It has been quiet here

IT HAS been somewhat quiet over here due to being busy in work and being away. More on that again. Part of that involved me going to Washington DC for a conference where I had a ball and in the meantime here's one or two photographs from the weekend. What a beautiful city.

I've also been doing a bit of messing about on photoshop, trying to upskill. Though at times I am a bit guilty going that bit further on the post processing than I should, I am learning and enjoying it. I don't like to do too much, usually just brightening and a little colour balance, no more than I would do in a darkroom while printing. But I have also trying a little experimenting with burning in to varying (laughing at that) degrees of success. Eh I can't say the same about my panoramas :( There doesn't seem to be many successes. But I keep trying.

Some of these varying degrees of success are down to the splendid screen on my Mac, how things look here are not how they look on my PC in work. Still it is all a learning curve and nothing at all that isn't repairable.

Over the last couple of weeks I have also bought a lot of stuff, course I did some spending while in the States, nothing too major but involving an ipod for the Young Wan who is delighted and part of the noise that saw her banned to her bedroom in the last post. Before heading to the States I bought a reflector on ebay, more moo cards (I will blog about that in the next day or two and the excellent customer service) and some Blurb books.

I have been toying with getting a Blurb book since I saw them promoted on Flickr. Making a book is easy, it can be time-consuming but easy. You download a programme to your computer and with a little fiddling and some fun layout your own book. It is quite easy to use, the programme tells you when images are too small, you can layout pics across pages, have whatever colour background you want, add text; the programme really is cool.

I was talking to Elly one night when she mentioned about getting her wedding pics done and how to get them done and I mentioned the books and only recently saw that she did order them and they look wonderful. I took photographs at my brother's wedding many years ago and I was thinking recently how better the pics would have looked in such a splendid book. Anyway as it was it looked good.

The books I ordered are gorgeous, I did one for a pal featuring herself and her near two-year-old, one for me :) and one for pals in Galway. My Galway pal was somewhat suspicious when I texted her a couple of times asking about the spelling of one her kid's name and even if I give you a quick glimpse she will still have no clue that I did the book as she doesn't swing by here ;)

I was going to post it down to her but I think I will save it until I can give to her face to face because I am proud of it and want to see her reaction for myself. I have many plans for more of these books, they are a joy to behold and if you have been thinking about making one, do; and if you don't know what I am talking about, check them out for yourself. I'll post pics of the books tomorrow.