marc.vic.max.elliot

I got fifth place last night at the camera club competition   The judge was a wedding photographer so I had a feeling that portraits would do well and I was screwed   All in all an enjoyable night with everyone agreeing that the winning photograph was not the best – that’s right, not a single person agreed with the judge!

On another topic the virus that got sent to us is doing the rounds so for anyone that’s noticing some weird email activity go to this page to read about what it looks like and how to deal with it. It also has a removal tool that you can use so that’s handy.

I have my second photography club comp tomorrow.  The theme and format is totally open so it should be very interesting. I like these comps as I get to see other peoples work and get my own critiqued by the professional that they pay to be judge for the night.

As I have mentioned previously I’m not very happy with what I have submitted. I have lost a bit of my photographic eye lately and so will just be making up the numbers I expect. We’ll see……

Another thing I am going to do is write a critique of each of my shots before the comp. It will be interesting to see if the faults that I pick up are the same as the pros………

I’ll let y’all know how I get on on Wednesday.

The PC is rebuilt at last but what a long and involved process!

At first I just re-installed XP.  This worked but the anti-virus software that I bought in the weekend was still picking up the virus that originally started me off down this track…….

On saturday morning I also bought an external hard drive.  This is VERY cool. I got a Momobay CX2 and put a 40GB HDD in it.  This connects to your PC via USB or Firewire and looks just like another hard drive. Anyway – thais allowed me to back up all my data and scan them before formatting my two internal HDD’s

Then I thought I’d be clever – I knew that NT was a pretty fast install and was also the only one that would boot off CD. One install later and I was ready to “upgrade” to XP. Oops, you need SP5 or greater before you can upgrade and I only had SP4 – damn!  OK, lets upgrade to Win2K then – yep, that works….now we can put XP on – phew! WinNT, Win2K and WinXP all in the space of about 3 hours.

Now came the apps.  Antivirus s/w first :emb: Photoshop, MS office and that’s all for the moment…………

Oh, and I almost screwed it all up by trying out a boot screen manager

The PC rebuild is going slowly.  I’ve discovered that my modem isn’t supported under XP! As far as I can tell the only reason it worked so far is that I had it installed under Win2k and it kept the driver after the upgrade. I’m doing this from work (shhhhhh!) and so I’ll have a look for a driver from here. It certainly is strange not having web access at home!

Wanna see how big Vic’s getting? Here you go.  I think she looks lovely

Bugger! 🙁

One of the reasons for no recent posts is the fact that I’m rebuilding my PC after getting my first virus (the other is having nothing interesting happening) so I would like to preemptively apologise to anyone that has received an email from me with a screen-saver of some sort attached don’t open it! It creates all sorts of weird .dll files that are full of your email addresses and stops your anti-virus s/w working………

It’s a bugger as well because I need to work on a couple of pictures for the next photo club competition. You might remember that I came first and second in my first comp which was a bit embarrassing :emb:  Luckily (?) there is no way that this will happen this time – the shots I’m going to use are not really up to scratch but I’m going to enter them just to get them critiqued by a pro. 

Vic and I spent the morning at the hospital today.  After having two urine tests at the doctors that showed high glucose levels the midwife booked her in for a test to see if she had Gestational Diabetes.

We had to be at the hospital at 08:00 this morning and Vic wasn’t allowed to eat anything after 22:00 last night. Being a breakfast kind of person this went down like a cup of cold sick   

The test is quite bizarre – they take a blood sample, make you drink 500ml of a sugar packed drink (in this case Lucozade), wait two hours and then take another blood sample.  After 20 minutes the results were ready and in our case everything was fine – phew!

Fidget’s living up to her/his name and Vic is thinking that he/she has moved head down now (most of the time) She was getting quite uncomfortable with Fidget lying sideways and her belly took on some very strange shapes at times……

oh and my new macro lens has turned up at the shop :vbg:

Up at 05:30, a 350 mile, 7? hour round trip and I’m back at home only to discover that I got another POTD at www.digitalphotocontest.com The original looks a lot better than the one on the web, I think they compress the photos a bit more than I would have thought…….. This picture was about 15 minutes work in Photoshop. I was playing around one day and the idea popped into my head – I only entered it as a bit of a joke

YAY! – Vic’s back from Philly and seems to have really enjoyed herself   She didn’t seem to go too mad and even managed to buy me a top from Nautica between kitting Fidget out in Gap and herself in Lord & Taylor……. The main thing is she’s back though :vbg:

Man I have a couple of busy days ahead – on both days I have meetings that are four hours drive away 🙁  Eight hours driving each day – crazy! At least I’m busy though.

Just to finish the day off here’s a couple of recent photo’s.  They’re both taken on Kodak Ektachrome and scanned into the PC. I have printed them at about 8×10 and the shot of the bust looks quite striking. I have even got the hang of the matt cutter I got for my birthday so they have nice cardboard surrounds!

  
click the images for a larger versions