Ever since shooting this week’s Photo Friday entry I’ve had the brain-rotting tune of “The Final Countdown” by Europe in my head.

Hee hee! Now you’ve got it too…

Well, I’ve ordered a strobe lighting kit. From the reading I’ve done so far, it’s going to be a long learning curve trying to get this stuff right. There are as many opinions as there are photographers. I’m going to practice with as many friends and family as will let me, and doubtless I’ll end up with even more huge stockpiles of pictures of Desdog. Not that I’m aiming to usurp William Wegman or anything. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever put this together in my head before. I love photography, and I certainly love Weimaraners, so why do I find some of Wegman’s work faintly creepy?

Aside: three times today, I’ve tried to type the word “curve” and actually typed “curse”. Does that tell you anything? (Other than I’ll never make the typing pool).

What have I been doing? Apart from taking photos of Hem, you mean? :-)

I’m just about caught up after all the excitement starting a week ago tonight when we saw Hem for the first (and only scheduled for us) time this tour in Shepherds Bush. Then we got chatting after the show, like you do, and ended up on the guest list with a photo pass for the next night in Reading, then E mentioned she loves the Beautiful South - no accounting for taste - and so off we went the following night to Nottingham for the third night in a row. Spent the weekend, and most of the first half of this week, knackered. It didn’t help that the Comfort Inn in Reading put us in the crappiest room on the top floor and because of the heat it was far from, ahem, comfortable. We ended up giving up on sleep and leaving at 4 a.m. which of course at least meant that we drove the M4 and M25 quicker than seems decent.

I doubt I’ll be able to see any band, let alone one I love so much, 3 times in a row again any time soon. I haven’t done that since my ligger days in Manchester, over 10 years ago now. It was cool to be able to hear the little details of arrangement they’d rehearsed for the shows, like the longer drum crescendos in Half Acre and so on, through repeated listening. But let’s face it, it was just as cool to get a little wave from Sally when she caught our eye amidst 4000 people…

They got me. The beta of version 3 of DXO Optics Pro was good enough to make me shell out for version 2.2 with the promise of a free upgrade to 3.0 when it comes out. It does a great job of subtly tweaking images to squeeze every last detail and nuance in a semi-automatic way. I’ve a feeling it will help enormously in preprocessing images that I’ll be stitching together in a panorama. Because they profile the exact body/lens combination in detail at every possible aperture for lateral aberration, distortion, softness etc. they can compensate for any small weakness the lens may have. In particular I’m surprised at how much vignetting can be in a shot before you see it clearly. The image still suffers, but the cause is not so clear. Maybe to a profressional photographer it would be, but hey…

We’ve been away in Paris and it’s been fabulous but extremely knackering. Only just got all the photos downloaded and submitted one for PhotoFriday. I will write probably at length about the trip. Just not now. Sleep now. Mmmm.

I really must get to listing the myriad things I’ve photographed and boxed up on eBay. Part of the justification for buying the ol’ D70 was that I’d sell the film body etc. to part finance it. Have I done that yet? Have I knackers.

Once I’ve done that, I need to get my arse in gear actually taking photos, particularly things like participating in PhotoFriday again. Good fun, and it gets you thinking. Or it should: some people seem to think it’s OK to slap pictures of their kids/cats up there no matter what the challenge is.

By the way, am I peeved that the D70s has been announced? Not really. The improvements like the larger monitor LCD, electrical remote release terminal etc. all make sense, but it’s basically the same (great!) camera. Another thing on the list of things-I-really-ought-to-do is to learn colour management - both for work and the photography, actually.