About 100 yards north of Oxford Street in London lies one of the best examples of Victorian Gothic architecture you’ll ever see. It would be easy to miss this church, even though it has one of the highest spires of any church in London. If you don’t look up and see the spire when you stand outside, you could walk straight past. All Saints church is set back from Margaret Street in a small courtyard. Once inside, a world of beauty opens before you.

Read more…

I’ve had two new websites ‘go live’ this week. One for Weaverbird, “an international independent executive search consultancy with an exclusive focus on finding talented digital and technology leaders”. And the other for Lisa Carter, a chartered clinical psychologist. Neither site is my design – I’ve worked with two different design agencies on these projects.

The Weaverbird site uses HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery, while the Lisa Carter site is based on WordPress and uses a child theme based on picochic. The theme is responsive, but it took quite a lot of tweaking to get all the responsive levels looking good with the new design.

ITV’s ‘Daybreak’ featured some of my photos of the church of St Magnus the Martyr this morning. They had a short item on the local London news section mentioning the 60th birthday of the National Churches Trust. They’ve created a new website – The UK’s Favourite Churches – to mark the occasion.  Boris Johnson has named St Magnus as his favourite church in London.

No payment of course, but at least I got an on-screen credit.

Well it’s happened again. Just three months out of warranty and the print head on my Deskjet 3070a has died (no it’s not repairable or replaceable) and with a batch of spare ink cartridges I’m stuck with buying yet another HP printer. At least the people who I spoke to at HP technical support were as polite and helpful as they could be under the circumstances. Eventually I got passed on to sales and they offered me a big discount on a new Photosmart 5520 with free delivery which arrived less than 12 hours after I placed the order. This has a two year warranty, so expect another post on this topic in about 25 months time!

Yesterday I photographed two more churches (Lezant and Lawhitton) in my ongoing project to record all of the churches in Cornwall. Inside Lezant was an amazing slate tomb and monument to the Trefusis family.

Read more…

Not much work yesterday, so I went for a drive to see the church of St Peter and St Paul at Chaldon in Surrey. It’s famous for its 12th century wall painting showing the Ladder of Souls and the Seven Deadly Sins.

The lower half of the mural depicts the torments and punishments of the wicked while the upper half shows the judgement and salvation of souls. In the centre is a ladder which people either climb to heaven or fall from to hell. The face of Christ appears in a cloud at the top. To the bottom right is the tree of knowledge with the serpent and sinners in the torments of hell. At the bottom left sinners are boiled in a cauldron. The top right panel shows the ‘Harrowing of Hell’ where Christ drives his staff into the devil’s mouth. The top left shows the weighing of souls. Read more…

A long time ago I animated all of the International Sport Kite compulsory figures using Flash. These animations became the de facto standard for competition kite flying – in fact some of the judges wanted them to be the official standard instead of the static diagrams. When Jobs and Apple decided to drop support for Flash on the iPhone and iPad it meant that people using those platforms couldn’t view the animations when they were in the field. Read more…

I’ve just finished a new website for Italian Properties who have six holiday villas situated north of Lucca near Coreglia Antelminelli which lies in the beautiful Garfagnana region of Tuscany. I first made a website for them nearly 13 years ago to a design done by an illustrator friend. It was his first website and the fact that it has lasted all that time without looking too out-of-date is a testament to how good it was for the time.

The new site makes extensive use of FloatBox – the best of all the Lightbox clones.

I just heard on the news that Kevin Ayers has died. Kevin was one of the founders of the band Soft Machine in the 1960s. They were the first band I ever saw live (at the Country Club in Belsize Park in 1969). He left Soft Machine later that year and began his meandering solo career writing beautiful songs that not many people ever heard. John Peel said that Ayers along with Syd Barrett were “the two most important people in British pop music. Everything that came after came from them.” I couldn’t disagree.

I actually met him once – he was very nice to me.

While I’ve been working down in Cornwall I’ve been lucky enough to see some beautiful birds just by looking out of my window. There were two that I couldn’t recognise and I had to ask on a birder’s forum. It turned out they were a black-tailed and bar-tailed godwit. The photo’s not the best – I wasn’t quite close enough and I was having to shoot at 800ASA – but I’m still quite pleased to have photographed two birds at the same time that have RSPB red and amber status. I was a bit more pleased with the quality of the photos I took of a curlew and a lapwing, also amber and red status birds.

All of the photos were taken on my pocket Fuji F600.