I was quite surprised by how well some of the pictures from my little canon iXUS 85 turned out.
Set to 'Night Snap' mode, and flash turned off. Only a little re-touching (levels, vibrancy and cropping) in Photoshop and they are now available for all to see here:
Can be found on my website
The first lot are from Alex’s SCUBA diving lesson, the few remaining ones are all I managed to take before the camera died!
Well sort of.
1) New Painting. As mentioned previously I have just ordered a new Mark Spain artwork for the lounge. I now have a delivery date of 21st of April, so I have two weeks to ensure that the decoration etc. is complete.
Today we went to the Halcyon gallery in Birmingham, where they were opening their "Figurative Collection" show, and we had chance to meet non other than Mark Spain himself. A really nice guy, and the free champagne was rather nice too.
2) New HDD for the PC. Lofty is in the process of reconfiguring his Media Centre PC, and as a result has a couple of 500 GB HDD's going spare. I have taken one of them off his hands for the princely sum of £40.
I intend to put this new drive (well 12 month old actually) in this PC, and take the opportunity to completely reload Windows Vista. I currently have C: on a 75 GB drive, and D:, P: and M: on a 240 GB drive. The plan is to go to a single large C: on the 500 GB, with data, pictures and music in the My Documents, My Pictures and My Music, and use the 240 GB drive as a backup device for those three locations.
... since I last posted here? Good grief, time flies when you are having fun!
'What's been going on?' I hear you cry, well not a lot actually. Currently decorating the lounge, in advance of a new painting - 'A Moment of tranquility' by Mark Spain
Ceiling and woodwork has been painted, walls have been re-papered with textured paper, and one wall has actually been emulsion'd to finished colour. Still not 100% sure on other wall's or curtain colour, so some work left to do yet.
Apart from that, not a lot... Tidied out my CD collection for a recent 'Car Boot' sale, sold about 100 CD's - still *way* too many left really.
Not too much time off from work, but work itself has been pretty quiet. That's the 'end of financial year' effect - it's either completely mad, or deadly quiet, depending on wether there is any telecom's budget left to be spent before April!
Took a day trip to see Lofty one day, he is now separated from his wife, and filling for divorce. It's the happiest we have seen him in years!
Have been spending quite a lot of time on Photoshop, working my way thro' the tutorials in Matt Kloskowski's "Layers - The complete guide to Photoshop's most powerful feature', and a couple of online training courses ay Lynda.com. I have been really interested in the area of 'retouching' and now need to get the camera out and take some good pic's on Amy and Alex so I have some material to work on!
The Beta version of Lightroom 2.0 is now out, and I have taken the opportunity to start from scratch again withLR. I started importing pictures into LR before I really understood what was going on, and as such - it was always a bit of a mess. Lets see if I can do better this time!
Golf has been a bit thin on the ground in March, every time I had a day off, the weather was terrible. Never mind, with the clocks going forwards, evenings are fair game again now ;-) - at least they will be once the decorating is finished...
Unlike me, Amanda does not take many pictures when away, but the few she took can be viewed online at
http://photoalbum.rockbox-themes.org/Fuerteventura2008/index.html
http://www.redbreva.com/Photography/Purple-Glass.jpg (1680 x 1050)
Looks *really* good with the Vista Aero transparency enabled. Based on the "Colour of the Year" Pantone 18-3943, a clouds filter and a texture filter complete the work ;-)
Put the feeding station up in the garden last autumn, and it has been well used by both a family of robins and several varieties of tit. This is the first time I have managed to get a good picture of any of them feeding. They have got used to us being around now, and will continue to feed when we walk past them - as long as we don't get too close of course.
