Square-ified! (or thats what I call it)

Something a little different this weekend, some images I have made... well square-ish for want of a better discripition.
Enjoy.
Wayne

Mobile phones again!

Yes I'm going to moan about mobile phones yet again, those who follow this blog will know I haven't had much luck with my mobile phones in the past.
You see first of all the signals pretty crap here in Wales. Yesterday was about the first time in months I actually had a proper conversation whilst moving without getting cut off part way through.
Then there's the phones themselves, I want a mobile phone to make calls while I'm out and about, I don't need Internet access on a 2 inch screen, I don't need an MP3 player, I don't even really need a camera (I usually have a proper one with me) The phone now is trying to hard to be everything to everyone, but failing at it's original function of actually being any good at making phone calls.
Then theres the issue of do we really want to be in constant touch? To be brutally honest I'm getting fed up with being on constant call to anybody who wants to call me, even driving home is a pain in the arse with a barrage of calls and messages making you stop to answer or read them.
Yes they are bloody handy in an emergency but the rest of the time time they can be a right royal pain!

World cup fever

Well world cup fever is over for another year, and what have we learned?
Well we learned that those stupid horn things should be banned.
Mars bars really don't sell so well with the English flag on them.
That England can't win the world cup no matter how much the publicity machine says they will before the game.
That the team manager is always at fault even though he's not actually playing football on the day. And that an octopus proved about the best judge of who was going to win, and he received death threats for heavens sake!

ACDsee pro 3 longer term review

Well I have been using it for a week or so now and I'm not sure whether it's an improvement or not. You see I like the new interface, and I like the non distructive editing, but I'm not fussed on it creating duplicates of everything, and the batch functions seen a lot less sensible to use, indeed I have hardly managed to get it to bacth properly at all, rotate doesn't seem to have any proper effect, once you open the pics in the editor it turns them back the way they were!
Not really impressed so far.

War in Afghanistan at critical stage

The war in Afghanistan has reached a critical stage, U.S. General David Petraeus said Sunday.
Wow that will come as a surprise to all the soldiers fighting out there! I'll bet they had never noticed things were a bit dodgy, indeed they have been for the best part of the last nine years. Most would argue that things will probably not get much better either, Afghanistan has never been successfully invaded in it's history, even Russia with it's massive resources failed to bring it under it's control, the people there are proud and have a long history of fighting for their freedom, time is also on their side, it doesn't matter if it takes them 50 years they will wear down their enemy and drive them out.
Then there's the question of whether British troops should be there in the first place. 9/11 was the reason given, even though 15 of the 19 hi-jackers were claimed to be from Saudi Arabia (we haven't invaded there) and Osama Bin Laden seems long gone (even the video tapes have dried up) My guess is he died some time ago.

Rollerblading !

One of my less onerous duties this week was to
photograph a female rollerblading team, it was a
good laugh and they are pretty good at it too.
Here's one shots of Miranda trying to look "well hard!" and a pics of them towing each other.
Be afraid other teams... very afraid!

ACDSee pro 3 review

ACDCee pro 3 is the latest version of the software.
Now as any regular followers of this blog will know I LOVE my photoshop, that said I do use other software as well, Adobe lightroom for one and ... Yes ok I'll admit it I do use ACDSee as well. Now I find I use it as a follow up to lightroom for editing large batches, it's quicker and easier than the time consuming import and export with lightroom, for "tweeking" any images I'm not happy with.
The newest version 3 has quite a few changes, the interface looks a lot different to the old one, in some ways it's more like lightroom.
One feature I have loved since it first appeared is the light equliser, a sort of souped up shadow/highlight control, the main difference is that in ACDSee you have a load of sliders to ajust different tones rather than just shadow or highlights of the photoshop one , this gives much finer control in my opinion, something photoshop should adopt!