The Pack Horse, Wendover

Sorry, Roy, but the Replace facility still doesn't work.

Have you contacted the team to ask when it's going to be fixed?

What difference will that make? They've probably been asked that question a thousand times to no effect.

Anyway, the improvement with Roy's crop applied is very debatable. My current genre of "olde cottages" pictures includes the chimney (with of course the television aerial and cables removed) and is square-format, and this shot is of that genre.

Yesterday was one of those maddening days where every time the sun went in seconds before I could get in position to take the pictures. But thanks to Photomatix and PhotoShop it's sometimes possible to end up with as pleasing a result with shots taken in diffused light as in bright sunlight. (Comments please.)

There was a bit of (other) cheating with this one. For a start, it's reversed horizontally. Yet the cottage name plate and the pub sign aren't in Russian. It may look as though I was trying to be clever, but how hard do I need to try?

Reply from Ipernity regarding the 'replace' function:
"It is at the top of our list and we have a new ipernity member who is willing to try and help us figure it out, but it takes awhile for someone to start to understand our complex program before they can actually do anything for us."

Well let's just hope that they[sic] can.

The Free Dictionary:
www.thefreedictionary.com/they

The use of the plural pronouns they, them, themselves, or their with a grammatically singular antecedent dates back at least to 1300, and such constructions have been used by many admired writers,

including William Makepeace Thackeray ("A person can't help their birth"),
George Bernard Shaw ("To do a person in means to kill them"),
and Anne Morrow Lindbergh ("When you love someone you do not love them all the time").

Despite the apparent grammatical disagreement between a singular antecedent like someone and the plural pronoun them, the construction is so widespread both in print and in speech that it often passes unnoticed. There are several reasons for its appeal. Forms of they are useful as gender-neutral substitutes for generic he and for coordinate forms like his/her or his or her (which can sound clumsy when repeated).

Thanks, Guardian-reader. Crime, corruption, racism and all the other deadly sins are also "widespread" and have long antecedents. This does not make them right, even if committed by those we admire.

And to me, nothing sounds more clumsy than bad grammar.

How DARE you call me a Guardian-reader! I've half a mind to report you for hate speech.

Half a mind? If you read The Guardian, that would be a left-brain decision.

Seeing as I'm left-eyed, I probably have a right-minded perspective.

When in your right mind, that is.

Why did you want to reverse it? You have invalidated the photo by doing so, as it's no longer a photo of that place, but just a chocolate box cover.

Personally, I don't care for the square format. In this instance, the main interest is squashed into the lower half of the picture, with the eye drawn towards a boring expanse of grey sky. The chimney is not sufficiently interesting to need inclusion.

I'm guessing it's probably better without the bright sunlight, as that can create too much shadow beneath the thatch and an overly stark contrast with the white walls.

I've checked it out on Street View and the place doesn't look quite so idyllic in real life.

No, it's by no means as idyllic in reality - a mass of rubbish had to be cleared from the background. I reversed it to disguise the fact that (on Flickr) it and the adjacent shot in my photostream were taken in the same place. My pictures don't purport to be literal, unaltered depictions of places. The end product is the image - however produced - not a record of what I saw.

And I don't agree with you about the sky. I always replace blank and boring skies with interesting ones, but this - the real sky - isn't boring; it's correctly exposed, contains both grey and blue, and (on my monitor) is full of detail, and its moodiness makes the foreground look sunnier in contrast.

Yes, I agree that the grey sky looks good, but it should be the backdrop to this picture, not the main focus. With the present crop, my eye is confused as to whether to look at the sky or the hollyhocks, and hardly notices the pub at all.

Although eponymous, the pub isn't the subject here. Nothing in this shot is interesting enough to make a picture in its own right; it's an ensemble, the sky and chimney included.

Certainly better than my own Wendover shot.
www.ipernity.com/doc/isisbridge/45128910