Website health checking

Yesterday and the morning I was checking awstats, google webmaster tools, and bing webmaster tools for my websites, to see if there were any issues that needing addressing (there was). Unfortunately I still haven't finished this yet.

In the afternoon today I went into town to test my Olympus LS-5, then went on a walk through Farndon fields on my way back home. Farndon fields looked like there were quite a few places that might be good to take a pano and document the development there, so I went back out at 3pm hoping for a warmer light near sunset.

Unfortunately, the sun was behind some clouds, and the clouds didn't really get lit up nicely. They just filtered and diffused the light so there was no shadows. Good for portrait photography, but not what I wanted. I had checked the weather.co.uk website, which said sunset was at 4.15pm, and I knew that the other day the sunset reached peak about 4.25pm. So I walked really slowly around a field, and kept stopping, to at least wait until 4.25pm in the hope the sunset might improve.

About 4.20pm I arrived back at some puddles I thought would look nice with a reflection of a good sunset in them, but the sunset still wasn't great. There was a nice purple cloud in a Z shape near the horizon, but you would really have needed a longer lens e.g. 50mm+ probably to enlarge it enough to make a meaningful photo. And I only had my fisheye lens.

To the east though, there were thinnish clouds on the horizon that were purple, again they didn't go up very high from the horizon though. I thought that I might as well take a pano by some trees there anyway. Then when I had finished that, the sunset got a lot better, with the sky around the horizon becoming more of a purple colour. So I took a pano by the puddle, though my boots made lots of marks in the mud there.

Then the clouds by the horizon became a much deeper purple. Again, it would have been best with a longer lens, and probably also in landscape orientation. I'll have to remember to bring my 50mm lens and a ball head next time, though of course today it would have meant having to carry more weight around for an hour while I was just waiting for the sunset to get nice.

In the evening I made some Eccles cakes, then finished watching the film 'Shane' with Mauser, Bo, and Clare.