Well, I don’t know if I should be annoyed, mildly miffed, slightly confused on a little flattered that someone took the time to HACK my main site!.. (Living In NZ) I think it’s going to have to be FECKING ANNOYED! why do people do that?.. just to prove they can or just for the hell of it. I can sometimes understand the challenge of Big sites, Micosoft or IBM or the like but my little site.. come on, give me a break.

Anyway I have to complimant my web hosting company (InMotion Hosting) I flicked them an email to say HELP!!! and only 10 mins later I had an email back tellng me what had happened and that they had fixed it!… talk about service, these guys are seriously helpful and seriously great. So a Big Thank you to InMotion for getting me back up & running in no time!

Yep, my trusty 40D is officially goosed, nackered, buggered, no longer working, passed on to the great camera shack in the sky.. as is the lens and the polarising filter that was attached.
I took them all into the local camera shop who are really brillaint, explained what happend and after the obvious questions:
Did you get the shot, you know that for underwater photography you need a special camera, etc etc they quietly bowed their heads , joined hands and offerd me a iscount on the new Canon 50D which i the replacement or the 40D.
Then they kindly gave me a valuation and note to give the the friendly insurance company to say it’s dead and you should buy him a new one, which is nice. (the 50D has a 15.4mega pixel sensor vs my current 10!!).

So.. stay tuned!

Well I was up early yesterday and up early today for more images and I’m pretty happy with those I have for a project I’m working on.
Satisfied with what i had I ventured to Hagley Park to capture form frosty images of the park & the light on the trees when i noticed the fab light on the weeping willows and the mist rising off the River Avon,. Excited i pulled the truck over and headed down to the river to try and find the right shot, I had my fav lens on the Sigma 10-20.. it’s fantastic and for me produces really nice blues.
Not happy with what i was getting I turned to get a grad filter from the bag to let me pull the sky down a little when I heard one of those sounds you just don’t ever want to hear…… SPLASH….. I turned hoping to see a duck swimming away from me, startled from the bank.. but no. All I could see were the legs of my tripod popping out of the Avon, held steady by the weight at the other end that was my Canon 40D and favorite Sigma lens….

Well Emily fouund her other foot shortly after my last post, which was fun to watch but the amusement didn’t end there. She has also now discovered her thumb…. it’s very cute to see her with it and certainly keeps her quiet.
Every day she gets more interactive as well, just the other day we had a whole conversation about something… no idea what it was but I’m sure it was very intelligent… probably either rocket science or… Oh god Dad… YOU’RE a GINGER!!!!!!!!… (hoping it’s not the 2nd one!)
She’s trying hard to crawl now as well so no doubt we’ll be chasing her round the house in no time, which is good… just in time for the warm weather coming in!

Well we were wondering when it would happen, Emily had discovered her right foot… two days ago she suddenly realised that there was in fact something there and.. if she tried hard enough she could get it into her mouth..
The left foot.. not so much at the moment but I’m sure it’ll be along in no time at all. Strange, all the the toys, play things, musical things and so on you get for them and here she is totally fascinated this month with her right foot. last couple of months it was her hands so secretly I’m hoping she doesn’t discover the left foot until next month which will keep her amused no end!

Well it’s now just a little over 4 months since Emily graced us with her presence in the world and what a 4 months it’s been. Just watching her grow every day has been amazing, each time you look at her there is a new expression on her wee face.

Lately she has decided it’s much more fun to sit up than it is to lay down, the 1st time we saw her trying we assumed (wrongly) that she had wind… in fact she was doing tummy crunches in a bit to get herself sitting up!… it’s now a game with her, every time you hold her hands she pulls her self up, gives a goo or an exclamation of how clever she is and then promptly lays herself back down… and then it starts again! This is great on the floor but not so good when she’s laying in the bassinet!!!!

Her conversation skills are certainly growing, we get told about everything… then again so does her toy bear (named Glasgow!), her mobile above the bassinet certainly knows when she’s unhappy with mum or dad for putting her back to bed!

The other day her mum showed her a picture on a magazine of Gordon Ramsey and she let fly with what was clearly a telling off for something he’d done… maybe it’s the language?

She’s also getting more and more keen to be taking control of the bottle.. attached is exhibit A … try and I might she was determined that she was holing on to it. Note if you can the look in her eyes which conveys the … haa haa I have the bottle look to her dad.. I would however point out she promptly dropped the bottle after the picture, so the question becomes was she startled or just posing for the camera?

So yesterday we put Emily into her own room. I spent some time in the afternoon putting her cot together and hanging the bassinet in it as she’s still too little to go in the cot proper. She has learned to kick the end of the basinet to make it rock and seems to enjoy that so no doubt that will continue.
I worried that she’d struggle to setting in her own room on her own, I worried and event commented to Emily on our walk on Saturday that I thought her mum would struggle a little with her wee daughter in the other room and only the baby monitor to keep us in touch.
It was a little unnerving I have to say for both of us but eventually we settled into bed.
Strange noises came from the baby monitor so checking was done. All was fine; some more coughs and was that a choke?! Again.. Checking was the order of the night.. on it went, then the alarm, the baby monitor also has a motion sensor that goes off if it can’t feel changes in the pressure pad, i.e. breathing isn’t happening… I’m not sure even Mr Bolt the Olympic sprint champion could have got to the room quicker.. But it turns out, our wee darling has simply wriggled to the side and off the pressure mat!.. All in all 10 visits were made to Emily’s room that 1st night… not by her mum.. But by me, I was, to put it mildly a bit of a nervous wreck by it all!…

So Emily has always been quite alert, everyday she’s more aware of what’s going on around her and is keen to see and watch everything. She’s increadibly social so getting her to go to bed at night is not impossible but she certainly knows how t use those lungs and her new found voice!
There are screams and calls, we’re aware of her being not too impressed at being in her cot, alone, when you head back in to try and sooth her we get lovely big smiles… and you can just see it in her eyes… “I’ll get you trained yet daddy!”
As for me… I’m loving it!

well I’ve been working away a fair bit on the website to get the galleries up and going and of course the downloads / shopping area – that isn’t working quite yet. One of the things that tends to happen a lot to me is rediscovering old images that I’d filed away for either a later date or I didn’t see anything there and really meant to delete them. As luck would have it I didn’t delete these ones which really for me give a good example of why I tend not to delete but keep going back and back again as I learn new techniques to work in lightroom or photoshop.

This one for instance I’m really quite liking and can’t wait till I get it to the point where I’m ready to print it, it’s probably going to need to be a min of A3, depending on how that looks it may get to canvas but we’ll see.

This started as a fairly mundane image that I’d captured with a few , well about 20 or so shots of the same area and I’d done some work on another of the images and won an award at the photo club for that one but I hadn’t done much else, lazy I guess. I got some fab software from OnOne and have now set about reworking a bunch of images that I’d put to the side. Below is another….

On a trip back in January with Tony Bridge we went off to the Maniototo in search of both inspiration (on my part) and really cool image son both parts. One of the things that Tony noted was that I seem to end up with images that are panoramic which increasingly I think is the case, not sure why that is to be honest.

Anyway I have to say I do really like both of these images and they have really set me off again on my love of landscapes but I also seem to be doing a few other things… what about these?

well it’s taken 6 months to do it, and it’s been off line for that amount of time but finally the website is back up. What the heck have I been doing?… Well firstly of course we’ve now got Emily, our fantastic wee daughter, but she’s only 9 weeks old. there was of course the DIY in the summer but there was also another website that I’ve been working on for my new photography club (www.photopnz.com) which is a great club and a fab site (even if i am biased!).

But now my own site www.Living-In-NZ.com is back up and running and it’s had a complete revamp… again! it will be a while before i do that again i have to say.

There are new image galleries, ecards, a link to facebook should you want to use that and become a fan (wasn’t my idea!) links to the blog of course, the guest book then there are some new features planned but not fully in place. Sales – I’ve been working  through a whole new sales area to let people buy – frames, unframed, canvas or block mounted prints or alternatively license images for use elsewhere and all done on line. downloads, I plan to have a few images that people will be able to use as desktop wall papers and hopefully a screen saver as well so keep checking it’ll be updated a bit more frequently over the next couple of months.