This is quite a funny picture of basil as he moved towards the camera
to sniff. Now all we have to do is work on how to get the autofocus to focus on the area we want, NOT the back end of basil – still I think its a funny picture.

The new camera arrived today, a Fuji S5000 zoom. I’m really looking forward to using this as the previous digital camera that we were using had no zoom and it was incredibly frustrating not being able to get some good shots. The camera arrived at lunchtime and I was incredibly self restrained and didn’t wander off to take loads of photo’s. Instead I just loaded the batteries, took a couple of photos and then put it back into its box. The main reason for this is that if I’d started, I wouldn’t have done ANY work this afternoon and the bosses were in today 😉
On the way home I was driving past a field and I saw my first ever fox in daylight, in the field. I immediately grimaced at the missed photo opportunity as there were no places to park safely and by the time I would have got the camera out of its box and in my hands the fox would probably have been long gone. This would have been a superb moment to try out the 10x optical zoom.
Incidentally, to see the difference in zoom levels, the zoomed out picture can be compared with the zoomed in picture. Yes I know its not an inspiring photo, but its the scene out of my window.

A bit late, but I finally managed to get my “spring” photo’s online – the daffodils are very photogenic at Astbury, the cows were feeding and lambs were cute. I’ve also uploaded a few more pictures of edale where Ruth, Tim and I went for an impromptu walk after meeting up for my birthday. It was a fairly deep valley but with easily climbed sides to take the pictures of Ruth and the stones are meant to say A and K in a heart (but you need superdooper eyesight to make that one out.

Not our cats, but ones we received by email over the past couple of days. First of all we have the Sunbathing cats and then on the opposite end of the weather, we have a kitten who will do anything to keep warm.
On the down side of things we noticed that our digital camera was broken yesterday where all functions seem to work APART from taking the picture. It will zoom and use the menu’s – just the button doesn’t seem to activate the picture taking 🙁

Chris posted about an amazing collection of space pics of earth. I now have this picture as my backdrop.

Loads of neat desktops and some free stock photo’s. I’m blogging this for future reference although Kristen got me (another copy of) digital photographer magazine which is really inspiring for photography.

Kelly links to a great panoramic photo of Mars. No I didn’t take it and my panoramic stitching would have been a lot better. I’d already seen the fisheye lens shot but this is a lot better. The MSNBC page of the snapshots from Mars has loads of photos and some good video’s too. (Note that this page doesn’t like the Mozilla browser 🙁 )