Fabulous Self Catering Holidays In Abruzzo - Our very wide blog...
MonteViste in Watercolour by Clive
Welcome to an all new 'wider' page view
It has become all the rage for website owners to write a blog. To this end I thought I might have a go myself and at the same time take the opportunity of increasing the page width. This is by way of an experiment - it has become increasingly obvious that the days of 800 pixel resolution monitors are just about over and that websites are increasingly taking advantage of that fact - more space eguals more useful information for the visitor. 
Now it could be argued that as regards a blog I personally don't really have a lot to say, in fact I strongly suspect that after this initial foray there won't be any further entries for ages! Oh well we'll just have to wait and see.
So then what have Paula and I been up to over the winter?
We closed up MonteViste last October and set off for England in our trusty Peugeot 106 - 'Pug Power!'. We had decided to take it easy and stopped over at a camp site at Moneglia in Liguria - we had been there some thirteen years earlier and strangely enough were given exactly the same wooden bunglow as last time, number 11 to be precise. Access to the camp site is through an old railway tunnel!
I managed to fit in some snorkelling but the water was a little on the cool side and underwater photo opportunities where not forthcoming. However, Moneglia is a lovely place and the weather was great and so we enjoyed a little break and after a few days duly set off for France.
We stayed in a beautiful town near Dijon; the hotel was a little rough but the breakfast more than made up for that aspect. And then it was on to Calais and the ferry. We had an appointment at a Christian retreat centre in South Wales called Ffald-y-Brenin - the name means Sheepfold of the King. Paula had read Roy Goodwin's book 'The Grace Outpouring' and about his subsequent vision of seeing prayer houses set up all the way around the Mediterrenean and to this end we were going to Ffald-y-Brenin to attend a conference called TransMed.
Ffald-y-Brenin Christian Retreat Centre. Pontfaen - North Pembrokeshire
The conference was absolutely fantastic - we met Elvis there!! Of course it wasn't the real Elvis but rather a very remarkable man called David Hay who was attending the conference with his mother in law and good friend CJ. David lives with his family in Mojacar in southern Spain and as a form of Evangelism has an Elvis tribute stage show. At the end of the show he says to the audience, 'You've met the King of rock and roll, now meet the King who'll save your soul!'. Here are two photos from David's stage show:
David Hay as Elvis
David lives with his family in Mojaca
We met many other fabulous people at the conference and hope to return this year. I came away with the intention of translating Roy's book into Italian - we're just in the process of speaking to the publishers about rights etc.
Lion Fish photographed in the Red Sea
From South Wales we travelled north to Colwyn Bay were we stayed for a while before going to Mostyn to look after my sisters three neurotic dogs for a week. From Mostyn we travelled to Warrington and I promptly flew off to Egypt!
Twenty years earlier to the month (November 1990) I was in Hurghada on the west coast of the Red Sea teaching scuba diving to tourists and Amercan marines.
I decided that it was high time I returned to enjoy some diving, 'Come si deve', (diving as diving should be).
Much has changed but the diving is still as fantastic as ever. Anyway, I've written a website all about the trip which you may be interested in having a look at: redseadivinghurghada.co.uk
The photo to the left was taken at a depth of around five metres using a 6MP digital camera waterproof to ten metres. I took this shot while snorkelling off a coral reef near Giftun island. The spines of the Lion Fish (Lionfish) contain a strong poison which can be lethal to man. Beautiful fish though...
As soon as I returned back to the Uk Paula and I went up to Cumbria for our friend Brian's birthday - he was 77 on the 13th of December. Brian is a professional artist and whilst we were staying with him I thought it was about time he had a website for his work so I wrote him one. There are still many photos of his paintings and sculptures to be added to the site but the paintings in question are so large that it will take good weather and a co-ordinated effort to remove them from the studio for photographing. Brian's site is called brian-slack.co.uk - please take a look. In the meantime here are two of Brian's paintings for you to enjoy:
St.Paul's Cathedral
The Dutchman
On the subject of fabulous art work, whilst I was in Cumbria I heard from my friend Kim in Oregon. She told me about an artist called Paul Smith who has now sadly passed on. Paul suffered with cerebral palsy but notwithstanding his disability he produced absolutely staggering art work on a typewriter! Yes a typewriter. Kim's husband has put together a website containing some of his work - there are also some videos of Paul working on his typewriter; they are very short videos but really bring home what Paul was up against whilst producing his images.
From Cumbria we returned to Wales for my brother's wedding and from there we braved the terrible weather and drove to Harwich for the ferry to Holland - we were to spend Christmas with friends in Northern Germany. One of my closest friends from university, Andy, lives with his wife and family near Oldenburg. Andy is a software engineer - and a very good one. At university he was studying business and economics but thankfully left that cobblers behind and moved into engineering - sensible man.
Given that I had some time on my hands, apart from helping Andy to insulate one of his bedrooms and to put some lighting into his loft I decided to have a look at painting with watercolours. It's been a very arty winter this year! I've always wanted to paint in watercolour, there's that fabulous line from Al Stwart's Year Of The Cat, 'She came out of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolour in the rain'. My first attempts were pretty awful but practice makes somewhere going towards perfect and I'm quite happy with the following image:
Andy Sledging (Pseudo Watercolour!)
Oh alright, I confess, whilst it does look a lot like a watercolour it's actually a photograph which, using a graphics package (not Photoshop), I've made it look like a watercolour. However, it is definitely my intention this year to perloin Paula's brushes and watercolour paints and to actually make a start on the real thing.
Clearly the image of MonteViste at the top of the blog is another one of my 'adaptations'...
I took the original image with a sony DSC-F505V. I mention this because I had one of these cameras in 2000 when Paula and I went to Canada to visit family there. That original camera, which at the time was cutting edge and cost lots of money, subsequently attempted to swim in the sea at Positano and didn't make a very good job of it. I bought this one from e-bay for £19 Absolutely astonishing!
By today's standards the F505 has vey few pixels - less than three million - but what most people fail to understand, as they swoon at the MP values of their shiny new cameras, is that it's not so much the number of pixels at hand that's important but rather the quality of the lense. The F505 is all lens - a Carl Zeiss lens to be precise which is absolutely superb.
So what use all these pixels then - O wise one? It's absolutely simple really. A 10MP camera will allow you to blow-up any given image to twice the size of a 5MP camera without losing any of the detail.
Andy Electrician - Taken with a Sony DSC-F505V
So far so good. How many of us want to print colour photos that are the size of posters? I thought not - at ten mega pixels the full resolution print size is A2. that's really, really big! Most of us want to either print A5 images or else send them to friends and put them on websites. Consider this photo taken of Andy being an electrician in his loft. I took the shot whilst standing on the loft ladder using only the lighting available and I took it 'handheld'. Notice the absense of noise (granulation) in the shadows and remember that this is only a 2.9MP camera. Click the image to open it in a seperate full screen window.
Assuming a 300dpi printer a 1MP camera will give you images that can be printed at photo quality on A6 paper (14.8cm x 10.5cm). The F505 will qive me images that will produce photo quality prints on A4 paper an excellent quality prints on A3. This way of looking at this subject is a little oversimplified - the physical size of the camera's CCD (the bit of electronics that converts the optical image into a digital signal) also has a large effect on noise as does the ISO setting. The term ISO comes from the celluloid film world where it refers to silver halide crystal density - the denser the crystals the finer the image but the more ambient light required for any given brightness. With good digital cameras the ISO setting can be adjusted in which case all that happens is that the gain of the CCD is turned up but as with all amplification used in electronics more gain means more noise and in the case of digital images that noise results in speckling. Hence the trick of quickly judging a digital camera's quality by looking for noise in the shadows.