Archive for August, 2013

The 2013 Annual Report for the Chris Worfolk Foundation is now available to access from our website. The publication gives you an overview of what we’ve been up to throughout the 2012/2013 period. You can find it here.

Earlier this month, we headed to Yorkshire Wildlife Park. It’s fairly small, no where near the size of Chester Zoo or even Helsinki Zoo, but it does have “contact areas” in which you can go in and pet the animals.

A wallaby comes jumping across the path.

A capybara hides under a bridge after it was chased into the water by a rhea.

A lemur diving through the air.

A lemur jumping off the top of its house.

Elina holding hands with a wallaby.

There has been outcries in the past that the Post Office is closing all it’s branches and what a travesty it is.

Good. I hope it does go bankrupt.

It’s continuing existence is a stain on our society. An affront to the basic concepts of free market that have built our entire civilisation. It is, in my opinion, a useless, badly run and incompetence organisation that is unable to do anything right.

Have you been in a Post Office recently? Their customer service is terrible! Go in at lunch time and expect to wait up to an hour if you need counter service. I’ve never seen all the windows open, it’s not that they don’t have the space. They just don’t make enough staff available, resulting in huge queues.

Their credit card is a travesty. Run by the Bank of Ireland, who I assume believe the internet is some kind of dark magic, their online service has an uptime of less than 50% in my experience. Every time I log on, if I can log on, half of the information is missing. Usually the summary, but I’ve also noticed that their online statements sometimes miss transactions that the paper statements include!

What really gets my goat is a recently passport application I put in with them however. Not wanting to take any chances I paid the £8.70 or whatever it is for the Passport Check & Send service.

A week later and HM Passport Office writes to me to tell me that the application is incorrect! What is the point in having such a service if they don’t properly check it?

You would think they would be more apologetic, but they’re not. All they offered was the £8.70 to be refunded, and having phoned an expensive 0845 number to get my refund, they then said they would send me a letter out and I would have to take the letter down to that branch and get the refund back over the counter!

When I add up the value of the petrol to drive over there, and the parking, it basically isn’t worth it, even before factoring in the hour of my time at least that it would take to accomplish the task.

There is a reason all the Post Offices are closing down. I believe that reason is thy are obsolete and incompetent, and they fully deserve all the problems they are facing.

Today, I’m proud to announce the launch of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It is, in our opinion, the finest guide to restaurants in Leeds city centre that has ever been created. Years of relentless eating, reviewing and indexing have come together to provide a complete guide to where to eat in Leeds.

• 188 restaurants and food pubs reviewed
• Covers every restaurant we could find in Leeds city centre
• Five star rating system
• Unbiased, independent, consistent

The book will be made available in e-book format through all major retailers – Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Ingram, Kobo, Google Play, OverDrive (Waterstones), Sony, WH Smith and Gardner’s (Tesco). It is also available online at LeedsRestaurantGuide.com. At a later date, it will be made available in print also.

It will be priced at a very reasonable £3.99. The exact time listings will appear on each retailer can’t be determined, so follow me on Twitter for updates.

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who helped with the book, especially Elina for her eating and proof reading, Gijsbert for his feedback and advice, and James, Norm and Michelle for their proof reading.

Tomorrow, Worfolk Media will launch its first publication, the Leeds Restaurant Guide. This is a comprehensive review of all 188 restaurants and food pubs in the city centre. The book will be available initially in e-book format, and later in print, as well as being online.

The book will be made available through all major retailers and full details will be announced in our full launch announcement at 9am tomorrow morning. Check back here for those details.

For updates on Twitter, follow @chrisworfolk.

Owls are such posers.

This photo was really dark, but trusting my histogram, when I brought it into Photoshop the detail came out far better than I was expecting.

An otter staring at his own reflection.

This lion was sleeping right next to the fence, then woke up and stuck his head up just long enough for me to take a photo.

This was through glass, but luckily it didn’t get in the way of his eyes.

This was just a gull, but I took this photo after it had just snatched some food and flown off with it.

Helsinki Zoo has some wonderful bears.

A feature that many sports photographers like to take advantage of is back button focusing. I was trying this out at Yorkshire Wildlife Park recently and it has its advantages. The idea is that you can use a button on the back of your camera to focus, rather than have the camera focus when you press the shutter button half way down.

The advantage of this is that you can focus when you want to, and then not worry about the camera re-focusing if you take your finger of the shutter button.

For example, I often press the button half way down to get my focus, then re-compose the shot because I don’t want my focal point to be right in the middle of the frame, then take the photo. This means I have to keep my finger on it the whole time, and need to re-do these actions if I want to take additional shots. With back button focusing, I focus using the button, then point the camera somewhere else and take as many shots as I like.

Some cameras let you re-assign the exposure lock button, but your higher end DSLRs will have an “AF-ON” button you can use to activate the auto-focus without having to re-assign a button – useful if you use exposure lock as well. In which case, all you need to do is stop the shutter button activating the auto-focus. I’ve done a video showing you how to do this on the Canon 6D…

By the way, the video is the right way round, it’s just the thumbnail that is wrong.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Helsinki Sea Life Centre. It had some cool animals in it, and you did get to walk through a tunnel with sharks swimming over your head, but it was fairly small and over quite quickly.

The first photo is a shoal of piranhas. They just sit there waiting for something to happen; it’s quite unnerving. I took a video.

A dolphin skeleton. They don’t feel much likes the clowns of the sea when you see how many teeth they have.

Every single diorama in this museum depicted one animal eating another.

The history of life exhibit finished by talking about modern times – including a chainsaw, skateboard, first aid kit and mobile phone.

Roughly translated, this means “an exhibition on animal poo”.