Those areas are great for spotting game up close and my favourite of those was Lake Manyara, noted for its invisible tree climbing lions. The places I really enjoyed though were the empty (of people)gameparks of Southern Tanzania and Zambia, more difficult to spot the wildlife and we had to rough it but the vastness is incredible and shooing hyenas and hippos from your campbed is fun. The remoter areas of Botswana and Namibia were also fantastic.

These are my favourite things to photograph. A selection of my favourite recent subjects, a couple of which are mine. C&C welcome:

When I first started the first batch took a good month. But they caught up with quite a backlog and now the processing seems to be done in the second week after submission.

I thought of two more Dutch films. Amsterdamned - which is worth seeing for excellent canal chase action scenes. And Flodder (plus sequels), which is not worth seeing. Unless you are Dutch, as I seem to remember it making shedloads of money as a local pick-up in Holland for the distribution company I worked for.

But I'm definitely all out of Dutch films now.

Swedish cinema is synonymous with Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential directors of all time. He was a master of gloom and dared his films to be entirely devoid of action with his cinematographic vision conjuring emotion. His films are not as widely known as they deserve, they are critic pleasers rather than crowd pleasers - for the arthouse. However, his influence is widespread. Films like American Beauty, for example, owe a lot to him. As does Woody Allen. And he is responsible for one of the most iconic scenes in cinema - that chess scene. Even Monty Python's Holy Grail acknowledges him.

As for other Swedish cinema: My Life As A Dog, very Bergmanesque. But I don't know much else.

Try The Vanishing (Spoorloos), which is excellent. I remember being told about an early Paul Verhoeven film called Turkish something or over which was the most popular film in Holland. He has done other Dutch language films, Black Books springs to mind. Son't like him much myself. Can't think of anything else.

1. The Big Lebowski (Must have seen it a hundred times).
2-10 in no particular order:

Alien
Seven Samurai
Some Like It Hot
Godfathers (well, 1 and 2)
Citizen Kane
Apocalypse Now
Badlands
Taxi Driver
City Of God

Bad luck. That must have been some web to destroy a lens hood.

I have FastStone, a freebie (donationware) which displays DNGs. It's very fast to scroll through and zoom full screen images, or slideshow them.

Vassivière is a very large, nearby lake. The island in its middle houses an excellent contemporary arts centre and sculpture park. Here are some examples, which are posted not for photographic merit but to give a flavour of the place to anyone who might find it interesting:

Poor photo but just to give a bit of scenic context to the place:




Contemporary Lighthouse by Aldo Rossi:




And inside 1:




2:




From the top:




Can't remember the details on this thing:




Andy Goldsworthy, Untitled.




And there's a lot more. The Goldsworthy, in particular, I think is fantastic. The water was too choppy to make out properly but the beautifully built drystone wall spirals around just under the waterline. It's a very tricky one to photograph as it's on the northern shore and requires some clambering too. I'll go back early on a still day to try to do it a bit more justice, along with the other stuff.