Night Floriade Photos

Last night I went to Floriade, a Canberra flower festival. Shooting at night without a tripod is really hard! Because the exposure is longer every time your hand wobbles so does the picture. I keep meaning to buy a tripod, but until then I'm stuck just using whatever is around. These are some shots I took using my babies pram as a tripod.

Telemarketers are People Too!

If you've come to this site by accident looking for ways to piss off telemarketers, go here.

I worked for ages as a telemarketer. People can be such jerks and it seems like telemarketers are the sanctioned punching bags of a highly stressed population. My friend Raven is one of the most imaginative telemarketer haters I know. He has it down to a fine art and can keep the poor saps on the other end of the phone hanging on for up to an hour, certain he's going to buy something as soon as he answers the door, gets the other phone, takes the burning dinner out of the oven or talks to the policeman about that horrible murder next door.

I hate that. Can't he just say "Sorry, not interested" and hang up? Yes, he's annoyed but if it didn't work as a strategy the companies wouldn't hire people to do it. Don't take it out on the employee. Telemarketers are people too.

This design comes on shirts, clocks, buttons, a mousepad - all the essential office supplies. If your friend just got a job as a telemarketer, the cards on the inside say "Congratulations on Your New Job!".

Is your profession hated? Want a shirt that tells people to get off your back? Leave a comment and I'll work something up!

I like taking photos of things up close

One of the functions I have always loved on my cameras is the macro mode. I've always had this fascination with taking pictures up close of really small things. When we got back from the park the other day I had bits of dried grass all down my top from where I'd been lying down trying to get the right angle on some tiny flowers.

I especially like taking photos of insects. Here are some of my up-close shots:






The beetle in the third photo down was actually in my sleeping bag crawling up my leg. That was a very eerie feeling.

One day I want one of those lenses that lets you take photos of really tiny things like individual ants and so forth. My ant shots haven't worked out well so far, but I haven't tried yet with my new camera. That will be my next excursion - shooting ants :-)

Changing eye colour in Paint Shop Pro X2

Today I had the luck to find this very quick guide to changing eye colors. It's so easy that even I had no trouble with it.



Way to go Torqque! I've been having so much fun playing around with this. Here are some examples using my (usually blue-eyed) baby Marcus as a model:





I just love that I learned so many useful concepts so quickly. I'd already been playing around with hues, but now I know how to select different areas to play with. The only thing that confused me was why I couldn't see the eyes in the preview screen like he can in the video, and that was because I was too closely zoomed in.

This is so much fun. I'm off to go give people I don't like Demon Eyes.

My New Camera - The Olympus SP-570UZ

For a while now I've been mucking about photographically with a little point and click digital. It was a great beginner camera that I loved. It worked underwater, in sandy conditions, after I dropped it that time...

But the camera store near me just had a special on new cameras and I really wanted an SLR camera with a higher megapixel count. I convinced the love of my life Matt that what we really needed wasn't a sofa (pft, what's wrong with the floor I ask you?) but a shiny new Olympus SP-570 Ultra Zoom. Weirdly enough, he agreed. There's a good run down of it's features here but the things I love about it are:

- 10 megapixels!!! (That's 10 reaally big pixels, right?)
- 20x Optical Zoom
- to use the zoom you have to physically turn the lens, not just press buttons. It's a nice feeling, like you're an old times photographer in one of those awesome films about how fun it was being a star reporter back in the 40s.

Yesterday Matt, Greg and I went on a picnic with the baby and I took so many photos! Of course the image sizes are larger on my new camera but I still managed to fill my 2 gig memory card, mostly just by saying "ooh, what does this setting do?". We tried out the fast capture mode by pushing the pram around really fast but we decided that was a bad idea with the baby actually in the pram. Here are some pics from the day: