Since Sainsbury's opened we have lost a pet shop, greengrocer, a cheap booze place, and now the bakery. We no longer have a bank but still have a butcher, ironmonger and pharmacist, photographer (yes on the main street), post office at the back of OneStop, a couple of charity shops, a posh frock shop, a motorcycle garage, filling station, two cafes, two pubs, a chippy, and a Chinese takeaway. Not bad for a large village. The Indian restaurant across the road spoiling my view burned out around bonfire night 2018, a stray firework in the kitchen allegedly, nothing to do with me honest! A short-lived bike shop has just closed as well. It seems those places with a personal service and choice of stuff not found at the supermarket nor on the internet still hang on but once closed the shops hardly ever attract new tenants.

I just collected my Christmas cake from the village bakery and was devastated to learn it will be the last - it is closing after over 100 years. A great source of preservative-free really delicious bread and cakes baked on the premises we will only now have the choice of mass produced stuff from the local shops and Sainsbury's, so I guess I will be revisiting my bread-making book after all. Gloom and doom.

I only keep JPEGs in a folder on my iMac, which get uploaded to the cloud, but the originals are loaded directly onto an SSD and backed up monthly to a hard drive. I do this because I don’t want my cloud cluttered up with RAW files which get deleted during the selection process, as I assume that if I delete photos from the computer folder they will be retained in the cloud.

Concerning hard drive storage I had one fail about a year ago with all my back-up and archive stuff for work, it was an electronic glitch rather than a physical fail. Luckily the iMac has a recovery programme which managed to download all the “lost” files into a new folder, it took all day but I was mightily relieved. Having made two copies of the recovery folder with one on a new HDD I reformatted the old one and reloaded everything and it is now disconnected and kept in a cupboard just in case.

Thanks John, I have just read that lithium-ion batteries have a limited life of 3-5 years even if they are not being used; that means it is possible to buy a “new” battery that has been on a retailer’s shelf for some time so will give a reduced period of use. That is something to think about when looking for a source, a bargain may not be as good as it seems. And having just discharged one battery to zero and plugged it into the charger I have just learned that is the worst thing to do!

I have three Pentax batteries for the K1 which get rotated in the camera, and always re-charge as soon as they get depleted. Recently I get the impression they don’t keep a charge anywhere near as long as they used to, is this something others experience? Any recommendations for reviving them? Given their cost I don’t want to replace the batteries unless there is no alternative.

With all this talk of breadmaking I’ll dig out the bread recipe book I was given last Christmas, there is no excuse we even have a watermill down the road which mills flour from local wheat (their largest customers are Indian restaurants for japaties apparently). However we also have a 100 year old bakery a couple of hundred yards away which can do the job much better! We are currently consuming their mince pies as fast as they are baked.

Reminds me of the Eric Morecombe line: the letters are all correct, just in the wrong order!

Hi Gwyn I take your point I just couldn't be bothered to start a new post, but I am suitably chastised! Anyhow I have just posted a snap in the Gallery but promise from now on to stick strictly off topic

You could try stock photography sites, the main ones like Shutterstock and Adobe Stock get global coverage but maybe there are specialist ones for botany, and they pay a modest fee each time someone downloads. Shutterstock shows where your photos have been downloaded which gives me more pleasure than the occasional payment, photos of my garden plants for instance have been used all over Europe and Russia and occasionally other continents.

I have been getting bogged down with shooting interiors blending flash and natural light exposures in Photoshop which I haven’t really used before, it’s a steep learning curve and I am not getting on very well! I am up against a deadline as the house will be handed over on Tuesday so I tried a straightforward HDR in camera, no flash, and you know the results aren’t bad. Anyhow I needed a break so this morning I went up the Welcombe Hills near me (a grand title for a pimple on the landscape) for some misty shots and whilst the results aren’t going to win any prizes it was great to get out in some sunshine and away from the computer.