It’s hot a whole lot different to any other Eddie photo but I love this one because the lighting somehow seems perfect, and depth is great and it looks somehow soft and pleasant in a way I can’t even explain.

I created this to be our family Christmas card for the year that has just passed. It was a nightmare to photograph. The fake snow is polystyrene packaging crumbled up. Oh and when they say never work with children and animals they are speaking the truth. In the end I gave up trying to photograph them both together I ended up doing Eddie afterwards and photoshopping him in.

More photoshopping was done to add bloominess style and darken the background to make it feel moor outdoorsy in a way.

Eddie isn’t in a good way, he’s become incredibly submissive, I can prod and poke him in ways that irritate him madly normally, resulting in deep bloody bites, but at the moment he just bows his head and sighs. Tears my heart apart.

Want proof, well that pic has him rejecting a Pollo pizza, and you see that blue bell shaped toy around his neck? It’s filled with fresh chicken…. he hasn’t touched it.

I was really blown away by how lovely the region is both aesthetically and in terms of friendliness.  The countryside there is very welcoming towards walkers, well set up paths, styles and all that.  They have a hilly area of country there called the Quantock’s, which offers up some great views.

We went to many pubs and none were trashy, all well looked after with the friendliest publicans you will find anywhere.  Best of all, every single person in Somerset seems to love dogs, every pub allowed them in, even in the restaurant areas, no where up north seems to let you bring a dog anywhere near.  Even the pubs which served expensive food welcomed Eddie with open arms, really really good food too, a sample of dishes I had in these places would be…  Monkfish, John Dory, Scallops, Rabbit and lamb (with a historically creamy parsnip mash!), um I didn’t all that in one evening lol. All with Eddie at my feet.

Downside would be that Somerset seems to have the worst mobile data reception ever. Earlier in the year we stayed in Wales and the cottage had wi-fi, thing is I don’t think it was intended for us, but it was unencrypted so I can’t really complain that the cottage in Somerset had no such luxury.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get a decent data connection from my mobile either (I hook my mobile to my iBook when away to get proper internet).  In Wales I could get a really solid connection via GPRS and at good speeds, I could download all sorts at a good 40KB’s.  In Somerset I couldn’t get above 5KB’s (is that WAP speed?) and it would only ever stay connected for about 5 minutes.   Hence why I never bothered to blog.

Actually, I would have hoped to have the photo’s all done but I went a bit mad with the camera.  I’ve got 576 photos to master and thats with the out-of-focus, blurred, overexposed etc deleted.

Uh oh.

First I bought a flash, ‘cos the built in one is too harsh and there isn’t much you can do with it.  Also, for some reason you can only push the shutter up to 1/250 when using the built in affair which ain’t no good with my shaky knuckles.  I bought the Olympus FL-36 which is their mid-level one.  Also to go with it I got a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce.  Which is a peice of frosted plastic you shove over the flash to soften the blow.  Other neat things you can do is rotate it so that it bounces off walls, but I haven’t quite mastered the art.  I’ve no idea what I’m doing really.

When the flash is in the neutral position you can hear it moving some optic around inside its skull as you zoom in and out of things.  No idea what thats all about.

The other piece of nuttiness I’ve gotten is that lens I wanted.  I couldn’t resist it, it was eating me up inside.  It’s a lovely looking object, got a sort of matt look to it, and boy is it heavy.  Thing is at first I was totally dissapointed, I couldn’t even get it to focus on the right things. I even took a photo to demonstrate the problem I was having, and opened a support ticket with the store I bought it from.  The photo is here, and the deal is, I was focusing on where the spoon meets the ruler.

But after using it more I freaking love it, it’s like a game.  I don’t think it’s faulty but that it’s more um, quirky.  I might have sussed it, I shall now talk a load of crap.  I think that there aren’t enough stops around the focusing mechanism for the shallowness of the depth of field.  So I reckon the trick is, take a photo, see if the spoon is in focus, if it isn’t shuffle yer feet forwards or backwards a tiny tiny bit and have another go, hoping the new position will fall into a possible focus position.

Did that make sense?  I haven’t a clue.  Tell you what though I just love the photo’s I can get from it.  As usually Eddie is my subject, with this lens I can make really soft pastelly portraits of him that make him look verging on the sexy!

Some photos taken with it. 

Nice bus stop, see that number?  I think it’s a mobile number, maybe virgin.  Anyway, darez you to call it.  Remember if you’re international to prefix 044 and knock off the first 0.

It was a bittersweet walk for Eddie, the urban sites and sounds were interesting for him, but through the people busy thoroughfare’s (and the sales are on) he got a bit stressed out and went into this odd clearing-his-nose fit that he does when he’s really freaked out.  Actually, speaking of this, can any vet’s explain to me what he’s doing?

Almost everyone it was sent to phoned up to say “OMG I loved the card!”.

Problem is now we’ve done it once, we’re going to have to make a custom christmas card every year from now on.

Amazon are very manipulative, no wonder they are so successful, I had never heard of Marley & Me, and then I visited amazon one day and there it was in my recommendations.  I knew what amazon were saying, scarily it was “Hey, somehow we know you have a dog and look here, a book with a cute doggy on the cover!  Buy it now.”  It’s the true story of a florida journalist who gets a labrador who grows up to have some major behavioural problems.  It’s as bitter-sweet as a story can be, and by the end I had such tears pouring down my face that I could barely see through them to keep reading.  As soon as I finished the last page I dropped the book to the floor and went running downstairs to the kitchen where Eddie sleeps of a night to give him a big hug, which he wasn’t best pleased about because I had to wake him for it.

Eddie does a good Che Guevara.. My newly found obsession with photography is getting more expensive. I now have the DSLR, the kit 14-45mm lens, a tripod and from today a remote control so that I can take pictures on the tripod without risking shaking the camera when pressing the shutter release. The next purchase will be a 45-150mm lens. And then maybe even a macro. Crikey. Well, I say expensive but I’m still a tight arse, I saved a fiver, yes 5 square pounds by purchasing the remote second hand on Ebay. I’m slightly regretting being so stingy though because I’m not finding it to be terribly reliable. I dunno if the battery is running low or what, but I doubt that because it’s supposed to last 5 years and an obscene amount of uses before the battery fails. Hmm, I suppose it’s possible it has been pressed continuously during transit or storage. Also, the zoom and exposure buttons don’t do anything, only the shutter button, I don’t need them though so I don’t care about this. Also, it didn’t come with the instructions and I had to scour the t’internet for a PDF.

KDE on Mac. Someone, or some people have ported KDE, and the QT foundation to Mac OS X. This is more than just an X11 recompile and I’m quite excited about the possiblities. When you launch one of the KDE apps it fits in really well with the Mac environment, the app’s icon is displayed in the Dock as it should be and the app’s menu bar correctly uses the mac’s at the top of the screen rather than being contained within the window. This is a great step in the right direction for a true cross-platform GUI, and one that doesn’t rely on some smelly, slow interperated language. I think this was it but now i’m not entirely sure because i tried it a week or so ago and forgot to note the URL. Sorry Susan.
Tesco Office. Tesco, the UK’s #1 supermarket, a shop which makes me shudder… is going to be selling it’s own branded cut-price software, including an Office clone and some anti-virus security bundle. When I first heard about this I thought oooooh I bet it’s OpenOffice, that’ll do the open source crowd some great PR. Unfortunately it isn’t, Tesco’s Office is going to be based on Ability Office, which as far as I can tell is a Windows only wanky shameful MS Office rip-off.