Amsterdam Russ

It's a truly wonderful place - a time capsule of Old Greece. It offers bugger all to do in the way of contrived entertainments, which is great. Want to get away from it all and relax, in a traditional setting, with the most splendid food and the warmest, most genuine people it's ever been my pleasure to meet, then Lesvos - and the fabulously picturesque village of Molyvos in particular – are where it's at. We'll be there again mid-June through to early July - staying in a local and very basic apartment (no fancy hotels here, but it is marble floored for coolness) owned by a wife and husband in their very late-70s. I say wife and husband in that order because the man is a right lazy sod, and she, in her old age, still wields a hoe like a demon every day in their well-tended, twice-a-day-watered vegetable plots, which we overlook from the basic, but serene comfort of our balcony. Oh, and neither of them speaks anything other than Greek! Peter, if/when you go, I can hook you up/recommend so many things – and it would be my absolute pleasure to do so.

Very evocative, Peter. Looking forward to summer even more now after that.

Wonder if you'll get an earlier sighting than that this year. I have a feeling you might as it's been such a mild winter and spring has well and truly sprung already. Mind you, if I were a swallow, I'd stop in Lesvos for the year where it's nice and sunny. Being mere humans, all we get are three weeks there a year!

As there's always interest in these threads on the arrivals of swifts, swallows and martins, I thought folk here might like to know that a friend on Facebook posted up pics this evening of the first swallows of the year on the Greek island of Lesvos. It might be a bit premature yet, but summer's coming!

Yup, very easy to find on Google, and used in loads of places online, including Wikipedia. No idea why you should have had such difficulty in obtaining it at all - unless the print belonged to a family member of Hutton or the photographer and they felt the need to protect or be reassured about how you might use it (which you said).

As said, I've used PVA to clean records many times and will continue to do so where thought appropriate. While the process of lifting the solidified glue layer is peeling, it does require some amount of pulling. Even this, to my mind, could all too easily lift the fragile layer of lacquer from the metal base. Herewith a pic of some 45s that I'd given the glue treatment... I ask if you or anyone else has images/sound files of acetates being cleaned with wood glue so that we might all benefit from seeing/hearing the results as I'm not alone in believing it would be a destructive process. Have you got an acetate you could slather in glue for the sake of an experiment, perhaps? Anyone else prepared to give it a go? I'm not, but I'm happy to be convinced...

I've used PVA many times to clean records and know how much effort the layer of dried glue needs to be pulled away from the surface. I also have a number of acetates in varying condition (including some that are flaking) and it's immediately obvious that using the same glue treatment on them would be damaging in the extreme. Emidiscs do appear to be quite resilient when compared to many brands of acetates from the US, but there's no way I'd slap a load of glue on one. As for copydex, I don't know that product so didn't comment. At the end of the day though, if it's like PVA I'd be equally as wary. Have you - or anyone else - got any before and after pics and/or sound files of acetates onto which PVA has been poured?

I have to agree wholeheartedly with all the comments stating that PVA should absolutely not be used on an acetate. Destruction awaits!!

Well done. If it took that much hassle, it must have been worth it for you. But... why all the copyright fuss over the sale of an old print?

Give them a wipe with a damp, lint-free cloth or the non-abrasive side of a washing-up sponge using tepid water. Distilled water's often been suggested, but I think having the water slightly warm helps dissolve the grime.

You're welcome. It used to be the case that you could get rid of EXIF data simply by using Photoshop's "save for web" feature, which reduces the resolution (and quality) so that becomes a smaller file and thus is quicker to load online. I've no idea if that still works. If people are serious about protecting their images then both watermarking them and adding EXIF info about copyright is absolutely the best option. Sadly, too many uninformed people believe that any/every image they find online is "public domain" and thus free for them to use, which of course is not true.

Thanks, Not heard of 500px before - will take a look. Lots of people on image sites do add either watermarks or "signatures" to their photos. Adding your name somewhere on the perimeter of an image means it can easily be cropped out. Getting rid of watermarks (Digimarc) is a much harder thing to do. Photoshop can't get rid of them with a click as the watermarks are part of the actual image itself, meaning you'd have to use Photoshop's editing tools to remove and alter the image bit by bit, which is very time consuming - especially if you make your watermarks quite obvious. People also embed their copyright and contact details into the metadata of images. All photos taken with a digital device contains EXIF data, which includes stuff like camera setting, even geographical location if you're inclined. And most photo viewing/editing software allows users to add info such as your name/contact details to that.

Cheers, Steve. Kind of you to say so. I've often thought about making my own website to display my better photos, rather than use places like Flickr and Ipernity. All these photo-sharing sites seem to succumb to internal politics after a while, or you find that other members lose interest in commenting and liking the pics of others. Not sure exactly why that should be, but I've seen it happen with both those sites. Flickr, in particular, had so many thematic groups with "laws" associated with them – post one pic, like and comment on five others, put your hands in the air, just like "Simon says" – that it was all too much. Whenever people get together, it seems some always want to make terms and conditions for being a part of the group. I couldn't be bothered with all that pecking order stuff, so I went to Ipernity. Sadly, though, Ipernity is a loss-making site and is sure to go under. That's unless the recently-formed rescue team of members can save the day, but – if they can save the site – they're talking about introducing a 50 euro annual annual fee. No thank you! Where then to display your photos to a like-minded audience? Perhaps oddly, in many respects it actually seems the best place is here!

Still got my Flickr account, although I moved from there to Ipernity around 2011. https://www.flickr.com/photos/rigilbert/ That said, my Ipernity subscription expired last year and I've not bothered to renew it because I think it's too expensive for what it is, and there's a strong likelihood that the site will fold very soon. http://www.ipernity.com/doc/rigilbert?view=1

Yup, the entire Billboard archive has been available through Google Books for a few years. Absolutely amazing what you can find in there, isn't it?

An acetate of a presumed unreleased song signed "To my brother Charlie… John "Someone"". Can't quite make out the last name properly, but it looks like "Higton"...

Signed by Bobby Bland...

On the Toy record label. Mine's red rather than grey.

Thank goodness one of us here still has a working memor… Er, what was I saying?

Wendy & Kev… Quite frequent visitors to soul nights in Amsterdam. It was Kev's 50th birthday over the weekend, so we put up the balloons and birthday bunting you see in some of the clips. There's usually a few in from the UK most months, which is great as they're always up for a good night. Often we get people coming in and they're disappointed at how small the place is. By the end of the night though, they always go away telling us what a great time they had.

Nooo… Just call ME Loma Russ!

Probably the smallest soul club in all of Europe at just 50 square metres! None of your big allnighter halls here with 10m square circles for each dancer, we're back to the early 1960s with bodies pressed against one another and everyone having a great time! Absolutely. Have I told you about my website recently? Discography of Loma Records

Soul Source music video feature announcement Name: Northern Soul Amsterdam Promo 2017 Category: Video Bites Date Added: 2017-02-19 Submitter: /profile/9478-russell-gilbert/>Russell Gilbert Video Description: Little selection of clips of Northern Soul Amsterdam... watch now... /videos/view-1355-northern-soul-amsterdam-promo-2017/>Northern Soul Amsterdam Promo 2017 Soul Source Video Feature 2016