Notice of closure

Monday, July 22nd 2019

Update, August 26th 2019

Since closing this blog, I have decided to start a new one. You will find it at this URL: https://silvercat.home.blog.

I will run this new blog almost entirely from my iPhone, using photos taken with the iPhone, and some supplied by Tigger (my mentor in iPhone photography 🙂 ). By blogging “on the hoof”, I hope to be able to keep up to date and avoid creating a backlog. The first post on the new blog, Introduction, explains all this in more detail.

A number of people have left comments or sent me emails thanking me for my posts here over the years. I am very grateful for these kind messages and hope that I can thank you all in a small way by publishing the new blog.

End of Update

---

Following on from my previous post, I am writing, with a certain degree of sadness, to say that I have decided that the time has come to discontinue this blog. The labour of catching up with the backlog while reporting on new outings has come to exceed the time and energy at my disposal and to be a source of anxiety.

When I started the blog in Septmber 2006, it was an experiment to see what this activity called ‘blogging’ was all about. I could not have guessed then that I would still be maitaining it in 2019. It became a hobby and something more than that.

I am grateful to those who have left comments over the years expressing their writers’ appreciation of my photos and accounts of the places visited. These comments were read with pleasure and gave me encouragement to continue.

I maintained the blog for the pleasure that it gave me but recently it has more and more become a chore rather than a pleasure and that, it seems to me, indicates that it is time to withdraw gracefully.

So many of the blogs I have followed in the past simply fell silent or disappeared, leaving their readers puzzled as to their fate and that of their authors. I have preferred to avoid ‘dead blog syndrome’ by explicitly announcing closure. I will leave the blog visible for a while and will probably shut it down after an interval to be decided.

In the meantime, anyone who wishes to contact me may do so by leaving a comment or using the contact form or email address reached by the link Contact me here in the sidebar.

Copyright © 2019 SilverTiger, https://tigergrowl.wordpress.com, All rights reserved.

Trying to catch up

Thursday, June 6th 2019

You may have noticed that I am having difficulties in keeping this blog up to date. This is because we have done a lot of travelling lately, which has caused me to fall behind, and in addition I have had to spend a period in hospital with a severe infection. This has left me with a painful swollen leg and less than my usual amount of energy.

As I publish my posts under the date on which the described events occurred, it may not be obvious that I am still producing. But I am, if rather slowly.

I hope to catch up eventually when I shall delete this post as, all being well, it will no longer be relevant.

Dan Kitchener at work in Spitalfieklds (April 28th 2019)

Copyright © 2019 SilverTiger, https://tigergrowl.wordpress.com, All rights reserved.

East Dock, St Katharine Docks

Tuesday, April 23rd 2019

This evening on my way to meet Tigger from work, I passed through St Katharine Docks and, as I usually do, paused at the end of the East Dock (see map below) to take in the view. The brown ‘pin’ on the map shows where I stood. (For a live Google map, click here.)

St Katharine Docks

There are often water fowl to be seen here, including ducks and coots and occasionally even cormorants diving for fish. Today, perhaps because I was later than usual (Tigger was working a late shift), there were no birds to be seen. I did, however, take a photo.

East Dock (looking west)

On a sunny day, if you take a photo from this position you have the sun shining directly into the lens but today the sky was cloudy so I had the opportunity to take a sun-free photo. (Click to see a larger version.) The scene is a bit dull because of the clouds but you can’t have everything!

The picture was taken with my iPhone 6 and is in fact a composite of three photos, which explains the small amount of distortion. (The boat in the foreground looks curved though it is of course straight in reality.)

The map was made using the mapping function in ACDSee Pro 9, an applicatiion that I use for cataloguing my photos. As you no doubt know, when you take photos with an iPhone, their geo-coordinates (latitude and longitude) are added to their EXIF data. In ACDSee Pro 9, if you click on a photo’s pin-symbol, the application displays a map showing the locations of the photos in that folder. (To map the position of a single photo, just put it in a folder by itself.) You can take a screen-shot of the map and then manipulate this as you wish.

Copyright © 2019 SilverTiger, https://tigergrowl.wordpress.com, All rights reserved.