The village in Noir et Blanc

 

Pauline had a Doctors appointment in our village a couple of days ago....
so I decided to pass the wait going KiMono... and had a bit of fun!!

Pentax has brought out a new, mono only SLR and everyone Pentaxian is taking Mono pix... hence, because of the K-mount... KiMono [and of course kimonos are Japanese]

Anyway, I hadn't tried the Mono settings on the K-3iii [which is the model from which they are making the new mono-only camera]...
and half-an-hour on a sunny April day seemed to be a good time to try them out.

These are ten of the photos that I think show the archi"texture" off.

The London Plane in front of the Mairie is now a couple of hundred years old

The Mairie... dominating the town... the front entrance.... is around the back!!

A quiet Grande Rue [for a change]....

A well positioned bench!

The Castle still looms o'er the town

Another view of the b'... looming castle!

The church with its mossy roof

All is quiet, no one about!

All's always quiet on a Wednesday

Except for someone checking her change!

Ahhhhh! Chocolat!!

 Chocolate is addictive......

La Fibre arrive!!

 

A strange glow in the Office

Yesterday a friend wrote this about "La Fibre"....
"Will our internet speed be noticeably faster? Stay tuned"...
because they are about to be connected....
"Noticeably faster" is an understatement of the 20th Order....
we were connected last Saturday....

Fast?
Not 'alf!!

Firstly..... using the Cloud now makes sense.... files transfer like lightning.... and putting photos on Flickr or Photocrowd is superb... I can upload the full sized picture, not one that is 2048px on the longest side [the FaceMangler required size if you want to avoid their alogrithms ruining your hard work

Secondly..... we have had to buy a new TV.
Our Sony of 25 years isn't Smart and communicates using Scart/Peritel.... that meant finding a TV that was HDMI and could communicate with our combined VHS/CD video player/recorder.... fortunately that is kitted with Red/White/Yellow AV output and we found an 80cm TV that had all sorts of inputs [except Scart] including RWY AV!
The new TV is 73cm wide and borderless, the old 23" Sony is 63cm wide with a 9cm border around the screen.... so a much larger picture.... the old one has always been like trying to watch a laptop from the opposite side of a rugby pitch!
I think we are going to be watching TV a bit more.

Thirdly.... the increase in speed is really quite amazing... we had Cable in the UK which was Fibre to a box at the end of the street then internet RJ45 copper to the house and was fast.... I've missed that since moving to rural France and ADSL.... missed it a lot.... but now, with "La Fibre" actually coming into the house to a box on the wall.... from what I can remember, we must now be at a fourfold or more improvement on Cable.... files travel like greased lightning and things like U-Bend allow video watching without spinning arrows.

Yeeehaw!!

The source of the glow....
our technician had a laser that plugged to the end of the fibre.
This allowed him to check the "connections" he'd just made....
and identify the correct fibre back at the centre!

And the light passes down the fibre, across the road to the pole and
down to the....

... hub on the pole.
The top wires are our mains power, which also crosses the road...
The thin, third black line is La Fibre de la Forge....
the second and fourth are the main power line that continues to Bezuard....
and the main line of all knowledge that continues to Petit-Pressigny.
For some unexplained reason, they went above ground between
us and Bezuard, then underground on our side of the road to le P-P.

What happens if something breaks that optical fibre....
they just replace it. The engineer described it as "assez court"!
 

 

Meilleurs vœux, bonne année et bonne santé... Surtout une bonne santé pour 2023

Happy and Healthy New Year for 2023

Fairy Lights (ICM)

ICM is when you deliberately move the camera... often night time lights.
This is two different ICM photos of our 2021 Christmas lights, combined then mirrored.

'Bout time I changed what I look at in the mornings!!

 I haven't posted for yonks.... mainly because there's been nothing like the hare incedent happening here at all.... and I had very nasty legs for a while and that and Covid kept me from doing things that I could blog about.... so what have I been doing.

With the help of Alex and Nicole, I have managed to get on top of the potager.... just in time to start gardening properly and get hit by this years drought!! Gah!!!!

I have been putting data up to iNaturalist because it is important for data to be collected and publicised during this period of rapid climate change and it is a worldwide site.... and very easy to add your observations to as all you have to do is post the photo and it lifts date and time from your photo's metadata.... and your position if you are using a 'phone or have your camera's GPS turned on.

I have also been posting photos to a site called Photocrowd.... you put photos in for adjudication under different themes and the "crowd" rate your photographs.
I am currently in the top 3.5% out of 17,000 photographers.... which is quite a boost to the old morale.
And because of that, I thought I would post some of those pictures on an irregular basis, but more frequent of late.....

Now, how do I add photos on this.....

Grasswaves

He'd smoked all his life

A Fly on the Curve

Clouds? What clouds??
{A pre-Covid fine day with contrails}

Point of Impact