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Life through a lens

Only a few weeks into the blog and already I'm having to apologise for the lack of activity, but at least I have a legitimate excuse...

Last week we had our nephew over from France for his first visit to England so I had a week off and spent my time introducing a 12 year old, who is used to the balmy weather of the south west of France, to the joys of a British summer. So in between sitting on an open topped London bus in the rain and getting sunburnt in Norfolk without ever remembering actually seeing the sun there was little time for writing this and even less time for what I'd call 'proper' photography. 

Being a tourist this week got me wondering whether anybody actually just enjoys an occasion without recording it in some way anymore? Stood outside Buckingham Palace on a wet Wednesday watching the changing of the guard, I was surrounded by thousands of people from all over the world all of them taking pictures on everything from top end full frame DSLRs to phones, mostly of some red guard shaped blips between the back of peoples heads and the railings if my efforts are anything to go by. If they were anything like me they weren't actually thinking about what they were seeing either, but how they could get in a position to photograph it better and once the holiday is over what will happen to these thousands of photos taken daily at Buckingham Palace or the hundreds of thousands of photos taken daily at the tourist sites around the world?

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Flatford Mill, one of last weeks rain free tourist destinations... a must see for visitors to East Anglia

Our French relatives seem to like to watch them as a slide show on the TV which is what will probably happen to the holiday snaps that I took during the week or, if I get round to it, they might even be whittled down to a suitable amount to print in a small souvenir book to send to France. This got me questioning whether I really need to lug around the heavy lump of camera shaped metal (which Canon prefer to call a 7D) and a bag full of very expensive glass when for these occasions something pocket sized would suffice? No is the answer I came up with so I am on the search for a quality small camera as of now... but more on this in future posts (although recommendations are welcome!).

Anyway our young French visitor went home with the news for his family that England isn't as bad as everyone says and the food is actually quite nice. So, despite the lack of photography time, the week was a success and I feel proud to have done my bit for British tourism.

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A rare sight last week... blue skies (well near enough) and people on the beach without coats

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In print

I was rather pleased to see that my Brighton beach deck chair shot (above) managed to sneak it's way on to the bottom of this month's What Digital Camera magazine, there's a reason for this... A couple of months ago I won a place on an Olympus/What Digital Camera magazine day in Brighton to try out the Olympus OM-D (very nice camera). The organisers then selected the 'best' picture of the day to win an Olympus XZ-1 camera, which turned out to be said deck chair shot.