Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Cami-flage 2: Here’s the Walk(er) plan

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My previous post outlined the background and general approach to the next couple of weeks, so I thought I’d provide a bit of plan detail for the record before we start trying for a succession of walks that take the place of the Cami de Cavalls on Menorca.

A disclaimer: this is a plan, OK? If the weather takes a turn for the worse, or some domestic admin gets in the way, we are going to be flexible. But the idea is to walk around 115 miles starting this Friday, September 11th.

The vast majority of these walks come from a great website called Fancy-Free Walks. So, if you fancy free walks, we can recommend this as a great place to look for them.

Our 13 planned walks are as follows:

Day number Description Length Cami Length Hostelry
01 Puttenham and Waverley 12.45 12.66 The Barley Mow
02 Friday Street, Leith & Holmbury Hills 9.34 8.47 The Royal Oak
03 Staple Hill & Chobham Common 5.85 5.94 The Red Lion
04 Holmbury & Pitch Hills 6.88 6.77 None available 🙁
05 Virginia Water Lake 5.58 5.36 Cafe in the Park
06 Windsor Great Park 9.42 9.11 Bluebells
07 Box Hill 11.13 11.74 The King William IV
08 Fishpool, McLaren, Horsell Common 9.12 8.11 Heather Farm Cafe
09 St. Martha’s, Tillingbourne 10.14 9.32 The Percy Arms
10 Ockham, Wisley 7.12 7.18 Ockham Bites
11 Leith Hill 10.41 10.79 The Plough
12 Haslemere, Hindhead 10.14 8.53 Devil’s Punchbowl Pub
13 Denbies Hillside 9.12 10.99 Denbies Wine Estate
TOTAL 116.7 115 2,678m

Had we been in Menorca, we would have sought out somewhere decent for a rest and some lunch, and so I’ve noted some inviting-looking places for us to stop during our re-creation. While it would be nice to stop in for a full lunch at each hostelry, we’ve begun to think that the consequences on our waistlines would be too much. However, where possible we’ll look in for a beer and a packet of crisps or some such. As you can see, there are a couple of excursions where there’s no obvious hostelry, so either we’ll take a picnic or we’ll soldier on without much of a break and have a glass of something cold when we get home.

While it’s a shame that we’re not in The Foreign doing the lunatic things that one does when abroad (lunch every day, walk immense distances, that kind of thing) one has to admit that there are compensations for having to remain in the UK. We know the bed will be comfortable; we know the shower will be luxurious; we know that there will be The Right Sort Of Tea (and milk); we will have unfettered access to appropriate clothing for the day (including clean underwear); and we can say “sod it, we’re not going” if it rains. But our earnest hope is that we can do the walks above in the order above in succession. I will report on each walk (including, inter alia, the photo of the Xoriguer gin bottle) on subsequent blog posts, so keep your eyes peeled for each enthralling instalment!

Cami-flage: what we didn’t do on our 2020 holiday

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September 2020. For us, as for so many people, the novel coronavirus has ravaged our holiday plans. The various excursions my wife and I had planned for 2020 have been put back to 2021 (or possibly later – who knows?) and lockdown meant we had resigned ourselves to a year at home. We’re lucky – we don’t feel this is much of a burden.

But then the government eased lockdown to the point where travel to selected foreign countries was not only permitted but even encouraged as a way of getting the battered travel industry back on the road to recovery. With pleasant memories of Menorca from our recent Spanish sojourn, and Spain being on the “approved” list, we hatched a plan to return to walk the Cami de Cavalls, a 185km hike round the coast of the island over the course of several days. This, we reasoned, would give us a chance for some exercise while keeping us away from crowds and minimising any Covid-type risk.

This plan lasted about a week.

Gradually, virus infections started rising around the world, and first mainland Spain and then the whole country including its islands lost its approved status. We held out as long as we could, but the Foreign Office guidance still says avoid any but essential travel, so this excursion joined the others in the “pending” file.

However, nil desperandum, as an office colleague of mine used to say when events and idiocy conspired to shatter expertly-constructed plans; we decided to stage a UK-based version of the endeavour. The version of the Cami we had planned took 13 days (as you can see, there are levels for hardier, and even, some might say, mentally suspect, folk), so we decided we would do 13 walks around our neck of the woods in Surrey, recording and photographing them as we went, and including a photo of the distinctive bottle of the Menorcan gin, Xoriguer.

So, here’s the plan: to recreate the 13-stage walk

(Image courtesy of Cami-360)

The 13 stages are as follows:

Day number Description Length(km) Length(miles) Elevation gain(m)
01 MAÓ – FAVÀRITX 20.37 12.66 403
02 FAVÀRITX – ARENAL D’EN CASTELL 13.63 8.47 227
03 ARENAL D’EN CASTELL – SES SALINES 9.56 5.94 109
04 SES SALINES – BINIMEL·LÀ 10.90 6.77 160
05 BINIMEL·LÀ – ES ALOCS 8.63 5.36 323
06 ES ALOCS – CALA MORELL 14.66 9.11 278
07 CALA MORELL – CIUTADELLA 18.90 11.74 304
08 CIUTADELLA – CAP D’ARTRUTX 13.05 8.11 25
09 CAP D’ARTRUTX – CALA GALDANA 17.37 10.79 161
10 CALA GALDANA – SANT TOMÀS 11.56 7.18 239
11 SANT TOMÀS – CALA EN PORTER 15.00 9.32 198
12 CALA EN PORTER – BINIBÈQUER 13.73 8.53 141
13 BINIBÈQUER – MAÓ 17.69 10.99 112
TOTAL MAÓ – MAÓ 185km 115miles 2,678m

So the Menorca hike averages just over eight and three quarters miles each day and climbs around 640 feet, which makes the pomada at the end of each day very rewarding.

Some rules of engagement:

  1. We’ll measure our distances using Endomondo on a mobile phone. This tends to be optimistic in its distance evaluation (particularly compared with, say, ViewRanger), but, hey, I’m not complaining. Update: Endomondo has been discontinued in favour of a sister app, also from UnderArmour, called MapMyFitness.  Having imported my Endomondo data thither, posts will reflect the updated URLs.
  2. It won’t be possible to match distance and height, but we’ll do our best.
  3. We’ll plan to include a hostelry on each walk if we can. In desperation, I suppose we’ll have to take a picnic.
  4. We will do the walks in as close to a two-week window as we can, but if it’s raining, I’m sorry, all bets are off for that day. This is a holiday we’re supposed to be recreating, here.

I’m pleased to report that the endeavour was successful and very enjoyable. To see the details of the plan and the actual walks, take a look at the blog section devoted to this.

Photobook Service Review – Saal Digital

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Background – Why am I reviewing a Photobook offering?

Saal Digital is a manufacturer of photo products, based in Vienna, Austria.  It offers a wide variety of ways to get photos into print – Wall Decorations, Cards, Posters, Photos and, the topic of this post, Photobooks.  The company’s proposition to selected photographers was this – review their offering and publicise the review on social media in return for a discount voucher to be redeemed against its Professional Line Photobook offering.

Executive Summary

The TL;DR, if you’re in a hurry, is this – I recommend the service. I used their Windows-based photobook editing package, which is powerful, flexible and responsive, and took delivery of a high quality book of photographs printed on fine art paper in a linen-feel cover. The service I got from their support desk was responsive and helpful. I noticed that the images as printed were darker than they appeared on my PC, but on investigation, I feel this is a calibration issue with my display.

A couple of comments: firstly, with such great flexibility in the book editing package, one can get bogged down in the creation process.  The website provides several (excellently short) video tutorials to help the novice make sense of what can be a bewildering set of possibilities.  I thoroughly recommend that anyone using the service check these out to make the creation process go smoothly.

Secondly, I recommend the service, but if you want top quality, be prepared to plan ahead.  I completed the book on 30th April (56 pages of images) and was quoted a delivery time of 13th May.  The book actually arrived on 11th May and is of very fine quality.  The above issue with darkness aside, I’m very happy with the way the images have come out on the fine art paper, with some great colours and detail.

(By way of comparison, Photobox suggests a delivery time of 6-11 days, but their top quality offering, whilst very good, is not as fine as the Saal Digital Pro Line, but then It’s slightly cheaper.  Photobox are in the habit of offering deep discounts if you’re prepared to keep an eye out and wait; so you can do a perfectly good photo book with Photobox for less than Saal Digital’s price.  But Saal Digital has offerings of superior quality.)

If you look very very closely at the book I received, it’s possible to see that the images on the left-hand pages are very slightly misaligned, with the top left edge being a fraction nearer the top of the page than the top right edge.  You have to look carefully to notice it, and I suspect that my selected layout was unwise, with the images very near the top of each page, making it possible to spot this.  So my advice would be to steer a little clearer of the top of the page than I did.

Read on if you’re interested in more detail.

The detail

Having been accepted into this scheme, my original idea was to use a forthcoming holiday to Jordan as the subject matter for the book.  However, nature, in the form of the SARS-COV-2 virus, intervened and kyboshed that plan.  However, there are many ways a photographer can get benefit from lockdown, and one of these is to revisit photographs from previous projects. I have used Photobox, a UK-based service, for previous books and been satisfied with the results for a high-quality portfolio book.  So I decided to use the Saal Digital proposition as a reason to revisit my portfolio, re-edit some of those photos and also select and re-edit new ones for inclusion in a second portfolio book.  Like the first, it would be based around photos I had taken on my travels over the last ten years.

The Process

Select your book

The Saal Digital Windows-based photobook editor is a very comprehensive tool. The process is driven by selecting images, which are displayed in the PC’s folder structure in a windows on the left.  But before you select your images, you need to have a clear idea in your mind as to what kind of book – an “article” in its terminology – you’re going to produce.  (As well as a photo book, an article could be some individual photos, wall decor, cards, posters and a variety of other possibilities.)

Within the Photo Book selection, a variety of options are on offer, from basic photo booklet through to so-called “Professional Line” Photobooks.  These are offered in a variety of different formats – square, portrait or landscape, with the largest being a 40×30 Landscape offering.  I elected to go for the 30×21 Landscape format, which is a similar size to the Photobox offering I’d done previously.

Having selected this option, the software asked for a choice of cover, for example, acrylic or leather/linen, the cover surface, what kind of paper (glossy, matte, fine art) and whether a gift box is required.  Some covers can feature photos, others only text.  A starting price for your selection is displayed, and which adjusts as you change options or change the number of pages in the book.

You then have three options – a “one-minute” photobook, where the software does all the work for you, “auto layout” which places images within a layout of your choice or an empty template so that you can have complete control (which was my selection).  There are tutorial videos, helpfully each only around one minute long, to explain how each works and how you can manipulate the format as you go along.  I recommend watching a couple of these videos as they might give you some ideas as to clip art or layout selections before you begin.

The final step is to select the number of pages you want in your photobook.  You can add pages later, so you’re not committed to a number; but this step does give you an idea of what the final cost is going to be.

Select and place your images and text

You’re then in the hands of the layout section of the software, which shows you the current page you’re editing in the centre, a window of all of the book pages on the bottom, your folder structure on the left, a set of tools at the top and some resources on the right (so you can change your article type if you wish, for example, or select page layouts). You are also shown thumbnails of any images in the directory you’re looking at.  I did all my photo edits before I started, so all the photos were in one directory, which I think made the whole process a lot simpler.

The look and feel of the tool corresponds closely to the Windows look and feel, so you can select multiple images with Ctrl-click or Shift-click as you would in Windows, and there’s a right-click menu of options as well.  For example, if you’re using the one-minute option, you could just select all the images and drag-and-drop them on to the current page window and the software will do the rest.  You have flexibility in adjusting things afterwards if you want – and this applies to auto layout as well.

I used a one-photo-per-page approach, so merely had to drag a selected photo across, then position it, size it and caption it.  Once you’ve elected to use a photo, the software places a tick against it in the thumbnail view, so that you can easily see which images you have used and which not.  The software gives an assessment of the image quality for printing and will for example alert you if it’s too small;  you also are alerted if you’re trespassing too near the edge of the page.  Having positioned the image, I could then edit it further if I wished (rotate, mirror, etc, or adjust the colours and brightness.  The menus at the top are all context-sensitive, so appear as needed when you select an object to adjust.  You can copy or cut-and-paste easily between pages, which I found useful in keeping consistency in layout and positioning of captions.

The software really is very good and very flexible.  It is possible to do sophisticated layouts with layered images, rotated images, a wide variety of text tools and clip art.  This is why I suggest you have a clear idea of how you want your book to look before you start – there are so many options and possibilities here that it’s easy to get bogged down.  The tutorial videos are very useful preparation, I found.

As you create the book, the pages are visible in a window along the bottom so that you can easily skip from one page to another.  A preview of the book is available so you can see how it looks thus far; and you can save the project so that you can come back later if you need to take a break.

All in all, I found it very easy to get exactly the look I wanted

Finish and buy

And that’s it!  At the bottom right is an indication of the price of your book, including VAT but excluding shipping costs and the tempting “Add to shopping basket” button, which will take you to a dialog for giving shipping and payment information – credit card and PayPal options are available.  If there are any last-minute issues with your layout (e.g. page accidentally left blank), the software will alert you before allowing you to spend money, which is a nice touch.

It’s a very smooth process, and the finished article, with the one layout caveat I mention above, is of very high quality – lovely image colour and detail. Overall, a very satisfactory project and I shall revisit the service for any top quality photo print items I need in the future.