RedBadger

From what you've said so far I'd go for the phone upgrade after checking the reviews of the camera. If you find you are getting into photography look at DSLRs spend as much as you can afford/justify but don't forget that lens are at least as important as the camera for quality photos so save some money for them. It's not a cheap hobby but you can pick up some bargains on ebay as people upgrade and sell their old kit. If you are interested in the subject youtube has loads of instructional videos.

Check out these photos apparently taken only on phones https://www.instagram.com/mobilephone.photographer/

Sounds pretty much where I am

What post processing software are you using, I use Lightroom and a bit of Photoshop?

I like these photos and fully agree about photography being therapeutic. Phone cameras are pretty good these days. My camera is nothing very special, a Canon AOS 600D I've had for years.

Thanks, I'm getting more into landscape photography lately. This one was taken at Portland Bill on a trip to Dorset earlier this year.

He was a mean spirited Tharcherite bastard who didn't care that her policies ripped the heart out of his home town So long as he could hang onto his money everyone else could get fucked. The only time he made me laugh was when he was canvassing for the tories and got chased out of the shopping centre in Speke by a woman armed with a frozen leg of lamb. Good riddance

If anyone has a spare 10 hours to kill over the holiday

Just got back to my hotel room in New York after being at the Metlife stadium NJ. Bruce and the band were on stage for 4 hours straight absolutely rocking. Amazing night.

It doesn't really matter if a third of the judges is biased that probably enough to convince the others

The mainstream press conveniently omits the fact that one of the judges, Philip Sales QC, is one of Tony Blair's long standing cronies. What was that about justice not just being done but being seen to be done?

I was at the Bernabeu on Saturday and he was on stage for almost 3 and a half hours. No support act. Brilliant night. EDIT - added set list Badlands Play Video My Love Will Not Let You Down Play Video Cover Me Play Video The Ties That Bind Play Video Sherry Darling Play Video Two Hearts Play Video Wrecking Ball Play Video My City of Ruins (tour debut) Play Video Hungry Heart Play Video Out in the Street Play Video The Promised Land Play Video Trapped (Jimmy Cliff cover) Play Video The River Play Video Point Blank Play Video Downbound Train Play Video I'm on Fire Play Video Darlington County Play Video Working on the Highway Play Video Waitin' on a Sunny Day Play Video Johnny 99 Play Video Because the Night (Patti Smith Group cover) Play Video Spirit in the Night Play Video Human Touch Play Video The Rising Play Video Land of Hope and Dreams (tour debut) Play Video Encore: Born in the U.S.A. Play Video Born to Run Play Video Glory Days Play Video Dancing in the Dark Play Video Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out Play Video Bobby Jean Play Video Twist and Shout (The Top Notes cover) Play Video Encore 2: Thunder Road (solo)

The Guardian's take on it posted without comment from me. Rafael Benítez: the control freak who learned a painful lesson at Real Madrid http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/mar/11/rafael-benitez-newcastle-united-real-madrid If you are wondering why on earth Rafa Benítez would go to Newcastle United from Real Madrid, consider this: the last time he didn’t have a professional side to manage, he took over his local school team on the Wirral. “It was hilarious,” his wife, Montse, recalled. “He stood there on the touchline and shouted at them as if it was the first division, waving his arms around.” This is not just Rafa’s job, she explained, it is his “passion”; football manager isn’t what he does, it is what he is. “Take the pitch away from him,” she said, “and ...” And there is nothing. Benítez is exactly the kind of coach Pep Guardiola was talking about during a 2011 interview with the screenwriter and producer Fernando Trueba. In it, Trueba tells the story of the film actor Jean-Paul Belmondo who gets challenged by an actor for agreeing to appear in a dreadful film. “With the money you’ve got, your standard of life, what need is there?” he asks. Belmondo’s response is eloquent: to get up every day, to leave home, to go on set, talk to the electricians and the machinists, to feel part of it. “It doesn’t matter that the film is bad,” he says. Newcastle appoint Rafael Benítez as new manager to replace Steve McClaren Read more Guardiola replies that there are coaches whose attitude is like Belmondo’s: “They could say: ‘No, no, I’ve got my status, I’ve coached Real Madrid ... I can’t just go and coach at any old place. [but], no, instead, they go. They go because they like the day‑to‑day, being with the players, preparing games, the adrenaline, the fear of losing, the blows from the media,” he says. “They prefer that to being at home.” Benítez certainly does. With the money he has – and the pay-off from Madrid was certainly significant – with the way he can live, what need is there? The answer is simple: every need. Benítez has always stood out as an obsessive, someone who once protested: “I don’t spend all day thinking about football,” before pausing to admit, “but a large part of it, yeah.” He spent part of his honeymoon watching Milan train and Montse revealed that on their first date he introduced her to 4-4-2. There is something on which Benítez would disagree with Belmondo. It does matter that the film is bad – or, in his case, the team. Yet whereas many see joining Newcastle as risky, or even plain stupid, it is attractive to him. For a start, it was the only job available. It is only two months since he was sacked at the Bernabéu and the speed underlines how keen Benítez was to get back into work; how he needed it. But that is not all. Benítez is more comfortable in the Premier League than anywhere else. He has expressed before his belief that managers there are afforded an authority and respect denied them elsewhere. He and his family are certainly more comfortable in England. When he returned to Madrid, the city where he was born and raised, his wife and children did not come with him but stayed in the Merseyside area. FacebookTwitterPinterest Rafael Benítez, pictured here after being appointed by Liverpool in 2004, feels more comfortable in the Premier League than anywhere else. Photograph: PANewcastle may be in desperate trouble, 19th in the table, but this remains a huge club and those problems too give him an opportunity to prove himself. The paucity of Steve McClaren’s work leaves him significant margin for improvement. It may even be tempting to imagine that he cannot lose: if he pulls them to safety, he will be deemed a success; if they go down, well, they were going down anyway. This may not need to be his final destination, but does represent the chance to climb back on board. To reconstruct his reputation and his career. If, that is, he really needs to. In England, Benítez’s reputation suffered less damage than it has in Spain. When his assistant Fabio Pecchia talked about a president with a “permanent presence” and Benítez expanded on that idea of interference from the Santiago Bernabéu boardroom on BT recently, when he chose to highlight the club’s structural flaws, few in the UK doubted that he was right. “You have to see what has happened there over the last few years. Camacho, Del Bosque, Pellegrini, Mourinho, Ancelotti … it’s not easy to be the manager there,” he said, and they saw. In Spain, most knew he was right too. In fact many noted that he hadn’t said anything they did not already know, nor indeed anything that he should not have already known. But rather than engaging with what he said, many attacked him for saying it. It did not help that he said it there, not here. Some criticised him for not having spoken out when he was there, as if any manager would ever do that, but there was more to it than just not having spoken out. While he had been Madrid manager, he had even denounced a media campaign against the club, himself and Florentino Pérez – the same president he now identified as the problem. If Benítez had thought that he would ingratiate himself with Pérez by saying so, echoing his master’s voice and playing a political card designed to increase his chances of survival, it did not work. Nor did it help him when he opted for the starting lineup he thought politically rather than tactically expedient when theclásico came round. Benítez chose the team “suggested” to him, not the one he truly believed in, but Madrid lost 4-0 anyway. He, meanwhile, lost credibility. FacebookTwitterPinterest Real Madrid’s 4-0 home defeat by Barcelona last November cost Rafael Benítez credibility after he opted for the starting lineup he thought politically rather than tactically expedient. Photograph: Mutsu Kawamori/AFLO/Nippon News/CorbisBecause of his personality and his methodology, Benítez is the type of manager whose style was always likely to prove problematic with a squad of players like Madrid’s, politicised and powerful. His appointment was an accident waiting to happen, if not entirely unavoidable – particularly as he arrived after Carlo Ancelotti and thus effectively played the role of the stepmother. His relationship with the president always felt like an odd one, too; they could hardly have more different views of the game and soon the brief he had been handed changed. Benítez seemed unaware of just how eroded his relationship with many of the players became – something they were not slow to reveal, pointedly, even cruelly, once he had gone – but he was aware of the different criteria he and the president held. The problem was that being aware of it, knowing where real power lay and being prepared to accommodate that, may even have made things worse. The man who demands to control everything, who famously complained that Valencia had bought him a sofa when he wanted a lamp and who Jermaine Pennant memorably accused of trying to control him by remote, snapping, “Just stick some batteries in me and call me a robot”, lost the one thing he hates to lose: control. Right from the start he made too many concessions, accepting that this time he would not be the architect. On one level that was understandable – it was Real Madrid, after all – but Benítez stopped being Benítez, and it proved unsuccessful as a survival mechanism. In the end, he died not with his boots on but with someone else’s, sacked in his absence on a wet, cold Monday night, mentioned one last time and never since, as if he had never been there at all. Now, two months later, he is back on a very different bench. The Madrid experience cannot have failed to change him and yet one of the most important lessons he learned will surely be: don’t change, be yourself. And what Rafa Benítez is, is a football manager.

http://www.squawka.com/news/benitez-alonso-wasnt-happy-about-liverpool-sale/482230? Benitez: Alonso “wasn’t happy” about Liverpool sale Read more at http://www.squawka.com/news/benitez-alonso-wasnt-happy-about-liverpool-sale/482230#lueR6tHwSPDDagic.99 Real Madrid manager Rafael Benitez has revealed that Xabi Alonso did not want to leave Liverpool and “wasn’t happy” when the club put him up for sale, as per Spanish news outlet AS. Alonso moved to the Santiago Bernabeu for £30 million (fee via Telegraph) in 2009, but Benitez, who was in charge of the Merseyside club at the time, revealed that the transfer wasn’t the player’s decision. Of the controversial Liverpool transfer, Benitez said: “When one is faced with responsibility, it’s important to assume this position. I needed the money as team manager. “You don’t get much for selling a bad player. He wasn’t happy about it. I was clear with him and his representative. Liverpool Football Club put him up for sale. “He had just had an excellent season and we sold him for decent money that helped us rebuild the team”. The departure of Alonso had a huge impact on Liverpool, who struggled to replace the Spaniard’s graft and spectacular passing ability. Alonso, now at Bayern Munich, spent five years at Madrid, with whom he won both the La Liga title and the Champions League. The cultured midfielder was part of the Liverpool side that won the Champions League in 2005 and the FA Cup a year later, but, whilst the club did receive a substantial amount of money upon selling him, they failed to reinvest it wisely and, arguably, are still in need of a player of Alonso’s calibre in their midfield today. Alonso, who made over 100 appearances for Spain before retiring from international football last year, helped to set the rhythm of Liverpool’s play during his time at the club and was the instigator of many of their attacks. The 33-year-old is currently in his second season with Bayern Munich, with whom he won the Bundesliga title last season.