Snowdonia Holiday

Last month we had our first holiday of the year.

We booked a small cottage in the Snowdonia National Park, a lovely village in the mountains called Beddgelert was our home for the week.

We traveled by car as the intention was to do plenty of walking with Timmy the Greyhound, who was just about recovered from his operation.

We are intending for our next car to be fully electric to minimise our impact on the environment so we planned an interesting cross country route, but one that passed a couple of rapid chargers.  It seems incredible that just seven years a go there was only one rapid charger in the country and the BBC doing a test took over three days to get from London to Edinburgh.  Though an owner of a Tesla Roadster did it in under twenty four hours a few weeks later after reading about the BBC report.

With it still being early in the season, we had snow many mornings and even a blizzard one day.

Each morning I got up early and took Timmy for a gentle walk along the river.

There was a nice church by the river which I took a few photographs of.  The holiday was not photography focused holiday I just took with me a pair of Leica M cameras.  An M4 film camera and a M10.

We were very lucky with the light and weather and I took some nice photographs during are walks.  The top photography was actually a series of photographs taken with the M10 and merged together in Photoshop.

Timmy enjoyed himself and many of the pubs in the village were dog friendly.  In fact the hotel where we had a meal on a number of occasions even had a menu for dogs, so one day we not only had a meal for ourselves but for Timmy as well.

 

The Photography Show 2018 at the NEC

The Saturday was The Photography Show at the NEC.  For once I had nothing I wanted, except to try out the Hasselblad and Fuji medium format cameras, more on those in another post.

 

 

We caught a few seminars which were interesting and saw a few of the more famous names in photography.  As you can see above Frank Doorhof was also there.

Our first visit was to the Olympus stand so that Chris could get his OM bodies cleaned and serviced free of charge.

After that we were free to explore.

I got the chance to have a play with a few ultra wides for the Leica M, the Robert White stand had the range from 10 MM upwards of Voiglander glass.  If like me you like the odd extreme wide angle but do not shoot enough of that focal length to justify your own brand glass then the Voiglander is definitely the way to go.

Chris did buy a Olympus 300mm but I did not buy anything.


At the end of the day Chris picked up his newly serviced cameras and we headed home.

Taking a break

Theres a lot going on in the Brown Family Household at the moment, and with all the extra demands on my time i’ll be taking a break from social media somewhat and this blog.  I’ll still be posting the picture of the month and the odd update but they will be far fewer then they used to be.

Timmy’s Been to the Dentist


We dropped Timmy the Greyhound of at the Vets on Wednesday to have a few teeth out.

I collected him today and spent the day with him, working from home. Its going to be tough for both of us not giving in and giving him treats, but its soft food only for about a week now.

Falcon Heavy

I have been looking forward to Space X’s Falcon Heavy test launch.  Its been hit my delay after delay, but in the end it was a wonderful test, an amazing launch, and landing two out of the three boosters was an amazing and fantastic sight to see.

Using the original Tesla Roadster as a test payload was also an inspired bit of advertising which will certain do Space X’s sister company Tesla, no harm at all.

SuperBowl

Today we have the day off as we spent the night watching the American Super Bowl.  It was a classic match, while I wanted the Eagles to win, I did not expect them to be able to overcome the might of New England, especially with the Eagles having a back up quarter back.  They surprised me and it was a great game with the Eagles pulling through.