paulrg

Archive for the ‘animal’ Category

Arrived and now settled in Italy

In animal, photography, travel on 02/02/2008 at 3:32 pm

Well it’s the 2nd of Feb and I’ve just got my internet on in Italy so I can start Blogging again.

Tomorrow I’ll put some images up of the journey down and the view when we got here but for now I’ll just say hello and how I’m glad to be back on the BLOG JOB!

British Airways screw me again!

In Blogroll, Photographic, animal, cats, photography, travel on 02/02/2008 at 3:29 pm

I hate British Airways! First of all they insist that you have to book a passenger flight before you can book cat’s onto that flight.

So I did.

I wanted to travel from Manchester, UK to Naples, Italy. BA fly that route but some times go via Gatwick. I book the flight and apply for the cats to go Cargo.

British Airways then said Cat’s have to wait at Gatwick 4 hours before they can do an onward flight and the changeover time between the Manchester Flight arriving and the Naples flight departing was only an hour so the cat’s wouldn’t be able to do that. (my cat’s are big and could walk that distance much quicker than 4 hours!)

OK, no problem I thought. My wife could drive the cat’s down to Gatwick and just catch the flight from there with them but was then told if I cancelled the Manchester to Gatwick part of the journey the whole flight ticket would be cancelled including the return and I wouldn’t get compensated for that loss even though it’s British Airways fault!

So, I organise someone else to take the cats to Gatwick, my wife will keep her original plans and fly from Manchester with the cats meeting up with her at Gatwick.  Fine ….. apart from British Airways then say, with only 2 weeks to go before the travel date, that the cats can’t go on that flight because it’s going to be full of mail so they can go on the earlier flight at 7.30am!!!!

Ok, what about my wife’s ticket – she has to be on the same flight because someone has to meet the cats in Naples and I will be driving and can’t be sure I’ll be there – British Airways won’t refund the flight or change the ticket even though it’s their fault – they insist on me having to buy a ticket before I can book the cats as freight and then when they say they won’t get the cats on that flight they say my ticket is worthless.

After throwing a wobbely on the phone I eventually spoke with a supervisor who said he understood how silly it must sound and that he would re emburse the money for the first cancelled ticket and change the second one (the return flight for my wife for the 14th Jan.)

Perhaps British Airways have seen sense at last, so I thought.  The guy changes the booking while I’m on the phone – it pops up on my screen at home and I print out the confirmed booking on my inkjet and off we go.  Suprise suprise – we get to the airport for my wife to return home and there is nothing on the computer terminal so she can’t get the flight without paying £230.  Two hundred and thirty pounds for a ticket that we had already bought for £65 but had to cancel because we didn’t catch the outwood bound leg because British Airways cancelled the cats flight!!!

The supervisor had told me he was giving me the ticket because of the loss we had had with them cancelling the first flight but he didn’t – all he did was “book” the ticket and I still had to pay for it but at the day of flight price – which is the most expensive way of buying a ticket.  BASTARDS .

I think British Airways are crooks and vagabonds and if they want to try to sue me – bring it on.  While we are in court they can explain why they are cheeting bastards to the Judge and let him or her decide what is fair.

The cats made the journey although 2 have had to go to the Vets because one caught a cold and the other got a form of systitus but I don’t supose I can blame British Airways for that.

Pictures for Alamy.

In Photographic, animal, photography on 21/09/2007 at 9:46 am

Just been working on some more images for my Alamy submissions today. I know I need to do my holiday photographs and last week’s wedding but I need to earn money as well!

I particularly like this one

Botswana

Not sure what it is – apart from a very big budgerigar!

I’m not really into photographing flying birds but this isn’t a bad snap either, I think.

birds in Botswana

Again, I’m not sure what sort of birds they are – anyone know???

I took them in Botswana last year – megga place which I loved although did get bitten to pieces by mosquitoes which I could have done without. My wife didn’t get one bite while I was covered in them.

botswana1

Think this is some sort of dear but again animal spotting is not one of my favourite pastimes. I love photographing all things, it’s just the captioning that I don’t like. When I worked for a magazine we always had a “bent nib” (feature writer) who took the captions so that was much better but I’m hopeless at writing which is why I became a photographer in the first place! Thank goodness for spelling checkers, I say.

I’ve just noticed that all the view format images get cut off at the right hand side – does anyone know how to stop that?  Is it just my layout that’s doing it?