I’ve just updated the menu system on the main part of my website using Project VII’s Pop Menu Magic 2. This allows for sub-menus to open upwards from my bottom menu. They make a great range of products. I just wish that they made them in a form other than Dreamweaver Extensions.

Stefan Lindblad – like me a long time CorelDRAW user and beta tester – has just published a series of interviews with CorelDRAW users… and I’ve been included!

You can read the full interview on his blog.

Also included are interviews with Fu Tiepeng, Jan Felber, Pratik Shah, David Millisock, Anand Dixit, Hugh Johnson and Foster D Coburn III.

The summer of 1973 had not been good. I’d split up with my girlfriend and had to move back home for a couple of months before I started on the photography course at the London College of Printing. I hadn’t been out of the house for weeks, but I’d heard that there was going to be a Festival of African and Caribbean Music in Kennington Park so I thought I’d go. It was fantastic and was the first time I’d smiled in a long time. I recently rediscovered the negatives of some of the photographs I took there and after a mammoth scanning session I thought I’d share. Let me know if you like them.

Click on the photos to see them larger.

Byron McGregor has just updated Floatbox to v5.0. Floatbox is probably the best of the Lightbox clones. Luckily I spotted a small problem with some of the graphic GIF files that come with the download. Byron had run these through Google’s Page Speed optimizer but some of them had been corrupted by this process. All’s been put right now, so if you’re looking for a Lightbox clone that does a whole lot more (see the demos on his website) start downloading. Floatbox isn’t free, but at just $20 per site license it’s a bargain – especially as the technical support (if you should need it – the documentation is extensive) is as good as it gets.

It’s a while since I’ve blogged, but I’ve been doing quite a few new panoramas recently and also tidying up some of the old ones. New ones include small tours of Bedruthan Steps in Cornwall, the newly restored bandstand on Clapham Common and The Rookery (the site of the old Streatham Spa) at the top of Streatham Common.

In the last couple of days I’ve been uploading some of my panoramas to 360 Cities, the world’s largest 360° panoramic photography community. You can see my panoramas here.

I’m a Photographer, Not a Terrorist! (PHNAT), the campaign group set up to fight unnecessary and draconian restrictions against individuals taking photographs in public spaces, organised a flashmob outside London’s City Hall today. Not a lot of people turned up (maybe between 70 and 100) but a letter was handed in to Boris Johnson.

What many people don’t know is that the land along the embankment between Tower Bridge and HMS Belfast is privately managed, and the company that runs it has draconian restrictions on what can and can’t take place there. This is also true of many other places in London – Canary Wharf and Broadgate have similar restrictions. Try taking photographs with a professional looking SLR and see how long it is before you get stopped by one of their security guards. You score extra points if they start talking about ‘the terrorist threat’.

There are a few more photos of the event at Flickr.

I’ve just added some panoramas of bluebells to my website that I took yesterday in Banstead Woods in Surrey. It was a beautiful afternoon and there were carpets of bluebells everywhere.

You can also see more bluebell photos at Flickr.

We’ve just held the 13th annual Streatham Kite Day. This was probably the best one ever. We had wonderful weather, the wind was good (enough) and we had very large crowds – maybe as many as 5,000 people over the course of the day. Sky Symphony put on three great shows, Carl Robertshaw flew some amazing solo routines, the trick flyers were great to watch and Andrew Beattie flew a large Manta, Tiger, Teddy…and Bob Colover flew for the first time in the arena. On the Saturday before the kite festival I helped out at a kite making workshop at the local school where children as young as five made kites from the plans on this website (the one in the photo was made by a six year old girl).

ReedDesign has just produced the smallest website that it’s ever made. It’s for the executive mentoring company EBM. The website is based on the Luna template by Project VII which uses the menu to produce a scrolling effect between sections of the page. So essentially it’s a single page website, but with a fixed header and footer, judicious use of CSS3 and the scrolling effect I think its quite a stylish little site.