DorkMatter.net

Last weekend we drove up to Lunan Bay for something to do. Luckily the tide was out.

Here are a few shots I took yesterday at the Bloody Bridge just outside Newcastle; some down at the shore and others heading up towards the Mournes (I think this mountain is Slievelamagan or Slieve Binnian).

This is one my dad took of me while I was trying out his new Canon 40d.

On Friday me and Tony went to Edinburgh on a photo trip and to do some shopping. About half an hour after we got there it started pouring down but I managed to take a few shots anyway. It was too busy with Christmas shoppers to photograph the places I had planned but Princes Street Gardens was really quiet. I took a few pics there so I didn’t feel it was a wasted trip. Below:
The cliche subject that is Edinburgh Castle, the cottage in Princes St Gardens and the view down the path… to an abundance of bins.

This is the outside world. I don’t see it often.

The sun is reflecting off our building and casting those orange reflections on the building across the street. That’s all that’s going on right now.

My lighting tent cube thing arrived today and I keep wondering why I didn’t buy one sooner. I should have had it a week ago (yeah, thanks 7DayShop ) but they decided to keep me waiting on an out of stock item only to tell me they weren’t getting any more in and cancelled my order. Instead, I bought it from Steve’s Photo Shop yesterday afternoon and it was here this morning. That’s good service!

I did consider making one but since I’m going to be using it a lot and putting it away again I decided to go for something more durable that can collapse. It’s 50cm³ and by some magic collapses down to about 20 x 10cm, although I haven’t attempted that yet. I’m overly excited about this thing, so much so that I finally got around to photographing some of the products I haven’t put in the shop yet. Here’s a taster:

The trouble is, it looks so much nicer than the other images I have in there that I may have to redo the lot: 300 products. RSI is always a good excuse not to. Oh no, what will the boss say? I’ll say have the afternoon off. In fact, take a long weekend.

When will I learn my lesson about being in drunken charge of a camera?
My first mistake was drinking 6 glasses (I should really say plastic cups) of champagne while helping Gemma get ready for her wedding. The photographer wasn’t around much while she was getting ready so I got my camera to grab some pics of her before the ceremony. Then more champagne.
The ceremony went well and I got lots of nice pictures of them walking in, exchanging rings, signing the register etc. I also got plenty of photos of the drinks reception, some family shots, the speeches, cutting the cake, the first dance. During this time I managed another 2 glasses of wine and 2 (or was it 3) more of champagne. Oh dear. I didn’t notice I was drunk.
Then I had the bright idea to change the format from large jpg to raw. Oops, did I just press “Format”?! Nooooooooo! Everything gone, cleared off the card. I was so annoyed I actually cried. The shock had sobered me up by at least 2 glasses of wine and thankfully I had the presence of mind to swap cards before taking any photos.
I borrowed another CF card and got some more pictures of the reception.

After some research on the webbernet it was begining to look hopeful. We were able to copy the contents of the card onto Tony’s computer and pull pretty much all the images out from there. I think a few may have been missing but thankfully nothing important was lost. Tony’s computer runs Ubuntu and in case you’re interested he’s working on a write up at ten.ynottony.net
I didn’t try recovering it on the mac but I was interested to try out one of the many free recovery programs for Windows (that computer runs 2000). For that I used “Art Plus Digital Photography Recovery”. I found it on download.com. The results were pretty good. Not quite as good as on Tony’s computer. Some of the images came in with coloured bands and it was quite slow but it did find a few that were missed the first time round. I’d recommend if you’re using it to run it through a few times and choose a new folder each time and then compare them. It was very simple to use if the linux way seems too scary.

But anyway – what a relief!