I’ve struggled to write these past few weeks. I never have the time and when I do have the time I don’t have the energy or brain capacity to string a sentence together never mind a full post.

My foot is getting better. I managed to walk for 90 minutes around Calderglen Country Park yesterday without the support on it. My foot was strapped up as best as my hiking boots could manage though and I’m paying for it today. I managed it though without any real discomfort. I’m looking good for my date with a mountain at the end of March.

Calderglen Country Park

Vonnie had it confirmed last night that her contract will not be getting extended so come the end of March we will both be ‘out of work’. By out of work I obviously mean working for ourselves as we should hopefully take over the shop we’re leasing a few weeks beforehand.

Talking of the shop things are progressing. It’s going slowly as every time we think we’ve managed to get over the last hurdle another three or four appear. The latest one involves bank accounts and proof of ID. Basically a lot of the things we need to get sorted NOW require proof of the business address which we can’t do until the lease is signed and in some cases until we get our first utility bill in. I think we’re going to have to get inventive to get past this one.

I breathed new life into my photoblog a few weeks ago but I’m not entirely sure folk know it exists. Trying to work out some way to display the updates on here to catch a few more readers. And yes I did actually take that photo up there!

I’ve spent countless hours hunting for a bit of blogging software that could pull photos from my Flickr account and put them into a page that looks good. Most of the software I’ve tried in the past has meant re-uploading the photos again to my own server and having to code my own exif retreaver. This really annoyed me.

Recently though I found Flogr. It’s everything I ever wanted in photoblogging software. It even links in with Flickr’s commenting system to display those as well as the correct exif data, photo titles and descriptions. All I need to do is throw a photo in to a set put aside for my photoblog and it is automatically picked up by the software. I love it!

Just before Christmas my beloved 300D died. The autofocus sub assembly broke causing every photo I took to have the bottom two thirds blanked out. Thanks to Santa however a replacement was found in the shape of a 500D. It’s great but I’m having to relearn a lot of post processing work as I was used to the results that the 300D gave me straight from the camera. Photos are very soft and in dire need of sharpening and slight colour correction once they get thrown into Lightroom. The results are great however.

Still trying to work on the white balance settings on the 500D but it makes for some nice photos of the family.

The cats seemed to like the snow at first but Horatio seems to live on the top of the fence now.

So I’ve started a project that I’ve meant to do for both Nairn and Erica but never got around to starting. It’s purely a personally project but I don’t mind sharing it with you guys. Basically the intent is to have a photo almost every day for the first year of Greer’s life. If Erica had not had the problems she had I’d probably have completely forgotten about this but with her going from a tiny baby with health problems to a healthy child almost over night we never really seen a gradual change in her. I want to be able to see Greer changing and growing and I want to be able to show her this in the years to come. I’d originally started posting the pictures on my Flickr account but in order to stop my contacts being flooded with photos of Greer that were almost identical I was making them private but that defeated the idea of sharing them with anyone we knew if they wanted to see them. So I added a subdomain on my blog and all the photos will be displayed there. As I mentioned there isn’t going to be a picture every day but I aim to try for that anyway. We’re only a couple of weeks into her life and I’ve missed one so far and fully expect to miss a couple more over the coming months. It’s no big deal so there’s none of the pressure that’s stopped me keeping photoblogs before or stopped me completing 365 projects. I’m really looking forward to this.

You can find the project at http://greer365.theapochrypha.co.uk

Speed: 1/1000 Aperture: f1.8 ISO: 100 Focal Length: 50mm

Do you know why people constantly take photos of their cats? It’s because they don’t run away and they are cuter that most inanimate objects.

This 50mm lens is really bugging me. Because you can’t really see the depth of field without using the magic button when I think somethings in focus I usually find that the cats nose is crystal clear but it’s eyes are fuzzy. Practice practice practice.