Target Achieved - Ex-Fotopic Roving Reports Reinstated!

When Fotopic suddenly disappeared on 9 March along with everybody's photo galleries, I thought it might take 6 months to rebuild all of my photo reports posted there. It wasn't the photos as I had the originals safe anyway, it was the texts and captions that were the problem.
 Anyhow, with the Shepton Mallet 2011 report that appears immediately below this posting, I am happy to announce that I have completed the rebuilding and reposting of all the reports previously on Fotopic all the way back to January 2008 and any or all of these can now be accessed through the links that appear in the postings below. It only took just over a month to do it, and using Picasaweb to hold the albums and this Blog as the access point, it has been a much more straightforward exercise than I imagined it would be.

Time to find a bacon butty and have a break I think!

That's better. I hope you enjoy the reports and the effort of the past month or so proves to have been worth it!

When I started rebuilding my reports, I made the decision to restart the albums/galleries from January 2008. I apologise if anyone was expecting to see the original 2007 galleries that I started with, but I'm afraid the captions and intro texts etc for all of these were lost as in the early days I used to type them in directly online without thinking of how much better and safer it would have been to compile them as Word documents and therefore have them saved for future use. All of the photos that were in these earlier reports and very much more are featured in my Roving Reporter Photo CDs with photo coverage going all the way back to 1997 anyway (further details about these and how to obtain them can be found in the 009 Society Website

The photo of me doing a culinary assessment on a bacon roll by the way was taken at the fondly remembered and much missed Chilterns Narrow Gauge which used to be held annually in June at Luton. A super show in a good central location, but very sadly not supported sufficiently well for the hard working organising team to be able to continue to run it. There's a clear message there - if you are able to get to one of the specialist events that I take nearly all of my photos at, please do make the effort to get there. The success of these events depends entirely upon the hardwork of usually a small team of enthusiasts, and the support of those who will come and enjoy the show.

FINALLY, just to explain the structure that I have standardised for all the reports:

There is a Title and Date; the introductory text usually unaltered from the original Fotopic gallery report; a copy of the album "cover photo" for the event and a LINK which is defaulted to take you to the opening slide of a slideshow that is configured to run automatically at 3 second intervals through the complete set of photos for that report. This appears to have confused a few people so a short explanation:

1. You can adjust the time delay between slides simply by clicking on the + or - symbols next to the time shown.

2. You can stop the automatic slideshow and go "manual" and then revert back to automatic as desired simply by clicking on the central II or > symbol between the blue arrows

3. If you prefer to see the album contents list in thumbnails and then select individual photos to view, then click on the large X symbol at the right of the slide controls. This will then stop the slideshow and take you to the album thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail to open up that photo and then you can either go back to the album contents or use the arrows to scroll forwards or backwards.

4. You can revert back to the slideshow at any time by clicking on the "view slideshow" link top left of the album contents pane.

WARNING. If you keep to the default slideshow, either auto or manual, you can immediately get back to the Blogsite by clicking on the "back" arrow top left (in Internet Explorer). However if you decide to view the albums through the album contents thumbnails, you will have to sequentially click the back arrow as many times as you have viewed photos in order to return to the blogsite and subsequently go to the next report to view. Additionally, the album presentation only allows for a truncated (150 words) introduction text to the album, which is why it is recommended that all access and/or saving into "Favourites" for future access is done via the Blogsite URL and NOT through my Picasaweb account URL