• Free entry and parking at over 300 historic sites
• Free parking at countryside and coastline locations
• A members guide book to all NT sites
• Newsletters about special events
• 3 editions of the NT magazine
• Free access to National Trust for Scotland sites as well as others around the world.

If you’re not yet a member of the National Trust and considering signing up then you might like to know that you can currently get a free pair of binoculars by using one of the many promotional links scattered around the web. To find one of these links just use Google.

Membership costs represent good value as long as you’re prepared to make good use of it.  If you pay by Direct Debit, you’re eligible for a 25% discount off the first year’s fee which works out at just £34.50 for an individual or £57.75 for a joint membership.  Considering you could easily spend £5-£10 per day on parking at a NTsite, the membership fee should easily pay for itself over the course of a year.

You don’t even have to wait for your welcome pack before you can use your membership as a temporary voucher is emailed to you for printing if you sign up online.

Lens hoods can be awkward to carry around, if they’re not in active use. Some allow you store them still attached to your lenses, but reversed. Whilst it saves some space, it can mean you have to remove the hood before you can get full access to the lens controls.

Many photographers consider lens hoods to be an essential piece of kit and yet they aren’t always supplied with new lenses. They can be bought as accessories, but form some reason that’s beyond me they can cost anything from tens to hundreds of pounds.

Thankfully, there is an alternative to shelling out £20+ for some shade and that’s to make your own lens hoods from cardboard! All you need to do is get hold of some cardboard (black would be best to absorb the most unwanted light), print off one of the downloadable PDFs and cut out your lens hood. Your creation is then ready to be attached with an elastic band or stashed away neatly in your camera bag.

Hmmm, pay £439.99 for a lens hood to put on my Canon EF 600mm f/4 L lens (okay I don’t actually own one of these lenses, but it’s a good example of a ridiculously priced hood) or make my own for virtually nothing. Tough choice…

In return for allowing people to do this, Flickr state, very clearly, that any images hosted by Flickr (regardless of whether it’s your image or not – that’s not relevant) and posted elsewhere should be linked back to the Flickr photo page just like this one,

On the Flickr photo page, when you click to view all sizes, you’re presented with two options; option 1 is some HTML code that will display the image on an external website and link it back to the photo page. Option 2, is the actual image URL. Underneath both of these options is this,

Flickr Community Guidelines specify that if you post a Flickr photo on an external website, the photo must link back to its photo page. (So, use Option 1.)

The following comes from the Flickr Community Guidelines,

Do link back to Flickr when you post your Flickr content elsewhere.
The Flickr service makes it possible to post content hosted on Flickr to outside web sites. However, pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr.

Pretty straightforward, yes?

Here’s one explanation of why you should link your embedded images back to the Flickr photo page from an employee,

The link-back-to-Flickr rule is there as part of a trade off: we allow people to reference image files hosted on our servers and pay for the bandwidth in exchange for some exposure.

So, there you have it. If you embed Flickr hosted images onto external websites (i.e. not Flickr) without linking the photo back to the photo page then you’re breaking the guidelines, taking without paying or in other words stealing.

In fact, you’d be no better than someone who hotlinks to other peoples images without permission and even has the cheek to serve the images from the owner’s website so it uses up the bandwidth that they’re paying for.

If you want to post your Flickr hosted images into a forum, the HTML code provided in option 1 probably isn’t going to work as HTML is usually stripped out of forum posts for a number of reasons. Usually, the alternative is to use forum BB code which may allow you to post images depending on the rules of that particular forum.

To make it a little bit easier to use the HTML code from option 1, I’ve coded up a little tool to convert Flickr embedded Image option 1 HTML to BB Code. The converted code ought to work on the most popular forum systems. Let me know if it doesn’t and I’ll see about changing it.