With the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival 2017 coming up in April, I set myself the task of capturing some elusive key part of that spirit. But what was the spirit of Speyside? Was it the surly, contrary Scots character of myth? The patient, slow burning wisdom that Speysiders showed in their judgement? The frankly…
Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival 2017 – From Strength to Strength
The week beginning April 25th had started with snow and finished with some sparkling Spring sunshine on the Spey. Both Craigellachie and Dufftown were buzzing and the already limited parking options shrank with cheerful abandon by the day. It was the best of times, and it was the best of times. David Mckenzie of Speyside…
Sunsets Over Moray
First time I’ve really put any effort into capturing some of the magnificent sunsets we have over Moray and Speyside. Not ventured too far afield as these things pretty hard to predict, so it was really just a case of looking for near-clear skies around 3.00pm and then legging it as fast as I could…
Alan’s Autumn Almanac 2016
Have a bit of a spring in my step this autumn, owing to me buying my first Canon dSLR camera. It’s an entry level rig that should come in handy for my daughter’s Scottish Higher in Photography and day to day business in web design. These were taken during the last week of October in…
Percy Toplis Bothy, Tomintoul – The Enchanting Secret Behind the Monocled Mutineer
More info: http://www.monocledmutineer.co.uk/ On Sunday June 5th 2016, I paid a visit to the Tomintoul bothy where ‘Monocled Mutineer’, Percy Toplis spent his last few days alive. It was almost 96 years to the day that he died in a volley of bullets on a single track road near Carlisle. The bothy lies on the…
5 Common Web Mistakes Made by Moray Business Owners
01. I didn’t have thousands of pounds to spend, so I did it all myself. First off, a basic 5-page website could cost you as little as £350. Depending on the size of your product catalogue a reasonable web designer could even add a Paypal shopping cart to the site for £150 or so. Whilst…
Death of Umberto Eco: Never Leaving, Always Arriving
He provided signposts in a world of infinite junctions, a road map in a world of infinite signs. Discovering Umberto Eco at University was a bit like discovering sex. During the long bleak months of winter 1990 I’d read his novel, The Name of The Rose back to back with Travels in Hyperreality — a witty…
Mobile Friendly Web Design For Moray: Latest Google Annoucement
Latest announcement from Google confirms that mobile-friendly websites will be given preferential treatment in Google web results from April 2015. Be responsible – get ‘responsive’. Well, we have been speculating about this for a while now, but it seems that ‘mobile-friendliness’ is going to be an increasingly major factor in how websites are going to…
Protected: William Watson Funeral Directors September 2019
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
American Relief Administration Scandal – Captain James V. Martin, Herbert Hoover & Russia
The Original Russian Job: The forgotten story of how a ‘secret compact’ between Churchill and America very nearly saved Russia from Lenin and the Soviet Union. This is the story of James V. Martin, an aviation pioneer who blew the whistle on American plans to smash the Bolsheviks at the height of post-war trade negotiations…
Victor Grayson MP Timeline Biography
Timeline September 1881: Victor Grayson is born in Liverpool. Just a few months previously the Grayson family had been living on Sidney Street in the Poplar district of London. In the late 1800s and early 1900s the area was home to the largest Russian émigré community in the UK. Lenin and Stalin would later hold…
Textploitation: Getting the Most Out of Content Marketing and Social Media
Slate columnist, Farhad Manjoo asked Josh Schwartz, a data scientist at the traffic analysis company Chartbeat, to explore the scrolling habits of its readers; just how far down the page would users scroll before hitting the exit button? For Manjoo, the data that Chartbeat pulled out wasn’t reassuring; the vast majority of readers scrolled no…
Not all design is art and not all art is achieved by design
My daughter has discovered Pixlr, a cloud-based photo-editing tool and photo-sharing device designed for non-professional users. I suppose this is another example of the democratizing nature of the web. It levels the playing field for storytellers everywhere. It used to be the case that ‘art’ was a studied discipline that attempted to capture the spontaneity…
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas – Walkers Shorts & Whisky Shots
A hamper of goods from Walkers Shortbread and a 12 year old Aberlour arrived with the first snows of Christmas.
Textploitation Part III: The Digital Exchange Mechanism
I started this series of articles by looking at how Slate columnist, Farhad Manjoo tackled an increasingly thorny issue: users of websites were scrolling no further than halfway down the page and often ‘re-tweeting’ posts with barely a glance at their content. On the face of things, Manjoo just wasn’t willing to tolerate the user…
Super Moon 2016 Moray & Speyside
In terms of brightness, that additional 15% made the 2016 Super Moon 15% more difficult to capture. Didn’t do it justice but had fun trying. Here’s several shots taken as it rose above Ben Aigan near Aberlour and above Elgin just before dawn. There’s also a sneaky one of the sunset the previous evening.
Rogie Falls near Contin, Highlands of Scotland
With school and work looming it felt wise to try and clear body and mind of all that grueling festive cheer. Temperatures across the Highlands were due to drop from a tropical 8 degrees to a more invigorating three degrees, and with light still being far from generous in these bleak mid-winter months, every effort…
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