Image search (advanced)

• I posted last month about my failure to identify these flowers through the new image search feature on Google. Old technology (or persevering in odd moments through the wild flower book) has finally identified it as Sneezewort - also known according to Wikipedia as Bastard Pellitory, Fair-maid-of-France, Goose Tongue and White Tansy, among other things. That was worth waiting for.


• To be fair to Google (must we?), its image search has in the interim proved useful. A client had provided me with an image for their website which, though striking, was too small for the design of the page. I dragged it into the Google search bar, which offered me, among other things, a larger version of the same image. Result!


• Dave has been photographing kingfishers: he posts some wonderful close-ups in his blog, and no doubt these are his most successful shots as wildlife photography. But as pure visuals, I like the almost abstract quality of some of the other photos in the set on Flickr, flashes of neon colour reflected in the water.


• In today's Guardian, AS Byatt reviews a book on Richard Dadd.