After watching the TV show, I decided I would read some of the Arthur Conan Doyle novels. I found out that the Sherlock Holmes novels are out of copyright, and because of this are available as free ebooks, through the Gutenberg project. I have downloaded all the novels and short stories, and am making my way through them in order. I started with ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and have just finished ‘The Sign of the Four’.

If you are not reading anything at the moment, or are looking for something to read, I highly recommend the Sherlock Holmes books.

On recommendation from a friend, I checked out a company called Big Wet Fish. They are a local company, well, local to me, based in Northern Ireland. I do like to support local businesses where possible.

There prices for their various packages are very reasonable and I have 3 or 4 different products with them. There is one thing that really stands out for me though. Their customer service is second to none, it really is fantastic. On the rare occasion that I have had to contact them, any problems have been resolved incredibly quickly.

For more information or to get hosting from them, you can check them out at www.bigwetfish.co.uk or click in the advert on the left hand side of my blog.

I think the photo above, of the blue car driving through the streets of Havana, Cuba, is probably my favourite travel photo. What do you think though, I would really appreciate if you guys could tell me what are your top 4 favourite travel photos that I have taken. You can have a look at the full collection in the travel segment of my flickr.

If you go have a little look at the travel photos on there, and then come back to the blog and leave a comment on this post. Thanks.

Bourton on the Water

Now that I am older though, and also because I am a photographer, I am coming to realise how great these places we went to really were. I want to revisit the places my parents took me as a child. Recently, I had a week off work, and Lorraine and I headed to one of these places. We flew over to Bristol, hired a car and drove up to the Cotswolds fo a few days. It was brilliant, to just relax, with no plans, and appreciate the beautiful area of England we were in. We made the most of the car hire and unlimited mileage, we stayed in Bourton on the Water, and visited Lower Slaughter, Burford, Stow on the Wold, Stratford Upon Avon, Oxford and Bath.

Punts

Radcliffe Camera

As always, Lorraine has all the ‘normal’ photos, and I spent a lot of time behind my SLR.

Old Buildings in Stratford

Bath Abbey

There are a few more photos on my Flickr

I’m really happy with how it looks, and how easy it was to customise. I like the advertising space options, and will probably make more use of them in he future. I will probably tinker about with the look of the blog for a while, I need to resize some images to bring down the size a bit, and speed up the loading time.

I would definately recommend Standard Theme to anyone looking for a functional, straight forward, easy to modify theme, and it doesn’t break the bank either.

Check it out at www.standardtheme.com

Firstly I must apologise to those of you who actually visit my blog in a browser rather than via RSS. You guys will have noticed the theme changing quite a lot over the past few weeks. I had toyed with the idea of this becoming a photo-blog but  have changed my mind on that, and I am now looking for theme that isn’t predominately photo based, but is still simple. 

Hopefully within the coming weeks I will have 2 blogs, one will be this blog, a personal blog, and the other one will be a professional blog as part of a new photography website that will be coming hopefully in the near future. There may be a crossover in some of the content however. 

I have been doing photography for a few years now, and I love it. It really is my passion, and I finally am taking the steps, to actually set up my own business. Its something I have talked about for ages, and within the coming weeks that may be realised. So when the new website is all up and running, you will have to stop by, and subscribe to the new blog that will be there. 

More on Flickr

See some more on Flickr.

We went down to County Down, and spent some time getting photographs in Castlewellan, it’s a beautiful part of the world that I really want to photograph some more. Have a look at the rest of the photos on Flickr.

I used the wedding as the first time i tried using the movie mode on my new iPhone, and used iMovie on the phone to edit it. I kept forgetting to take video footage though, and when I did, it was rather shaky, so the video isn’t great, but it was good to test the camera out.

To watch the video in 720 HD, have a look at it on Vimeo