A Most Unusual Tree
August 19th, 2006 by Stephen
On a trip to Cardiff recently, I passed this tree in a field not far from Talsarn. The colouration was quite striking on a bright sunny June day. Unfortunately I did not have my camera, but I passed the same way this week and stopped to snap this image.
My daughter complained that there were no leaves on the tree. I explained that blue trees never have leaves – or at least, I have never seen a blue tree that does have leaves.
My wife never told me that her beloved homeland has blue trees!
What is it that makes it blue? Gift wrap?
As best I can tell it is a roll of cloth dipped in a blue dye, although it is possible it is made from the blue towels sometimes found in one of those continuous towel dispensers.
I couldn’t get too close, because of the dangerous breed of killer cows! (they get like that when feeling blue!)
)
Dear Sir,
I visited your site A Most Unusual Tree the other day. An interesting place, which I will have to look at again.
I found it very slow to load using my old dial-up connection to the internet. It seemed as though the pictures were taking too long.
So I copied two of them (fair use?) to my computer, and noted that the ‘bluetree1.jpg’ file contained 340 KB. Quite a lot. It was also 600 X 385 pixels in size. Your html file calls for a picture 500 pixels wide.
So using a graphics program, I re-sized your file to 500 pixels in width and then saved it in .jpg format. The new file size was 18 KB, a remarkable reduction from 325. And hence much quicker loading. The small file looks just as good as the bigger one.
I did the same thing with your picture of the lighthouse at Holyhead. It comprised 325 KB, and was 600 X 385 pixels. I re-sized it to 300 X 193, saved it in .jpg format, and it now contains 18 KB.
If you like, I could email these two reduced files to you as attachments to an email. If you were to then substitute them for those already in your web page, they would both load much quicker.
Please let me know if you would like to do this. If you do not want to do this, and I will not mind if you don’t, then do not reply to this note.
Best regards,
Tudor Jones.
http://www.storm.ca/~tjones/index.html
Tudor,
Apologies for the slowness on this page, and thanks for doing this. I have replied in an email to you in the affirmative, with thanks. I have also changed the way I am generating photos so that I can use iPhoto to compress the JPEGS properly in future.
Thanks again.
Stephen