Helen, Claudia and I popped down to Dover to visit with my Uncle and Aunt. Weng took some publicity photos for Helen. Other than that we did mainly the usual things, ate too much, played with the cats, watched my Aunt’s local dramatic production (”The Beat Goes On”), fed the fox.

As usual, full set of pics in the Photo Gallery, here’s a few of my favourites:

Been playing with my new camera (Canon S3). Lovin it! Here’s a few pics from my garden.

Getting ready for work one morning, I noticed the birds on the evergreen two doors down were flocking like crazy. Not that they’re the best pictures ever, but the tree is at least 40m from my window, the birds were small, and the light was coming from behind the tree. With the naked eye I couldn’t even make out what the birds looked like, much less what they were eating. Even with the SLR, I very rarely got shots better than what I can actually see with my own eyes.

The super-macro mode is also really cool, but sodding fiddly. It can focus at point blank range (amazing, but from time to time also leads to the auto-focus focusing on the dust on the lens!) but manual focus is damned near impossible to do using the screen. Especially when your subject keeps moving and swaying in the breeze as this one did. In the end, taking a million pics and using focus bracketing was the winner.

Just got back from a short sejourn to Antalya, Turkey.

Pretty quiet as we spent most of our time eating, swimming and napping!

We did however narrowly escape being blown-up! Kurdish separatists set off a bomb a block away from the cafe where we were drinking coffee and eating Baklava at the time - more than close enough for us to hear the bang…

The explosion killed 3 people and wounded many more. The international media covered the story including the Times.

The incident had no negative impact on our trip however - in fact we were largely ignorant of what had actually happened until we got back to a country where the news is in English!

The full set of photos from the trip are online in the Photo Gallery, here are a few highlights: