The Vienne in Autumn

We are back in our favorite quiet corner of France to pay bills and agree the next stages in the endless process of getting our house here renovated.  In the process I have been using the tips from Gary Friedman’s very fine photography seminar in Kingston last week to take some photos of the immediate area around our house.  I’ve also been trying to fix a problem that I know will come back to haunt me in the future – how to show photographs well without using Adobe’s flash plugin.  Flash is of course not in any Apple mobile product, and now it is not being supported in some new versions of Android.  And Adobe themselves have stated they will move to HTML 5 (in principle a standards-based way of doing the same things as Flash) in the future.  The problem is that I cannot at the moment find a way of displaying slide shows without Flash.

For all the criticism of it, Flash enables quite complex display effects without great programming complexity in my web site. The system I use (which is  the excellent Grand Flash Gallery plug-in) allows photographs to be shown in-line in the post or full screen, with information if required, and by and large works fine.  I have just spent 10 hours trying to find a non-flash alternative – and they all either don’t work, or they display results far worse than the Flash way .  So I have to retire hurt (DNF) – at least until I can get back to the UK and get sufficient bandwidth to make more experimentation possible.

In the meantime, here is a slideshow of shots taken within 50m of our front door.  As usual, the photos are best seen in full screen (press FS in the bottom right hand corner), and in slide show ( press SL).  Titles can be seen by pressing the ‘i’ in the top right corner, and to get back here, press ESC.

The next post will be shots within 5km of the same door.