Foreign Perspectives

One confusing thing this year is that we’re still pretty full this week and even had to close down availability for a couple of days already. Ordinarily, when the French have gone home from their holidays last Saturday, there’s a week of a lull in activity before the Visa pour L’Image photojournalism festival starts but for the next couple of days we’re pretty much full.

Even odder is that it’s during a time when the weather is just dreadful which generally keeps down the numbers of guests staying with us.

What is a major nuisance is that they’re all booking just a couple of days at most in advance. That has the effect that we don’t know if there’ll be a lull at all because we could easily find that the end of the week we’re full.

Still, it helps the bank balance no end!

One of the long term aims I have is to be able to sell photos from our little collection of sites as we tend to build up quite a collection of photos in the course of developing the likes of our Pyrenees Guide and, on a grander scale, our Whole Earth Guide.

For the guides themselves, the little Nikon Coolpix 3700 was more than enough. Whilst 3mp mightn’t sound much these days, you don’t need anything like that for the internet and in fact even the largest images on the websites is under 1mp. Even those 300,000 pixel cheapo cameras have much more resolution than is required for internet use.

However, it’s quite a different matter when you want to sell the photos as prints or whatever.

So, we had a bit of an upgrade last year to the 6mp Nikon S10 which is an excellent little camera and one of the few which offer x10 zoom on a compact digital camera. It’s certainly improved the photos that we’ve taken since getting it quite substantially, it’s still limiting us in terms of potential future sales of the images we take.

Anyway, ’twas time to really up the ante and so as of next week we’ll be starting to use our brand new Nikon D40x which takes us up to 10mp and will give us a whole lot more flexibility. In fact, the resolution increase is much more than it seems as there are all kinds of settings on the camera should let us produce prints up to poster size.

Now “all” we need to do is to wait for the perfect lighting for the photos…. the weather at the moment is more like the depths of Winter than mid-Summer!

Whilst yesterday we rebooked a room within 10 minutes of putting it onto the system, tomorrow that won’t happen no matter how low we price the rooms because the French will have all gone home.

The fact that they all go home at the same time creates chaos on all of the roads in France. Whilst we notice the French retreat from Spain, of course they are doing exactly the same thing all over Europe so that the roads in all directions are packed with cars and drivers who have been on the road far too long.

It kicks off from before dawn and will run well into the early hours of Sunday morning. It’s one of the days of the year when we get requests for breakfast at 6am (nope, it’s 8am at the very earliest) as the French usually take to the roads around dawn. Others go to the opposite end of the day and we’ve one family who are planning on setting out later this evening with the hope that the traffic will have tailed off by then (it won’t).

Definitely not a day when you would want to be on the road in France!

As ‘yall know, Wendy and me have been plugging away with paid posts over the last month or so.

One thing that we hadn’t expected was that by taking it a little bit more seriously, we’d be rapidly closing on the top 10 earners on PPP quite so quickly. Due to the delay in payment (you’re paid 30 days after your post is approved), it’ll actually be another month or so before get into that list but ’tis encouraging that we can get there so quickly.

Actually, all being well, we’ll not only be in that list but moving up it next month as we should be bringing online another blog by then.

As you know, I’m in the process of building up a sort-of technology blog over at An Age of Magic. It takes about three months before you can make money on these things so it’ll be a month or so before I’m ready to start raking in the cash from it and retire on the proceeds. Well, maybe a “bit” more than a month before I can retire on it 🙂

Anyway, I’ve been putting on vaguely techie type postings as you can see. Techie with a slightly different slant on the technology.

What’s really interesting is the kind of searches people have been using to arrive on the site…. “walk on water with magic”… “travel in time”… “move things with magic”. Also interesting are the results that I get when I use Digg and similar social bookmarking sites on individual posts: some of them do incredibly well considering the content that’s on the site.

Now, the bigger question is whether I’ll be able to make money it….