Thursday 20 August 2015

Label Your Photos Whilst You Remember...

Having two blogs to run, this one and Serena's, I thought I'd have a look through some of my old (back-up) CD/DVDs to choose a few of my archived pictures to accompany the next few posts.

Oh dear...

In (the past) my inexperience of digital photography I never individually labelled the images. So whatever was on the memory card at the start was what it was labelled.

It's not that I don't know the year they were taken, or where, I do, although I'll need to search the exact names of buildings shown in them.

But it's the odd ones that are the issue. Specifically this one.
Postcard image, source unknown...

It's a picture of a postcard of Weymouth Harbour, unknown date.

I've no idea where the postcard was on display, I just know the photo of it was taken on holiday in the summer of 2008.

It may be the detail is written down somewhere, but it wasn't on the photo information, nor on the back-up disc. Then about a year after that my old computer had to be wiped after a damaging virus got onto my machine- despite a security package. So a couple of documents and photos not backed up were lost forever... :(

Since then I've learnt a lot about correct labelling and adding tags to my images, so I don't have this issue now. And I always make a back-up copy too.

So I've now got a lot of pictures that need sorting out and relabelling-including numerous images of my (now grown-up) sons, buried in sand on Weymouth and Lyme Regis beaches, and in pebbles on Chesil Beach. :D

If anyone can enlighten me on the postcard, do get in touch; I want to credit the original source location of the postcard too.

Sunday 16 August 2015

The Fruits of Summer...

It's fortunate you can't see the traces of purple on my fingers, but if you could then you might realise I've been picking Blackberries.

Blackberry season...
As I grew up in the Garden of England- Kent, I was used to seeing hop-fields and fruit being grown and picked, especially in the summer when it was common to go and pick Strawberries when the farmers had fruit crops to get in.

Wild brambles grew in lots of overgrown places and country roads, and it was common to pick the ripe fruit on a country walk. It was then made into a pie when we got home, or if there was enough, jam.

This was probably being done for centuries...

This year has been very good for fruit, and this winter our garden will need sorting as we've got self-seeded Redcurrants and a Holly growing up among the Tayberries- a raspberry/blackberry cross.

Of course we're growing cultivated varieties of the fruit, rather than the wilder fruit that would have grown in hedgerows a couple of centuries ago.

One of my research points for my Nottinghamshire story, is what would be growing in the rectory's kitchen garden in 1802?

My heroine, Sarah, defends herself with her spade when confronted by the hero's unpleasant cousin, and I immediately thought what would it have looked like, and could she have hefted the spade in the way I describe?

I found some images for American garden tools of the time and also have a history of country house gardens- somewhere- that I can search; but I realised that living in a village attached to a smallish estate, there would likely have been a carpenter, and even if not there, then there would be a blacksmith in another village who could make a suitable sized spade section to attach to a shaft and handle just right for my heroine's needs...

There may perhaps be a small rose somewhere, grown from a cutting given to the previous occupant of the rectory as a kind gesture.

But it certainly won't look like the scented roses in my garden that seem to have gone crazy this year- these were opening when we got the heavy rain Friday night...

blown Roses...



And the Hawthorn has
ripening berries...