PigPog

We see hot air balloons fairly often over Tiverton.  On Thursday evening, the Virgin balloon was flying fairly low over the town.

Then, on Friday morning, as Sam and I headed out for work, the Triumph balloon peeked at us through the trees – it was so low that it seemed to be almost level with us on Canal Hill.

Oh my Giddy GOM. A track from the upcoming album “Les Paul and Friends – A Tribute to a Legend”, featuring the legendary Mr Paul and the deliciously lovely Mr Hudson doing what he does best. I’m just going to sit over here and squee myself silly.

Listen to Vocalise online here.

OK, so it’s not usually me posting about Slimming World, but I was the photographer for this event in Plymouth.  I’ll put together a bit more of a post about it later, but if you want to see the photos from the event, they’re on Flickr.

Spotted this one day as we were wandering around Tiverton.  Had to grab a shot.

I recently tried out Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom – an excellent RAW editor.  There are a couple of problems with it, though.  For one, it’s quite expensive.  If you’re a pro, and you need the best, you probably won’t care too much about that – it’s worth the money.  When you’re an amateur, though, you have to decide how much it’s worth spending on your hobby.  In either case, £200 spent on software is £200 you can’t put towards your next camera or lens.

The other problem is that I want to just point an app at my folder full of photos, and…  well, that’s it.  With Lightroom, I had to import each set of photos after adding them, which took quite a while.  Any changes, renamed folders, etc., it didn’t just find them – I had to import again, and delete old stuff.  Yes, there’s an option to get it to just sync all changes, but it had to be left overnight.  At least.  It seemed to be built around the idea of having one catalog file for each little set of photos you take.  That probably suits the way a lot of professionals work, but it doesn’t suit me.  I like to be able to search all of my images at once, and sometimes I just take one or two photos in a day, and don’t want to have to create a new catalog and run an import routine just to see how they turned out.

I think I’ll be sticking with Picasa for most of the basics now, with The GIMP for the more advanced editing. Lightroom is very impressive, but it just doesn’t suit me.

For reasons I’ll go into further when I’ve processed a whole lot more photos, Sam and I were in Plymouth yesterday.  We called in at a branch of Sainsbury’s, and it had a very funky roof, which I got some strange looks for standing in the car park photographing.

Mainly from the guy who wanted to park in the space that happened to get the best angle.

We popped over to a farm shop in Halberton to get a bit of fruit and veg today.  On the way there, I spotted a buzzard on a fence-post near the side of the road, but too late to stop.  On the way back, I decided to pull the car over just in case it was still there.  It was.  I managed to get a few quick shots before it got nervous and flew away, and a couple of them turned out ok:

It still didn’t go very far away, but it was nervous, so if we’d tried to follow, it would have flown again pretty quickly.  It’s easy to think of them as big tough birds, but when you see them regularly being beaten up by crows, gulls, blue tits and wrens, you start to realise they’ve just big wusses.

The walls of the youth club here in Tiverton are given over to graffiti – no idea if it reduces the amount of graffiti done in other places around the town, but it makes the club itself bright and colourful.  As we were passing it last week, I snapped a few close-up shots.

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My first full week of commuting completed has taught me many lessons – how to negotiate my way around Devon’s lovely capital, how to behave in an Apple store with class and dignity without turning into a drooling fool (answer – leave quickly and quietly), and what would happen if Terry Wogan and Leo Sayer produced offspring. The most important lesson learned this week was this – be nice to bus drivers. Even after a journey on a bus packed with gibbering obnoxious students, it’s important to give the driver a friendly smile and a Thank You. Because without them, you ain’t getting home, and that wine ain’t gonna drink itself.

There you go, my first oink.