Formerly known as "The Golden Shot", for reasons no one ever understood.

AlphaContent is an extension by Bernard Gilly is a component that allows the creation of directories such as Yahoo from sections and categories on your site Joomla!. It also helps to add items not categorized (Articles static) as a section like weblinks components and contacts. We've used it here to create a simple A-Z list of site content as an alternative to the normal SiteMap (powered by xMap).

See this in action at the A to Z list.

Name: Ami Gardner

Hello. My name is Ami.

Ami tried out loads of fun things during the holiday. Here are a few of them.

Ansel Adams is credited by many as the grandfather, and indeed the inventor, of landscape photography.

He is famous for his mainly black and white studies of the American West, and particularly Yosemite National Park ( www.nps.gov/yose ).

He developed a number of techniques which developed the art (pardon the pun) including the zone system to determine proper exposure and to adjust contrast whilst printing.

You can read more about his life and work in this article on Wikipedia.

He used his art and his skill to raise the profile and support many environmental and humanist causes, including a study of the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. But he also contributed greatly to the American war effort by undertaking numerous assignments for the American military, including capturing details of Japanese installations in the Aleutians.

The photograph of the Tetons and the Snake River shown on this page is one of the 115 images of the Earth included in the Voyager Golden Record, so it can be said that his work is accessible at selected locations outside the solar system, a claim that cannot be made by many photographers.

He also has a mountain named after him. Mount Ansel Adams is an 11.760 feet high mountain in the Sierra Nevada on the border between Yosemite National Park and the Ansel Adams Wilderness. So I guess he has a wilderness named after him as well.

You can discover more of his life and work at the following sites :

• www.anseladams.com - Official webite of Ansel Adams
• www.anseladams.org - Official family owned Ansel Adams website
• memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/anseladams - Ansel's study of the Japanese-American internment at Manzamar during WWII
• www.archives.gov/exhibits/picturing_the_century/portfolios/port_adams.html - National Archive photos by Ansel
• www.archives.gov/research/ansel-adams - Highlights of Ansel's work for the National Park Service

The puzzle is very simple. The photo below shows the back of a bus stop. The cache is attached to it. The puzzle, of course, is that I'm not telling you where it is. It isn't far from the given coordinates. Shhh ! I've already said too much.

Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate outdoor hidden containers, called geocaches, and then share your experiences online. We have been Geocaching since May 2010. Our latest statistics are shown below.

MKGees have proudly achieved

Profile created using MyGeocachingProfile.com

Friday night, the girls driving up north for the weekend, and not a lot planned, oh, apart from my parents inviting themselves down for Saturday and Sunday to help with something or other. So a quick dash around Caldecotte Lake seemed a good idea.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Milton Keynes, Caldecotte Lake is one of several balancing lakes designed to prevent flooding of the River Ouzel. This would be likely to happen very regularly now as a result of the building of Milton Keynes - building introduces hard surfaces, hard surfaces don't absorb rainwater, and hence rivers get very full, very quickly. The balancing lake fills up when the river is high and then gradually empties out again when the river is lower, thus levelling out the peaks and troughs. All very clever, and no doubt it helps to keep our household insurance bills down. They also provide very useful and pleasant environments in which to conduct a number of activity hobbies, such as hiding and finding bits of tupperware, for instance.

You can read more and see a few good photos about Caldecotte Lake here. In fact, browse the whole site and find out why Milton Keynes is absolutely ripe for geocaching. All those parks with good quality paths...........And the Parks Trust has agreed a global set of rules for placing caches in the parks, so if you follow the rules you have several hundred square miles of prime caching territory to work with.

Charlie Waite is a renowed English landscape photographer. He worked in theatre and television for several years before turning to photography. He is best known for for his "painterly" appraoch to the use of light and shade and his use of large, square format equipment.

During his photographic career he has lectured throughout the UK, Europe and the USA. He has exhibited his own work many times across the globe and has published nearly 30 books, also exclusively of his own photography.

He now spends much of his time introducing his art to others through his company Light and Land ( www.lightandland.com ), organising tours with a group of specialist photographic leaders, all experts in their own field.

You can find out more about Charlie and his work on his website at www.charliewaite.com

Click any of the images to see a bigger version.

Find out more about Roche Courbon at Château de La Roche-Courbon ( http://www.t3a.com/LaRocheCourbon/ ). 

David Muench is an American landscape and nature photographer best known for his studies of the American west.

He has plied his trade for over fifty years, beginning by touring the country with his father, also a pioneering photographer. He has latterly ventured to other continents and countries and has successfully raised his son Mark into the same trade.

As with Ansel Adams one of his more famous works was a commission for the National Park Service. In 1975 he produced 33 large murals depicting the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which forms a part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St Louis, Missouri.

You can find more information about David at his official website, www.muenchphotography.com.

The much anticipated trip to France for the Gardners began with a relatively low stress morning of cleaning and checking the car and then loading it up with enough stuff to equip Napoleon’s armies for an entire tour of Russia.

In the meantime, Kas was doing last minute shopping with Ami and finishing some emergency work, Izzy was having a last morning at nursery.

For the first time in ages, we set off at roughly the time we planned and seem to have remembered to bring everything. A quick stop at the Burlaces to drop off some keys and off we go. Doh ! No we don’t, we’re missing one child. OK, round to Acorns to fetch Izzy, and then off on the road around 12:30. It should be plenty of time to make a 17:50 train through the Channel Tunnel ( www.eurotunnel.com ), but you never know on Fridays. Our previous experiences have shown that any trip near London on a Friday afternoon is a nightmare with nobs on.

Not much to say really. We got up a bit early, drove to Heathrow, stood in several queues and eventually got on one of BA’s finest big aeroplanes bound for San Francisco. 10 hours of flying later and it was still only mid afternoon when we arrived. Oh yes, jet lag !

SF airport was uneventful, as was the taxi ride downtown. We had one of those American big city moments. Miles and miles of suburbs and wide roads, then suddenly your view is blocked out by all these big buildings that someone very thoughtlessly left in the way. Downtown San Francisco just rising out of the suburbs. So we arrived at our hotel, the Westin St Francis ( http://www.westinstfrancis.com/ )on Union Square. Right in the middle of downtown, and certainly deep in the middle of the one way system.

Yippee ! It's time for another drive through France for a much earned family holiday. This time, we're trying St Malo in Brittany. Like last year's trip to La Rochelle, we are taking the train through the Channel Tunnell on Le Shuttle.  Unlike last year's trip, though, we have Kev's parents in the car with us, and as a result of that we have a roofbox on top of the car, and also a booking for a "high" vehicle. "High" in Eurotunnel terms means more than 1.85m. The old Peugeot 807 struggles with that when not wearing a hat. With the hat on there's no way.

We also decided to set off much earlier in the morning for a midday train. Friday midday train, 150 or so miles to drive round the M1 and M25..."You do the Math!" as they say over the pond. Early start - lots of driving and a lot of luggage to put in an unreachable roofbox first.

Today we resolved to do nothing in particular during the day, and hope to get the girls to go to sleep nice and early so we could go out for dinner in La Rochelle in the evening. Granded got up first and in traditional style kept Izzy and then Ami busy until everyone else could be bothered.

Any dreams of a quiet day was quickly gone with the discovery of lots of new friends who arrived last night. In the "big house" we say hello to Katy and Thomas from Cambridgeshire and their parents Matt and Suzi. With them are Beatrice, Jemima and Constance, also from Cambridgeshire, with their parents Alun and Jessica. Round the corner in the duplex we say hello to Edward and Lucy from Yorkshire with their parents Simon and Rachel. And by evening time we also were joined by William and Alex from Northampton with their parents John and Kelly (I think). Anyway, that probably makes a full compliment of 12 adults and 11 kids, the oldest of which is 11 and only three of whom are over 6. It could be a bit loud this week and there's probably going to be loads of playground incidents.