Today, I did my first “maternity photoshoot” with my sister Mary, and her husband Mark.  We had a lot of fun (and rather a lot of ice cream soda!)

I’ll link to the rest of the shots once they’ve had a chance to look at them.

I hurt my back on Wednesday, and haven’t really felt like taking any photos this week, so it’s a return to “black background closeup photo of a thing” for Stus Challenge entry this week.

My back’s feeling a lot better (and is now merely “stiff” rather than “stabby pains”) so there’s a chance I might try a little harder this week.  I hope it’s a seasonal challenge.

I’ve decided that I’m not making nearly enough effort with Stus Tuesday Challenges, and now that I’m not doing photo-a-day I’m getting lazy and sloppy with my camera. So rather than one half-hearted attempt from me this week, I’m going to try and take a photo a day that fits the theme – and then Stu can have the best of the bunch.

The theme is “Blue” which strikes a chord for me this week.  I’ll not go into details though, this isn’t LiveJournal.

That’s it!  Done.  Over.  Fin.

I’ve taken and published a photo a day for the whole of 2008!  That’s 366 photos (bloody leap years) Wow.

A huge thankyou goes to everyone who’s been following this, feeding me ideas and giving me support, especially on the days when I didn’t feel like taking a photo.  I feel I’ve learnt a lot over the last year, and my skills have certainly improved (although there is still a lot of room for further improvement!)

I can have a day off tomorrow!  That’s going to feel weird.

Where next?  I’m not sure.

I think I’m going to continue to take a camera with me everywhere I go, and this photoblog will continue in some form – although I’m going to aim for quality rather than quantity and only publish images I’m truly happy with.  I may start posting links and/or some more wordy stuff as well, we’ll see how it goes.

My photography aims for 2009 are pretty much:
- More Portraiture.  I need to learn how to work with models, it’s a gap which I’ve struggled to fill.
- Keep working on the lighting.  I’ve still got so much more to learn about lighting!  I really need to hook up with the Bristol Strobist crowd (Less gear, more brains!) – they’ll probably be able to help with that first aim as well.
- Update my workflow.   The Gimp has served me reasonably well for the last year, but I’m frequently hitting it’s limits.  I lack a decent RAW processing solution, and my “file by date” approach is making it hard to find the shots I want in the archive.
- See if there’s a way I can feel at home on flickr.

Any thoughts/comments/favourite images from 2008 – hit the comments.

Happy new year everyone :-)

I had a day of outdoorsy diy today.

I gave the  new door for the shed a coat of primer, tidied up the worst of the front garden, did some (much overdue) deadheading, gave various lavender bushes haircuts, cleared out the herb garden, did some digging, cropped some (also much overdue) salad potatoes, cleaned and cleared away my bean poles, and a few other bits besides.

I topped up two of my three compost bins so they’re now full, and I’ve got a pile of woody stuff that needs burning.  I tried to burn some of it, but it’s a little green and there was quite a bit of smoke.  I think I’ll try it again in a couple of weeks.

Oh, and my kettle has died!  I think it’s a lose connection or something as the fuse is ok.  I’ve only had it 3 years, that’s not long enough in my opinion.  Good job I’ve got a whistling camping kettle though – otherwise I would have had to go without tea!

A fix will be attempted before I buy a replacement though…

I’m counting down the days until 2008 is over!

I’ll try to get out and about for the last two photos, to make them a bit more interesting.  I can’t guarantee I’ll manage it as I’ve got quite a list of DIY jobs to get done as well!

J’s borrowed the car for the week, and I was due to be at my parents house mid afternoon for the last round of this years Christmas present swapping.

That’s a 3.3mile walk (and about an hour if you take the hills into account) according to google maps.  That route is rather boring though so I went the long way round, through some local park/woodland, through a cemetry, then another park – all in all I took 2 hours 40 minutes.

I wasn’t exactly powerwalking though, and I did stop several times to take photos.  Such as the above.  It’s actually two exposures, shot handheld and realigned in post-processing, then carefully masked to highlight the beech leaves and spots of sunlight on the trunks.

It doesn’t look too bad at this size, but if you look at the original file you can see I didn’t *quite* rotate it accurately enough – but given that Gimp doesn’t let you onionskin while rotating this is as close as I can get.

I’ve spent most of the last 4 hours staring at something approximating the above photo trying to work out why on earth my blog has gone tits up recently.

I *think* I’ve tracked it down to a combination of over enthusiastic search engine spiders, some rather intensive image resizing code, and a wordpress plugin which is ignorant of my image caching. That little lot have been using up all my cpu/memory resource allocation on my webhost.

I have taken a couple of steps to reduce the problem, and the site is at least viewable now, but it does mean I’m really going to have to rethink the backend of this site in the new year.

The last photo of my cat for 2008 – I prommise!

Christmas day was hectic as usual, and I didn’t get around to shooting anything until late evening.  Hence the not-particularly-christmassy photo above