This public house is in the center of Leeds near the bus station, the Parish church, and the central market. It is in an area that has been hanging on and on and on.

I imagine it will be long before the area is redeveloped. But first there is another development planned for the other side of the market. It is a huge development and I think that if it goes ahead it will change the character of this part of Leeds which has been struggling for years.

Taken with Panasonic GF1 (full review here).

I think I am getting carried away with all the new (and good) themes that WordPress is bringing out. It seems like not a week passes without a new one.

I couldn’t resist, and I am now using the Mystique theme, which you can read about here.

Meanwhile I have been photographing fish to accompany an article I just published on Kirkgate Market – The Largest Indoor Market In Europe. Nowadays the fish that are sold on the market stalls come from as far away as Mozambique and China.

Do take a look!

Shot in very poor light with a Nikon D7000 with 35mm f1.8 AF-S lens.

The pig was jumping up and putting its forelegs on the topmost bar of its pen, so it was moving a lot. All of which meant that of the four or five shots I took, this crop was the best I got.

If you are wondering what this post is all about, see the comments on this earlier article and you will understand why I am putting these two screen grabs up here.

In a nutshell, it is to help a blogger named Leema who writes a self-hosted WordPress blog entitled Some Thoughts About Dogs who has decided to use the Liquorice theme on a self-hosted blog but cannot see how to use certain options.

The answer seems to be – as revealed in these two screenshots of the back end of the Liquorice theme – that there are two different versions of the theme.

What I can see in the back end is a more complete version of Liquorice with more options for WordPress.com and a more limited one for self-hosted blogs.

I have suggested that Leema contacts the author of the theme to find out how to proceed.

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I photographed this wonderful animal this afternoon and will be putting him into the Animals Ecards section of Quillcards in the next couple of days.

The question is, which version will I use? It is the same animal processed slightly differently each time in Photoshop.

I shot the image in RAW and I post-processed it in Photoshop CS5 by boosting the colors and increasing the sharpening. That was pretty much it for the lower image.

The top image is actually a more complicated version than the bottom image.

What I did was that I produced a duotone image which I then converted back to RGB. I then layered the original lower image over it and combined them to emphasise the dark areas and produce more contrast.

I think that works well around his tail feathers but the edging effect is too strong around the edge of his comb.

Which version do you prefer?

Technical
Nikon D7000 with Nikon 70-300mm lens at 200mm, 1/500th second at f5.3 at ISO 250