It’s a fabulous start to the month of May, wall-to-wall sunshine for at lease the last week, though temperatures seem to be more ‘normal’ for the time of year. Gill and I had a fabulous time in South Wales last weekend and it was a joy to meet her lovely parents and family. We did plenty of cycling and visited a number of interesting places. I must admit that I have never been to this part of the UK before and found it all to be rather pleasant. We cycled up to the curious folly that it Castle Coch, not a real castle, but instead a palatial home built by the eccentric lord Bute and constructed in the Bavarian style that has come to be the model for all Walt Disney castles. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to go up to the much more impressive ‘real’ castle at Caerphilly; but maybe next time. On the ride up to Castle Coch we stopped off at a curious little cafe, more a shed beside a mini vineyard which dished out gorgeous stone baked Welsh Cakes with filter coffee. Maybe it was the French girl that served us or the vineyard setting, but for a moment it felt as though we were actually in Southern France rather than Wales. Still, it gave a sense of that certain quirkiness and invention that is a distinctive part of this little country which is such a popular destination for all of Britain’s alternative life style seekers.
I didn’t manage to get quite as many pictures as hoped, or at least pictures that could be configured into a nice sequence on flickr or this site and (foolishly) I omitted to take the D80 to save space. So all photos from Wales are courtesy of the Sony. Fortunately, I now seem to have gotten to grips with all of the D80’s peculiarities including the infamous firmware glitch in the matrix metering and the need to set up a permanent -3ev to compensate. The camera is producing fine results in spot and the rather old fashioned (and disfavoured) centre weighted modes and I definitely prefer to use the assignable ‘single area’ auto focus mode, when actually using auto that is. Results with the other two dynamic modes where proving to be a little frustrating at times as the camera has a tendency to make random assumptions about the point of focus within the frame.