Feature Edition - Ghana

Ghana in West Africa provides a pleasant safe way to discover the best of Africa. With options at low as well as quality prices, even our devaluing pound goes a long way. You can get a good meal for two with drinks for under £5,  hotel rooms from £3 a night and entry fees at similar prices. Being only half way down Africa you can find airfares for under £200 plus taxes. Speaking English and with its clocks running on GMT, this stable ex-British colony with its happy and friendly people, could provide great opportunities for you. It has coastal, lakeside, inland, heritage with most of the castles and forts in Africa, ancient mosques, plus more. It has landscape features such as waterfalls, and wildlife that is truly wild not in farm parks, but in places you can get very close. It has a treetop walk through the canopy of a rain forest and far more. You can also discover hundreds of miles of unspoilt Atlantic beaches and coastline. There is colour everywhere, and for the photographer so many opportunities, including events of all kinds, and a vast array of regional festivals.

Although it welcomes tourists its only international airport is small, the number of visitors its gets is modest, you are unlikely to find when visiting travel agents anyone offering trips here. Outside of visitors from other West African countries, Britain's are the most numerous tourists, but with fewer in a year than many British parks would get in a couple of weeks. Roads, or tracks in many parts are poor, and there is no complete map of roads. You will find a wide range of property styles from state of the art and ex-colonial to many mud hut villages, some that see a car only a very few times a year. Crime is low, and you can safely travel and chat to the friendly people. With the average income for the employed being

around £3 a day, even the poorest person from Britain is a wealthy visitor here.

Camera Images looked at most locations to see where would be a great place that would offer the scope to gain a vast amount of photographic experience fast, was safe, convenient, and unusual enough that your photographs would have wide appeal, and discovered what Ghana had to offer. Last November Keith, Camera Images' most experienced photo tutor visited and using a top local guide and 4 wheel drive vehicle,  got to see a great deal and took over 900 photographs, some of which we are sharing with you now in this special feature edition on Ghana. Camera Images also now offer a VIP Plus 6, 10 and 13 day combined training and experience events on a 1 to 1 basis, for those who would like to get the most out of a trip here in the shortest time. We covered this in an article on Ghana VIP plus training and experience last week.

Today in this feature edition we are introducing you to Ghana, telling you about Camera Images' trip, and showing you many portfolios of photographs taken while there. We have information about going there, about the country and a range of other articles, plus we have location guides on some of its attractions, and listings of festivals.

We are also introducing today, a new part of our development, with the first portal devoted to a country, so that all of the information on Ghana is in one convenient place, and is expandable as we add more articles and location guides. At the same time we are are also introducing the first portfolio sections (galleries), with collections of photographs of a location or to support an article, far more than we could include within the normal page. A Portfolio section will shortly also be added to our main site, and allow us to include far more, and larger photographs to support articles and topics.  If you are a regular reader you will be aware that we have a range of symbols to allow us to tell you in a page that we are sending you to an article, location guide, table or external website as well as much more. The new symbol for the gallery section is .  Our main website that you are on now is photographers-resource.co.uk, but we also have the .com version which up to now has just brought you here. The http://www.photographers-resource.com    version is now an international gateway and will still allow the option to get to this site, but also to go to the national portals as we develop each. You can get directly to the Ghana portal by going to http://www.ghana.photographers-resource.com/  and from the index bar at the top of most of its pages get to both this site, the latest magazine/newsletter and to sections within the Ghana portal. It has its own index, so the Ghana articles and locations are not included in the main site indexes here, although you will find under Ghana a link to the portal. Shortly an addition to this site will allow more direct access to sections here and to portals.

We will have portals for other overseas countries, but chose Ghana to start with as its the ideal place for people to gain their first experience of Africa, with wildlife, heritage, culture and very friendly people and over the coming months we will be showing you how, if you have the time and wish to, you can have a photographic holiday you organise yourself for a fraction of the cost of taking a similar holiday in the UK, plus other half way options, and contacts to make the task easier.

The main home page of the portal has a featured list of articles but there are more articles available from the article section.

So what do we have available to you this week on Ghana:-

Articles

• Ghana - introducing

• Getting to Ghana

• Getting about

• Visas and immigration control

• Health and staying healthy

• Report on Camera Images visit Dec 2008

• Photography training and experience on Ghana

• Funerals in Ghana

• Festivals in Ghana

Location guides

• Larabanga Mosque

• Mystery Stone

• Elmina Castle

• Botel Cottage in Cape Coast - Crocodiles

• Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary

• Mole Park/Motel

• Kakum National Park - Rain Forest

• Bosumtwi Lake (crater lake)

• Kintampo Waterfall

• Nzulezo Stilt Village

• Castles and Forts (list)

Festivals - arranged by month

Reference - wide range reference resources.

Portfolios (Galleries)  - 10 portfolios with 252 photographs

This portal will grow with more location guides, more articles and more being added regularly over the next year. It has its own indexes.

We haven't hyperlinked these from here, so take a look at the Ghana portal to see these, there is a link back to this newsletter.

Within most browsers you can toggle the page area, giving you more usable screen by pressing F11 at the top of the keyboard, pressing it again puts you back into normal mode. With many of our location guides and with the new portfolio/gallery sections we have assumed you will do this, and this allows us to use larger photographs and for you to fit them onto a page.

We have optimised our pages for the most popular page format, but there are many others in use, and a range of screen shapes. Clicking the wheel of your mouse and then turning the wheel before clicking again will often offer the scope to scale a page to fit your own screen arrangement, otherwise taking View from the browser menu and then text size does something very similar.

On the bottom of the newsletter page and the top of most others you will find an additional menu bar that allows you to go to major sections within Photographers Resource, including indexes. It also allows people who have entered from search engines, and can see just the page without the rest of the frame set, to see all the panels properly and for people to be able to include our pages within their website framesets and users to be able to break out of them if they wish.

Above the main part of the menu bar on the left, we show the current date and time here. You can also click on this, allowing you to enter another system that shows you the time anywhere in the world, the weather at each location, sunrise, sets and more for each location. You can also compare times allowing you to plan when to call other countries.

Most if not all hyperlinks on a page have symbols next to them telling you what it is you will get to and identifying with a those that are outside the Photographers Resource system. Other common symbols are feature location guides  ,  location guides   ,  quick location guides   ,  route guides   , tables or lists , articles , and Photographers Resource sections or special features  , and today we have introduced   for galleries. Holding your mouse pointer over these or any of our other symbols shows you what they mean and click on any of them gets you to the key of the current symbols in use.

Location Guide pages contain grids and these are designed to be easy to print, giving the information you may want to take with you. We use generally white backgrounds to make the printing of selected pages and text easier.

We believe in, participate in and support Creative Commons, the sharing of information and images over the internet, our pages are designed to be able to be included or indexed from any system, with linking instructions and other information available from the bottom of most pages. We also provide a text link on most pages that can be copied and entered into most websites to give a direct link to the page. We don't move our pages about, so if you include a page link it will stay current. We prefer you to link to or include our page rather than sections of information, as this is self updating and we update a lot of our pages on an ongoing basis. Obviously if you do take sections of our data, then you must say where you got it from and a link to the page in any event.

Our own images and most of the images from others are also covered by creative commons agreements, meaning that you can often use these at least in some ways for free, and in most cases we have creative commons symbols next to pictures that both tell you what its use is and on clicking these symbols will either tell you more or take you to the source we obtained the picture from. Our own images are usually flagged this means that you can use them for your own use and non commercial uses for free and for a small charge if you want to use it for some business use. Clicking the symbol explains this more fully. 

You can also participate, writing articles, location guides, managing portals or in other ways. You can have your name on items or do so anonymously. Most of the work is done by just two of us, with the occasional item from others, so just think what could be achieved if we could get more people to become involved. If you would like to help but don't have the confidence to take on larger projects, then consider acting as a researcher, assisting us to collect information to update pages with opening hours, prices or other data, or to build listings.

Do you have a favourite country, one that you would like to share information on, produce articles and location guides for, perhaps even managing and editing a portal for that country similar to the new Ghana one. If so then please let us know, we would love to help and encourage you, and this might also be a good launch pad to get involved in travel writing or writing for magazines generally.

As this week was a feature week we have not included any news, next week is a more normal week.