and things went downhill from there

Believe it or not, there is a fish hiding somewhere in this photograph. It saw me approaching the tank with my camera, and after a moment of furious fishy panic, it quickly manoeuvred itself into a position where it would be mostly obscured from direct viewing, and nigh invisible against the background. Such a clever fish. Surely if it was not in a sealed tank, and I was a fish-eating predator it would be perfectly safe.



So far I am impressed with the camera in this phone - especially in lighting conditions as poor as they were for this shot. The images are not quite as sharp as you would get with a real lens, but the fact that it supports shooting RAW gives me a lot of leeway to play with sharpness and detail after the fact. I cleaned up this shot a bit after the fact, but after playing with a couple of different crops, I decided to keep the original image.

Happiness is a tin of sardines in lemon sauce. While that is not the only key to happiness, nor even ranking in the top ten elements of a happy existence, it still added a non-zero, non-negligible amount to my level of satisfaction today.

Another important piece in my interlocking puzzle of contentment is that the weather has finally turned spring-like. Sunday was gorgeous, but even the cool, grey, wet weather we are experiencing this morning is a tremendous improvement over the bitter conditions we have been contending with for months. I daresay I may even forgo eating the hearts of my co-workers for another day.

I was not feeling particularly stabby even before the fish, mind you.

We went to the Easter service at church yesterday, and it were treated to the usual intellectual (if somewhat safe and predictable) fare that I was expecting. "The spirit of Jesus lives on in us, even if he's deader than your first web page on Tripod." When we got home later, we waffled over what to do next (cook up an Easter dinner, have tea,or go for a walk). It was the weather that finally pushed us into taking the third option first.

We both overdressed out of habit, and then made our way down to St John's park. It was nice to find sidewalks that are (mostly) navigable again, and Saturday's stiff winds had subsided to a gentle spring breeze. A pleasant walk was had by all.

I don't know why, but lately I've had pretty good luck with photographing birds. This gull was a little skittish, so I kept my camera trained on him and slowly stalked up on him, knowing that it was just a matter of time before he spooked again. When I thought he was going to panic, I clicked the shutter pre-emptively and caught him right at the, "I'm outa here!" moment. While I would have liked to have caught a little more of his reflection in the water, I am overall pleased with the shot.


Just as we got to the bridge, there was an unusual break in traffic. This bridge is normally very busy, so I took advantage of the situation to dash out into the middle of the road for a shot. I did not have as much time to compose it as I would have liked because I saw cars entering the far side of the bridge again as soon as I got out into the road.

I decided to snap a picture quickly and see if I could salvage anything from it later with some cropping. After a bit of cutting and the application of some interesting filters, I decided that it the shot was worth keeping.


In spite of her winning smile, the harsh sunlight playing across her at a bad angle just made this a poor picture. I tried salvaging it in software, but my efforts just made it worse with each attempt. I finally gave up, and just started playing with random filters to see what kind of cool effects I could achieve.

I am not quite sure what I did to arrive at this, but I like the result. I have concluded that I am not a good enough photographer to care that much about being a purist, so I don't feel too bad about experimenting with filters and effects.

Today's irritant:  CTRL-F is the Windows de facto shortcut key for "Find"...

...except in Outlook.

Way to follow your own guidelines, ya mooks!