice was still melting a bit. We were able to travel further south than the party which was there a fortnight previously.

You can click on Antarctica Video to see and hear my first efforts on Google Video.

Sally's Antarctic Blog

As we travelled down the Antarctic Peninsula, we heard that there was a BBC South crew on a ship in the Antarctic. They had joined a Royal Naval ice survey ship, HMS Endurance. We had been watching a film about what was perhaps the greatest survival story of all time, the 1915 story of the British explorer Ernest Shackleton who managed to escape in a lifeboat, when his ship also called the Endurance broke up in the ice. We had been sailing near Elephant Island in the north of the peninsula.

I did not make any posts on my blog site while we were in the Antarctic as we had very limited Internet facilities. However it was very interesting to find Sally's Antarctic Blog and to see what can be done with the support of the BBC. Sally had to make her broadcasts. There was a personal touch in her blog as she wrote "Another successful live broadcast into South Today … what a relief!"

Sally had to land on an iceberg with her cameraman to take her pictures. In the picture above it is just possible to see them on the iceberg. In Sally's Antarctic Blog, you will be able to see more pictures including an enlarged one, which shows how enormous the iceberg was. You will also find some 60 pictures on the BBC South site.

I have managed to post some 20 pictures on my site and I hope that I will be able to add some further pictures from others on the Professor Molchanov with our party. The BBC blog provides a good model to aim at. In the Professor Molchanov we travelled further south and crossed the Antarctic Circle and of course we saw a Ross Seal. (as it jumped off the icefloe)

A rare event in the Antarctic Peninsula

Sorry for the long break but I have just returned from an expedition to Antarctica.

I will now try to make regular posts during the next month.

One of the most exciting moments of the trip was the sighting of a Ross seal in St Marguerite's Bay near the Antarctic Circle. Ross seals normally live in parts of the continent where ships are unable to penetrate the ice and so they are seldom seem. In any case they do not live on the western side of the peninsula.

What was this seal doing miles away from home across the peninsula? The master of the ship was so excited that he called another ship on the radio and told the master that he was unable to explain to his passengers how rare the sighting was. Here is my picture of the Ross seal and you can see my first selection of pictures from the Antarctic on line Picasaweb or at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/geoffrey.boys

Broadband and Taking Photos

I have been taking photos for most of my life, firstly with a box camera, then with coloured slides and some four years ago I began to use a digital camera.

I will never attain the skills and understanding of some of my friends in the local camera club. I do not have the patience to use Adobe Elements in order to manipulate my digital photos pixel by pixel.

However I have made some exciting progress this year using Broadband and I am now able to share my photos with friends and relatives. You can see my albums on line on Picasaweb at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/geoffrey.boys.

I use the free progam Picasa so that I can rearrange and manipulate all my pictures at the same time. Picasa (Picture House!!) is a wonderful program. I have talked to noone who is disappointed with it, although it only manipulates the picture as a whole cropping, brightening, tinting etc but not changing any individual pixels. All my pictures are saved as JPEGS and those that I have changed in any way are accompanied by a file which remembers how they have been changed.

But my most exciting achievement is that I have now loaded my best pictures on Picasaweb. This is completely free and there is enormous capacity for photos but the best thing is that if you have an up to date version of Windows you can view all my albums as full screen slide shows. On Picasaweb my pictures have been reduced so that there is only the information needed to fill a screen of 1024 by 768.

I have also loaded pictures on the Kodak Easyshare Gallery. Here my pictures retain all the information that I have recorded and are therefore ready for printing. Pictures can easily be printed as a 4" by 6" print and some that can also be enlarged if necessary. Prints usually arrive the next day and cost less than 15p each. My pictures can also be shared with my relatives.

Even the Consumer Magazine Which does not yet seem to have caught up with the wonders of Google. I am still exploring this wonderful new world. I would be pleased to hear about any other systems that my readers are using.

Welcome to my Second Blog.

In my first Blog I reflected upon how I learned to Blog.
In my Second Blog, I will be reflecting upon ways in which using Broadband has changed my activities and indeed my approach to life, how it has helped me to keep in communication with many friends and relatives, how it revived my interests in photography and family history, how it has changed my working practices....
I hope that my readers will be able to share their own reflections upon Broadband with me. I would like to hear about your frustrations, your hopes, your problems as well as your successes.