Sleepy

Penny has just come back from the Vets. She went in this morning to have her teeth seen to and to have her claws clipped. Unfortunately she needed to have two teeth extracted - not an unusual event for a rescue greyhound. She had the rest scaled and polished.



She was still quite groggy from the anaesthetic when I collected her though she did manage to climb on the back seat of the car. There was more of a problem when we got home as she didn't want to get out. Partly as it was very dark on the drive and she didn't feel confident so I took out a lamp and Freddy the Fox to persuade her. After she had wobbled her way indoors she settled down to sleep things off while I boiled some chicken pieces and a piece of fish as she is on a soft food diet until after her check up.

Not a Horse Shoe - Visiting Woodpecker

The first Guess What of the year managed to fool a few people. It certainly looked somewhat like a horse shoe in the snow but as ImaBurdie and Wilma worked out it was an impression from the ice spikes on my shoe so they get the first virtual Gold Stars of 2013. Many thanks to all who had a go.

  


No new Guess What for this Monday but I will try to find something for next week.

A pleasant surprise this morning when I spotted a male Great Spotted Woodpecker on the peanut feeder nearest the kitchen window. Lighting was poor and I had to up the ISO to 3200 on the 50D to get even a reasonable shutter speed.







Unfortunately it didn't stay long enough to get any video this time.

Village Church - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Glorious blue sky and brilliant sunshine for much of yesterday. Quite chilly but it is only the start of February. We had a couple of good walks round the village to get some well deserved fresh air. Part of one route took us through the churchyard which kept me and my trusty Nikon S9050 busy.

The good things noticed were these signs that Spring is round the corner:

Winter Aconite:



Snowdrops:



(I did spot a few daffodils in full bloom in the sheltered corner of a garden on our way home.)

Also it was good to be able to clearly see a part of the church it has been difficult to get at in the past when part of the graveyard was fenced off with sheep grazing on the grass. The fence has been removed and one can wander at will all round the outside of the church.

The bad is the way bricks have been used in the past to repair part of the structure which does rather spoil such an old stone built church:




The ugly - the gargoyles and grotesques decorating the roof line of course. Some are probably carved from something like sandstone which has weathered badly over the years:

  

  



All in all we both enjoyed a satisfying and rewarding perambulation.

The Man, His Dog and the Trees

Lovely late Sunlight illuminating the bare Poplar trees:

iPad Photo Processing With PicsPlay Pro

Yesterday the iPad app "PicsPlay Pro" was reduced to 69p for a short while so I grabbed a copy. At the time of writing it is still at this reduced price. So far among the many iPad photo apps I have tried out this is far above the others in quality, reliability, ease of use and versatility. On starting you can take a new photo or load one already in the iPad. Once loaded there are choices of cropping, effects, general exposure control, adding text, borders, vignetting, colour splash and many others. Choosing the effects section brings up this screen:



Choosing an effect from the left brings up many thumbnails of different ways to apply that effect. This is instant and the thumbnails can be scrolled through and tried at full screen size. No problem if you change your mind as the app has many levels of undo.

I have chosen Art - Sketch. With most, probably all, effects there is a slider which lets you choose any state between the original photo and the full effect. Here I have adjusted the effect to allow some of the original colour to mix with the b/w sketch:

 

You are not limited to using one effect, many can be used one after the other to build up the result which pleases you. At any and every stage the result can be applied and saved to the iPad Camera Roll, sent to other apps which have the facility to import a photo, emailed, sent to Twitter, Facebook or Flickr. If you use Dropbox then that comes up as one of the 'other apps'.

This started off as a b/w Moon in a black sky:



There are far too many different effects in PicsPlay Pro to cover here such as the HDR type effects and the way some can be applied to part of a photo. For me this app was well worth 69p of my pension and would still be a great aquisition at its previous £1.49 It looks as though it could be going up to £2.49 soon.

When I want to get photos in or out of the iPad I use a PC program called iFunBox which allows access to all parts of the iPad much more easily than battling with iTunes.

Guess What

A photo I took in the snow a few days ago.
Can you guess what made this impression?




No prizes, just for fun.
Answer next Monday.

RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch - Results

Nothing out of the ordinary while I did my hour stint on Saturday morning counting the maximum number of each type of bird which visited my garden.




Some of the regulars were missing from the count as they didn't arrive during that hour.