I’ve spent most of the week in Cornwall with my classmates, which is why I haven’t replied to my emails or updated my blog. I really enjoyed the field trip and will have some pictures and stories.

We stopped at Bath (my second visit now) and had lunch in front of the Royal Crescent.

Here are two photos I took from my early morning walks along a beach in Newquay, where we stayed.

These are some of the biomes at the Eden Project. They are giant glasshouses, which lead visitors through a tour of human dependence on plants.

Both these photos come from the Humid Tropics Biome. It really did feel like we were in Malaysia or Brazil.

This statue was one of many in the Warm Temperate Biome.

The Cotswolds is an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) in the south of England. It’s full of typically English picturesque villages. How picturesque? See for yourself. I took these photos last weekend, when Damjan, Maja, Kreso and I rented a car to go dancing and exploring.

Burford is a beautiful English village, which has been taken over by tourist-loaded cars.

If you can’t get to London to see the real thing, Burford School comes to the rescue! It’s kind of like Microsoft Office: Student Edition.

Burford has a few strange things. There are green crosses like these on many of the walls…

And giant green ‘salt’ boxes on the sidewalks.

A pot plant.

The people living in this house must not have been into pot plants.

Like the good souls that we are, we immediately walked towards the church.

There are a lot of churches in England. They’re often the most beautiful buildings.

I like taking photos in graveyards here in England. There’s lots of moss.

We trespassed on private property. This, in England, is called ‘rambling’. It’s a national past-time.

Rambling is muddy business. Damjan and Kreso found a large stick to scrape off the clods of mud. Can you tell Damjan likes to dance?

I used to be happy when I took a photo that looked like what I saw in real life. There is skill in knowing how to use a camera so that the lighting, perspectives and colours are ‘right’. I’m getting better at doing this but I still need to take two, three, four or more photos of the one scene before I am satisfied.

Increasingly, I am interested in creating photos that reflect not the reality I see but an image I have in my mind. It seems to me that photography stops being a memory capture process and becomes ‘art’ when you start heavily post-processing.

I kept about 120 photos from my Yorkshire holiday. Of those 120, there are surprisingly few that I am happy with. Yorkshire at this time of year can be a dreary, grey sort of place. Late last night, I experimented a little on the computer. This is what I came up with.

I just couldn’t take a photo of this scene (Whitby Abbey) with a wide enough contrast. Either the ruins and gravestones were too dark or the sky was bleached out. Using the computer, I was able to boost the fill light and contrast, as well as crop out the empty space. One day, I will get a wider angle lens so that I can make real panoramas.

It was a beautiful sight as we rounded the corner, jumped a gate and realised how wide the River Tees was. My photos of the scene were dull and ordinary, probably because it was a dull and ordinary day. Once again, I didn’t have a wide enough lens to convey the vastness.

On the computer, there was nothing I could do to make this a panorama shot but at least the colour filter allowed me to create an interesting picture. It looks a little like an old-fashioned painting. If I could recompose the photo with my camera, I would have included a bit more grass at the bottom. Unfortunately, this composition suffers a little from the feeling that the observer is about to topple off the cliff.

This photo modification made me the happiest of Joans! The doctored photo was what I had in mind when I took the original (near Steel Rigg, Hadrian’s Wall). Imagine my disappointment at how washed out the colours were! In fact, the original is a pretty good reflection of reality. Reality, in this case, was just not good enough.

Finally, just to prove that I am not completely dependent on post-processing, this photo of York Minster Chapter House is all camera work. Of course, I had to take about eight photos to get this one.

I thought of all places in the world, there would be the greatest chance for name products in England to include ‘Joan’ in their range. Joan is a good English name. It used to be popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

I looked amongst the pea pots in a tourist shop at the seaside town of Whitby. As always, there was no Joan.

My first three days in England were spent at the Peak District. It’s a beautiful pastoral area about three hours north of Cambridge. Being used to the wild beauty of places like Australia and New Zealand, the tame English countryside presented a new kind of prettiness.

These sheep were in front of our hostel.

On our ‘day off’, a large group of us decided to climb Back Tor, a very large hill near Edale.

The 2.5 hour walk ballooned into a 4.5 hour hike when our navigator got lost SIX TIMES. He once said, “I’m 99% sure we’re going the right way!”

I don’t normally post photos with recognisable people in them but I couldn’t resist this time. I hope you don’t know him but if you did, you would understand that this photo captures a lot of this person’s personality.

As a group, these scholars represent some of the best and brightest in the world. The following photos show that intelligence didn’t stop us jumping an electric fence or two.

After jumping electric fences, we trespassed on very pretty private property. When people are lost, they tend to be willing to cut across anything to get to a recognisable landmark.