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I had to change the theme as it was seriously broken in IE7. I can't be bothered to try to fix it / sort it at the moment so I'll leave it on this one for a while. I'll think about updating it when I don't ahve loads of coursework to do and an exam to prepare for.

This theme is seriously bright though.....it just might be too bright...

Here we are having just been for a huge hike. The sun is going down and I've been able to check my hotmail messages for $2.
Hope Matt has been able to turn on the central heating. We had an email saying what problems he was having. Having to type quickly as the money is running out of the time on the computer. All going well, John and I are still talking, weather is a lot colder than we expected but they say their winter has been a bad one this year. We've seen lots of lambs plus a few dead ones. Having to look to see if their tails have yet been docked to save them from flystrike, so I'm told.

We're off again this morning to New Zealand for a month. Wifi points are few and far between there so possibly no contact till November. We've hired thesame type of motorhome as we had last year from Maui company but will possibly stay in the South Island this time and explore more as this was our favourite of the two Islands. The bags, laptop and cameras are packed and we are off to Heathrow at 9am. Matt is looking after the cats and garden but I don't expect much gardening to be done. Currently there are hundreds of spiders spinning webs everywhere and we all know how Matt likes spiders!!!

I shot this panorma some time ago while on a business trip to Germany. I managed to get into Berlin one evening and subsequently took a lot of pictures of the architecture. I've put more effort in to this picture than it was really worth on the basis that I've learnt a lot while producing it. It was three images handheld at 18mm x 1.6 crop factor. There was some significant mismatching in the stones making up the foreground which I've repaired although if you look really carefully you might just be able to spot an oddity that I've left in! The image has also changed a lot since it started. I started off doing it in colour with a natural look (it was taken in the early evening so it was lightened a bit). I then started going with a bit more of a fantasy look with more of an overdone HDR look (although looking at some peoples HDRs you have to wonder whether there is a limit to how far you can push them into fantasy-land). The final image is obviously black and white and I'm personally more happy with it this way. Taking this image through a process of evolution has been interesting in making me more aware of what sort of look I like and given me lots of (not necessarily wanted) practice at masking!

Cross

A photo to honour the death of the 250ish spam comments I just deleted out of my approval queue and the IP address I have subsequently banned from the site. It's still trying to add stuff (you can tell by the number of guests online and the site slowing down every so often). You'd think they'd give up after a while but apparently not.

Now that I've finally got my coursework out of the way I've had time to have a go at sorting out some of the photos that I took at my brother Mat's graduation on the 1st of September. The light was pretty harsh and trying to get my brothers to pose for photos in which they both look at the camera and smile at the same time is difficult but there are some reasonable ones. It was a good day out, we all got to be proud of the 'baby of the family' and the 'baby' seemed to enjoy himself. Now if I could just get both my brothers to smile!

If you're wondering why my computer for the first time in forever is not 'online' it's because my internet connection is down. I'm updatating this from my bro's computer in Reading who I'm visiting this weekend. I'd update from work with a placeholder message such as this but unfortunately my workplace classifies my site as 'unsuitable' for viewing and denies access to it with an error page that implies you've done something hideous like you've tried to look for warez or donkey porn ! This wouldn't bother me so much if this site was actually controversial. Then being denied access would be cool - like a badge of honour, rather than just an annoyance and slightly sad. Ciao for now...

My parents bought me a flight in a balloon as a Christmas and Birthday present last year and Saturday was the day I was scheduled to fly. My mum had organised for me to take a flight during one of the launches at the Bristol Balloon Fiesta. After checking the weather reports on the Friday night it didn't seem likely that a Saturday morning launch would take place but given no cancellation message on the balloon company's weather check line I dutifully turned up to the launch meeting point at 05:30 on the Saturday.

.....Cleaning the sensor of your camera in preparation for an amazing photo and life opportunity, accidently dropping a big blob of wet cleaning solution onto the sensor and watching it leave a big mark.

Examining the resultant photos from the camera and seeing a huge smear mark all along the longest edge of the picture.

Trying to clean it with a swab and seeing the circular type mark turn into a long smear.

Spending the next hour carefully erasing the mark using a 'speckgrabber', the tool that dumped the rogue cleaning solution from a crevice that hadn't emptied fully of solution after cleaning it.

Moral of the story: don't just check the Speckgrabber twice that it's dry before sticking it on the sensor - check a third time!

Irony of the story: the two dust specs that I was trying to clean off before 'the incident' are still present! After having my heart in my throat for so long - I think I can live with the cloning task on this weekend's photos.

I've finally started looking at some of the pictures that I took when I visited the British International Motor Show 2006. It took me a while to identify this car as in all the links that I clicked on the Beaulieu website I didn't manage to spot the obvious! I finally identified it by stumbing on an entry for a classic car aution in the states where one of the lots looked suspiciously like the car I was looking for. Still, nevermind, it got identified in the end. The two photos I took are below. The first - just a record of being there, the second - trying to be more arty! ;-)