yes to all the above… and we should also be included in the Scottish Independence vote and what shape it should take.

contacting experienced people is always a good idea. The reason i recommended the local council building regs surveyor is they don’t charge until work progresses, are aware of what needs to happen to meet the regs and will point you in the direction of builders and architects for drawings and structural engineers for the calculations, simples really

Having a good working relationship with the building regs surveyor is a good start.

as been said, any alterations to properties need to have the correct supporting documentation, it’s part of section ‘P’ of the building regulations and part of the conveyancing documentation.

You may well make the alteration, but it will need checking and verifying by a qualified tradesman.

Room enlargements, wall removals will need the support of a structural engineer report and calculations who will provide the required beam size and size and construction of wall piers/pads which the builder will follow, while the work is ongoing visits by the county building regs surveyor will come out and sign off the work stages, so that means you will need to advise them and get permission.

If you go along the route of just doing, then it will cause big trouble when the property is sold, not with-standing that any insurance you have will be void as the work has not been carried out in the correct manner.

Sorry about bringing sad tidings, it’s just the way it is now.

My advise is get in contact with your local county building surveyor and have a chat, they are very helpful, knowledgeable people and will give you good advise.

L+V for me, I was with A Plan but each the premium went up and up, It was only when They knew I was moving that the premium came down to a poorer policy. But at renewal they always said it was the best they could find. At one time I had three cars with them.

Possibly, get in contact with the Royal Artillery Museum? They may even be able to provide more detail. Just a thought.

Depends what you want to do, If you are interested in looking at images on the computer screen or print the odd image with a modest printer then stick with JPEGs straight off the camera, learn how to use and set up you camera accurately. You’ll have great images and be very happy with results.

You can still use Adobe Camera Raw ( capital R because it is an acronym ) on your JPEGS, just tell Elements or bridge to open the image in ACR. raw isn’t a file type like JPEGs, TIFF, PSD etc, so is written as raw and not RAW/Raw.

Why worry about a raw image in full 16bit resolution when most/some photogs computer screens are 8 bit, maybe 6 bit and unable to resolve a sRGB colour space. Let alone having a fully calibrated and managed workflow. So you won’t be able to see the 16bit Adobe RGB colour space let alone manipulate it.

ACR is able to do many things but can’t and never will be able to recover either a blown out or black pixel/s. It doesn’t matter how elaborate the software is. Think about it, blown out means too much light for the sensor to respond to and puts a value of 255 against that pixel. It is pure white. If you see some recovered information then this is the raw convertor looking at all the color channels and finding information in either the red, green, blue info.

raw doesn’t have a colour space so is unaware of what type of light the image has been captured in, so it doesn’t matter what the camera menu has been set to. Colour space information is attached to the metadata file, not an actual change to the raw information. In fact the raw information in the sensor is grey scale, the Bayer filter colour array information is added to the raw grey scale information and then saved onto the flash card. The white balance is set in the raw convertor and not in the camera. If the image looks blue/yellow whatever, it is because that is how the camera metadata file has been set-up, it just needs to be tweaked, so JPEGs can be partially saved as the white balance can be changed/altered.

The are many pluses to shooting in raw, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing whatever your camera captured is all there on the flash card and then saved onto the computer. Shooting in JPEG, about 80% of the info captured on the sensor is thrown away, the image will be 8bit and this doesn’t have the headroom for later manipulation that a 16bit image has. Hence way JPEGs suffer with jaggies, and the hair comb histograms.

When personal situations change and photogs can move onto a more capable system, the raw image will be still waiting there for you to see the image in its full glory and as raw convertors improve so does the ability of releasing more stored image info. Many photogs I speak with now wish they hadn’t deleted an old raw file, because they didn’t think it was up to scratch but saved similar images are giving up more info.

If you would like to know more about raw especially, I would highly recommend any of the books written by Bruce Fraser, sadly gone now, Bruce knew more about raw and what to do with it than anyone else, in fact Bruce was a key engineer in the development of Lightroom and its raw convertor. Also a founding member of Pixel Genius.

Sorry if this has rambled on a bit, come back if you have any queries, pleased to help, Peter

can I also recommend whilst in the Orne Bridge area, the Merville Battery. Another “Coup de Main” operation, it had the same importance as taking the bridge, I won’t explain the detail, but what the airborne achieved with so little often goes without comment.