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Posts tagged maidenhead

Snow day!

December 19th, 2009

Last week doof.me.uk brought you coverage of fog. This week we bring you yet another weather phenomenon: snow!

What to take a picture of to demonstrate “snow”? How about the Maidenhead bridge? A favourite of this blog, here it is covered in snow yesterday morning:

Not wanting to be accused of bridge favouritism, here’s a picture of that other excellent Maidenhead landmark, the Brunel railway bridge:

The fast trains make a nice wooosh effect with the snow when they go past, but sadly I couldn’t hang around to photograph it as I had to hurry to the station to go to work. Here’s my train!

A problem: how to stop snow photos coming out blue? I play with the white balance setting and this seems to help a little.

Fog

December 12th, 2009

When I got up yesterday morning someone had turned on the fog! Here is a picture of the Maidenhead bridge featured several times previously on this blog now with added fog:

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No fog today so I’m going to Slough: updates to follow.

Photos of sunsets

September 18th, 2009

I can see some lovely sunsets from the window here, but my attempts to take photos of them have been a bit of a failure. If I leave the automatic settings on it comes out either very bright or very dark, but generally fail. Experiment! Set the ISO setting very high and made these:

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Lots of noise though, and Digikam’s de-noising algorithm, after churning away for a good 30 seconds makes absolutely no difference at all. Hmm.

Exploring the ‘hood

September 18th, 2009

What have I been doing during my blogging absence? Working! While not working last weekend I walked from my home to Windsor. I thought this would be exciting, but it turned out to be incredibly dull. Highlight must have been walking over the M4 flyover (no, really).

M4

I really like this photo for some reason. Clouds could be better as usual. I’m not sure if the M4 will replace the A64 in my road-affections: the A64 was like a warm comfort blanket enveloping York; whereas the M4 is like a sword slicing through the heart of Slough; and, annoyingly, limiting the places I can go running south of Maidenhead (flyovers are limited compared to the A64).

Windsor itself is quite nice, bit out of my price range house-wise though.

This is the Queen’s house. She’s now officially my neighbour, living the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. Well posh. No one seems to have noticed that both Windsor and Maidenhead are closer to Slough than they are to each other. For the sake of property prices, this is probably for the best.

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Went back home via Slough where I took these pictures of local landmarks:

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Slough has very advanced high-tech public toilets. Toilet seems to be broken at the moment judging by the status indicator. Note the “20 mins maximum” sign. I read somewhere that Slough was the most productive town in the UK: if it takes you that long to use the loo there’s no place for you here. [Update: whoever wrote that was wrong: Slough is only the third most productive town outside London.]

Tesco in Slough is the largest supermarket in Europe. It’s opposite Slough’s other major landmark: the Brunel bus station. On the outside it’s a huge shiny box: they’ve made no attempt at all to beautify it, and it fits in very well with its surroundings. It’s pretty impressive on the inside too; although they’re not using all that vertical space for sales area: the inside is cavernous like a cathedral. Didn’t see many other supermarket spotters there.

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