Freshly eaten, or newly hatched?

Paul and I went for a little walk in the field closest to our house, so that Paul could take some photographs of  me wearing the skirt that I drafted and made today.

Just as we were going home again, he pointed out this little white egg.

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Scanning Things In.

Today I have been mostly Scanning Things In.
I promised Rob that I’d send him a pile of photographs of Things We Did Together. As he’s still very much paper-based and all of my recent photos are online, it made sense that I’d scan the photos in and send the originals to him.

I was a bit nervous about this at first. My photos! But as soon as I started to see the results of the scanning, I was more than happy to keep my old photographs in digital form. At 300 dpi, you can see a lot more detail than you can at 6 x 4″.

These two are from Exeter Cathedral (1998) and Cardiff Castle (2001), respectively.

I’ve scanned in almost 200 photos so far, and there are still more to go through. Most of them are set to “private” on Flickr at the moment, as I haven’t yet checked with Rob whether or not he’s happy for them to be shared.

If you fancy a bit of amusement though, there are two galleries full of beer-fuelled shennanigans over on Facebook, in the form of lots of parties at the Hobgoblin. My photos are from 1995 to 2001, although I’m sure I’m still missing a box somewhere. The galleries are here and here. I don’t think you need to be signed in to Facebook or me on my Friends list to see them. Let me know if that’s not the case?

What I’m wondering now is what on earth am I going to do with all my photos?! I’ve got absolutely hundreds of the damn things, all stored away in boxes, and I never look at them.

I think my first challenge is to get them all scanned in, and all backed up onto CDs. That way I have two digital versions of them, as well as the paper ones that I’m still keeping. I’d quite like to do more with the paper ones than just shove them back in a box though. I recently inherited lots of family photos from my two Grandmas, so it would be quite nice to put together some new albums with those pictures shuffled into the chronological order.

I took all my photos out of their albums many years ago, as I was using those self-adhesive ones, and was worried about the photos being damaged. I have some lovely new albums, old-fashioned ones with black pages, but I haven’t got around to doing anything with them.

As always, I think this is something I’m going to have to work on in my Spare Time. I have plenty of access to the scanner this week though, so at least I can get a move on with that part.

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Knitting and photography.

I’ve just been updating my projects on Ravelry, and apparently I have completed 40 projects since I started knitting in 2005. Does that seem like a lot? And that doesn’t even include all the things I’ve unravelled, or the things I’m knitting right now!

Here are my two most recent knitting photographs:

The jacket on the left is Murmur, from Rowan’s The Next Big Thing book. Sadly it’s another one of those unfortunate incidents you often find when knitting or sewing – you spend lots of time, money and effort making a thing, only to discover when it’s finished that you don’t like it, or it doesn’t suit you.

So, it fits chest 36-40″, and it’s for sale! £40, or I’ll happily trade for 6 balls of Colinette Point 5. Any colourway, I’m not fussy. ;)

The purple scarf on the right is The Yarn Harlot’s One Row Handspun Scarf. It will shortly be going up on Etsy for $30/£15, unless anyone really wants to grab it first?

I appreciate that it’s not really scarf weather, which is why I also took some photos of my most recent little felted bag. It’s in the same colourway as the jacket above, but I could not for the life of me get a good photograph of it.

Paul’s gone off to America with work, and he didn’t want to take his SLR with him, so I’ve lent him my little compact camera for the week. To begin with I was quite excited about playing around with Paul’s Canon EOS 350D. And then I tried to use it. Ugh, what a pain!

For a start off, it weighs a ton, which is not very useful when you’ve got a sore wrist. Then I discovered that Paul had left the 70 mm macro lens attached, which is no use at all when you’re trying to take a picture of a whole jumper! I managed to change the lens to a 55-200 mm one, and discovered that I still had to stand approximately eighty-seven miles away from the jumper if I wanted it to be in focus. I also have a headache from squinting through the viewfinder.

I think the only thing I liked about using this camera was the short depth of field you get from these particular lenses. I can only achieve that with my camera when it’s on the macro or super-macro settings, and then it won’t focus if you’re more than 20-100 mm away from the subject.

Obviously my little Pentax Optio A30 has its limitations. It’s fiddly to focus it manually, you can’t change the lens, and it doesn’t shoot in RAW format if you want to fiddle with your photos in an artistic manner after you’ve taken them. But I love the large screen instead of a viewfinder, I love that you can choose to use all of the settings manually if you want to, and the super-macro setting is very good. (The “face recognition” software is rubbish though.)

Paul and I went for another walk round the lake yesterday, and Paul took some more lovely photos of birds. I was feeling quite envious of his camera and photography skills, and went back through some of my old pictures to find ones that I’d taken with the film SLR. There were some lovely ones in there, but I think I’ve taken some much nicer photos with my little Optio than I ever did with my old SLR.

In fact, my old Olympus OM10 (Quartz) has been sitting under the bed, mostly unused in the last ten years. Perhaps it’s time to dig it out and sell it on.

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Wonderful Wilderness Walk.

This afternoon, after we’d become bored with scraping the dirt off the house, Paul and I went for a walk in The Wilderness. It’s part of the University campus, and somewhere I spent quite a lot of time when I was a student.

Paul took photographs, and I talked to geese. :)

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The Great Outdoors.

It’s almost spring!

It was very cheering to pass this little splash of colour on a cold, grey morning.

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