Shyheels

Not sure how you are setting up your shot, but you might consider using a Gorilla pod. These are brilliant little flexible tripods with wraparound legs that can be attached to railings, chair backs, lampposts, almost anything, they are small and lightweight and come in sizes suitable for everything from iPhones to DSLRs.

They vary from a few inches high to just over a foot. Brilliant little pieces of kit to take on holidays etc

I realise this is a year old thread but the accuracy in the observation is undiminished. I have niticed much the same thing. Taller boots with heels are very much more frequently seen on mature eomen while the younger set, if they go for tall boots, prefer flats. 

Either way there does seem to be more taller boots around this season.

I'm not lecturing. I don't care enough. 

I guess it would depend on how many it would sleep and whether or not you were looking to hire during school holidays when everything goes nuts. 

The idea of a canal boat is quite appealing. It woukd be very appealing on The Contnent as well, with more places to go as well. 

This has given me food for thought...

Pure piracy.

Actually no. The point of a £2000 lens is not always to get everything pin sharp. For portraiture and still life photography professional photographers, such as myself, happily pay good money for the wider aperature of an expensive lens specifically for the creamy bokeh that can be achieved. It is a very desirable effect 

it depends on the type of photography you are doing. Lenses are tools to be used in a variety of applications. My 135 f/2 Zeiss can achieve pin sharp results for landscapes stopped down, and gorgeous bokeh when opened up for portraiture.

I must say the idea of floating along a canal - something I had not thought of previously and been only dimly aware of - is really appealing. I love the imagery it inspires!

Almost all of my travels for a good many years now - or at least a very high percentage of my travels - have been for work. I am increasingly becoming a homebody in my down time, quite happy to explore the lanes on my bicycle or sit in the back garden and improve my mind with a Mickey Spillane or Perry Mason.

I like being in interesting, far off places - sometimes - but I do not like travelling there, the exact opposite of my youth when it was all about the journey, and the feeling of liberation I felt when I started off. The destination was nearly irrelevant. Nowadays the journey - typically by air - is deeply unpleasant as a rule. I can still enjoy settling in for a long train journey, up to Scotland, say, or a sea voyage (not on a glitzy cruise ship, never been on one of those, but on an expedition) but those opportunities do not come up often. Generally it is air and a trip to the airport has become to me like the halo before a migraine.

Bokeh not a technical fault, it is a natural effect - part of the laws of physics and optics. If you shoot wide open - say, f1.4 - you will have a shallow depth of field. That depth of field will deep as you stop down the lens so that by the time you get to f16 everything will be, more or less, in sharp focus.

The 'quality' of the blur you see in the backdrop - the bokeh - when you are shooting with a narrower depth of field is subject, as with anything artistic, and varies from lens to lens with better glass giving you a softer creamier, and generally more desirable bokeh. 

I have had some amusing happenings while asking directions in other languages. I remember asking about catching a train in rural Hungary and being unable to comprehend a single word of Hungarian was bemused when the person who was trying to be helpful believed he could solve the problem by speaking s-l-o-w-l-y in Hungarian. I laugh, but I do the same thing myself...

Bokeh is the creamy quality of the blur of an out of focus part of an image. It can be quite beautiful in the way it lifts the subject away from the background. It is from a Japanese artistic term.

I hadn't thought about the technological advances in materials technology. Interesting point. So PVC has sort of been overtaken by newer, but similarily sleek, shiny rock-chic style fabrics? (Pardon my rather dated and stodgy ignorance) Or has PVC itself improved?

good luck finding a good pair of size 12s from M&S

Back on the subject of your shiny leggings, did you decide to keep the M&S pair?

Suitably emboldened, I shall keep an eye out for a pair of slinky rock chic PVCs then dare myself to buy them...

No - I didn't think you were rocking up places with a battered old caravan and taking over some public park or farmers field or some poor sods back garden. I meant it in the homme du monde sense. :-)

Alas no place is really safe these days. One has to make the best of things. Even so I am not sure I would have been taking my wife or kids off to any place in the Middle East (other than, perhaps, Dubai) or North Africa.  Too many fruitcakes.  And professionally, I have no interest in covering terrorism, political unrest or being embedded with combat units along anybody's front line. I have great respect for those who do these things - indeed one of my friends regularly covers some of the seediest and most violent pockets of central Africa, but not me. I have no calling in that direction.  Risk, I don't mind - but 'clean-cut' risk, that of nature, wild animals, and remote wilderness environments, not deliberate attempts on my life by religious fanatics with black plastic sunglasses and bad shaves.  

As for cycling, I have many many thousands of miles under my belt, excellent bike-handling skills, road sense and much experience at paying attention to my environment when I am out and about. That said, I would not be too keen on wife of kids cycling the same roads I do. Not at all. 

What an interesting and thought provoking reply, one that leads me to suggest that you have indeed travelled, or are a traveller by nature, even if you have not filled up many passports - something which, frankly, is increasingly seeming to me to be a minor detail. One who can find interest and adventure and beauty in a field, or be open and curious enough to strike up a conversation with two Spanish speaking ladies at a adjacent table at a cafe, and learn their stories, is a traveller - and is one whether they are home or somewhere exotic and far away. As the philosopher Henry David Thoreau once said of his meanderings around Concord,Massachusetts - I have travelled much in Concord. You have travelled much in Hertfordshire.

And of course the very soggy trip to and through France. I have experienced something similar, although not on a motorcycle, and recognised with a smile the experiences you write of. Such journeys do make for pleasant memories, despite the discomforts at the time.

I always wanted to travel and see the world and engineered my life and career so that would be the logical outcome. Journalism and photography have taken me all over the globe, and at somebody else's expense. i am very fortunate and feel very privileged to have seen as much of the world as I have and I remind myself of that often. 

Increasingly though I find that some of my most interesting travels occur around home, on long bicycle rides through the lanes, rather than taking a jet to the far side of the world. Part of that is because the hassles and unpleasantness of airline travel leeches much of the joy and romance out of the actual act of travelling, and patly because I have come to understand that a wonder at the world, an interest in people, history and a love of beauty does not require an exotic backdrop but can be felt and enjoyed on an English country lane, astride a bicycle, as well as anywhere else.

My own children have travelled far more than I did at their age, as your grandson appears to be doing as well. That is indeed a chilling thought, the proximity to disaster with their having flown out of Egypt that day. Thank God they came home safe.

They did look a little dead. As you say, a more enticing photo would have brought out bigger bidders. They are probably quite nice boots.

If only...

The speaking four languages part is, or rather was, true, but as for the others..,

i can ride a carousel pony...

Back in the late 70s I could cut a pretty mean jitterbug (something my wife would never believe if I ever told her)

when I was very little I used to love to sing - until I was made to feel self conscious by bigger meaner kids and quit forever

And would loved to have cut a dash in PVC but never summoned the nerve...

I have however travelled to the South Pole, the Tibetan plateau, Tierra del Fuego, and the Skeleton Coast...

Quite a lively auction, with 28 bids!

I don't mind my cycling bib tights in the least in terms of snug fit,

Just self conscious about trying on rock-chic style PVC! 

Maybe the M&S ones could be fun to try...hmmmm....

Quite a comprehensive review.

My wife used to wear a stunning pair of PVC trousers back in her rock-chic days. Not the kind of thing she would wear any more. 

I always thought it would be fun to try on a pair of PVCs to see what they felt like on, but never quite had the nerve (Lycra tights for cycling is my limit). 

That's not very good. You may well find they were out of stock - or had sold out in the few seconds before you placed your order. I know how frustrating that can be,..

Who told you?

I think of myself as have a great face for radio, and the perfect voice for print.

I know the Jean Gaborit boots come with a high price tag, but they are beautifully made, come in a huge choice of colours and leathers and are made to your precise measurements - 13 measurements in all, not just foot size, but calf, ankle, instep, knee etc. And they are leather, not a sock. Obviously at these prices they are not the sort of thing one has dozens of pairs of, but for something special...they are hard to beat.

I believe the portraiture prizes announced yesterday were shot on digital...

Auto focus is handy for some things, but being an aficionado of Zeiss lenses I have learned to get by without it. I learned on manual focus anyway, back in the 70s, and have no problems with it. The throw on the Zeiss lenses is nice and long and beautifully controlled and when used with live view on landscapes is incredibly precise. Pin sharp.

The nicest thing about 'fast' lenses, especially for portraiture is the soft creamy bokeh you get when you shoot wider-open. 

I can't say I've personally had difficulties - I never order from them - but my wife does and I hear her complain about it regularly. Don't know the specifics... I know she also says their quality control is pretty poor and that you can get two of something in the same size and find they are radically different.