Durham

January 6, 2007 · Filed Under Digital photography, England, Holidays · 3 Comments

This is Durham, a city in north eastern England which boasts a castle, university, river and a cathedral, and lots of Italian restaurants somewhat surprisingly. It was a cool and wet day when this photo was taken. I have played with the RGB colour curves to get the photo to look a little brighter as it was a little underexposed. I have also reduced the size of the photo and optimized it for the web. The file size is only 40k now, from its original 1.24megs.

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Tags: Italian, Italy

Falling over

January 6, 2007 · Filed Under Me, Milan, My son · 6 Comments

Yep, I fell over yesterday. Tripped up by an uneven pavement. It happens. Only this time I had my 3.5 year old on my shoulders. All 20+ kilos of him. This meant he came crashing to the ground too. I was horrified because I thought he had fallen on his head. Luckily, deep sigh of relief, he had not hurt himself apart from a slight bump on his head and some scratches. He cried purely because he was frightened, not because he had any injury. As a parent you learn to recognise different types of crying and this lets you understand just how serious an incident has been.

That’s it, our little one is now too big to be carried on my shoulders - I have realised that popping a 20 kg weight around your head does nothing for your stability at all and the consequences of falling over are too frightening to consider. Maybe I’ll dig out the pushchair. Don’t want to do that again.

The victim:

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Tags: Italy

Digicams

January 6, 2007 · Filed Under Digital photography · 2 Comments

I blame Di over on her womanwandering blog for this. Her rather good photos have reawakened my interest in photography. I find digital photography yet more enticing than film photography seeing as I do not have to hang around waiting for films to be developed.

Years ago I met a pro photographer who told me that unless I developed my own films, I would never really see the true results of my photographic labours. This put me off a lot because I really did not have the time, space or money to create a dark room. Enter digicams.

With a digicam you can ‘develop’ photos yourself, with a little help from Photoshop and other similar programs. We already have a point and shoot digicam and it produces some nice, if red-eyed, shots. I now want something a wee bit more advanced. I know Di has an excellent Canon 350 dSLR, but that would be a bit ott for me at the moment, so I am looking at super zoom slr-like digicams.

I’ve been doing some research and have found two contenders - The Fuji Finepix f6500/6000fd and the Canon Powershot S3. Both get good reviews, both have 10x plus zooms and both appear to have lots of ‘tweakability’. However the Canon has IS - image stabilization, and Fuji does not, but the Fuji has a 28mm wide angle ability and a nice large diameter lens, which may well be great for the low or poor light shots I have always wanted to get right. I also have a good Manfrotto tripod sitting around doing nothing, so I could live without IS. Both models do quite well on the ‘noise’ front too, which is important for low light shooting I think.

At the moment I am erring towards the Fuji, that has a RAW function, which may well be available via an unofficial firmware hack which can be found on the www for the Canon.

I think I may well be testing the functionality of my new credit card, if, and when it drops through the letterbox. Then I can add a little bit more pictorial content to this ‘ere blog. My mouth is starting to water at the prospect of getting hold of good camera again. Mmmm.

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