What are you stairing at? Wooden you like to know?

Christ I need to hire a copywriter.

Nah, I’m not dead, just been the usual: working long hours | tired | busy | working long hours | drunk | lazy | working long hours | blah | de | blah | de | blah. And like a broken record the first two things to get sacrificed are Detour and exercise. Paired with a moderate to high increase in alcohol intake – but now it feels like I’m over-sharing, so let’s move on shall we?

Adobe released Lightroom 3.0 the other day and finally they’ve given us lens correction (vertical/horizontal shift)! Fuckin yay! Now all I need to do is understand sharpening in Lightroom and I can dispense with Photoshop for 99% of my shots! (If anyone has pointers, or links to good tuts on Lr sharpening, PLEASE do share. Seriously, I can’t figure it out!)

However, with the good comes the bad – Lightroom 3.0 is a motherfucker when it comes to memory/resources/cpu. Lr 2.x was always a bit greedy, but FuckMeDead, after only two days I’m seriously sick to DEATH of Lr 3.0 and it’s pre-loading dotted-circle bullshit! GodDamn Adobe, you’re the reincarnation of Microsoft in your insistence on the latest and greatest hardware upon which to run your software! Srsly! I don’t have that 8-16GB of ram you’d ‘recommend’ (I’m making that figure up BTW, I have no actual idea here). Argh! The budget can’t support a new computer right now, not with all the drugs and hookers of late – see paragraph one.

[FYI: yes, this is another of my 'historical' posts – actually posted 16.06.2010, but dated 08.06.2010... I'm determined to have one year of a full 365 posts, so I'll be making up days for a while to come!]

On quite a few of the family holidays my parents took us on, we went wandering down caves and I always loved it. Maybe not enough to ever become a caving explorer (that just seems a bit of a daft pursuit) – I’m quite happy to wonder at the natural phenomena someone else took the time and effort to discover.

They had this mast at the good lighthouse but I’m not entirely sure why they had it. Apart from a general sea/nautical reference, and a supposed challenge for the kids to figure out what the various signal flags meant.

H found the flag chart nearby and was pretty quick to point out the Z (Zulu) flag to me. Oh did we laugh!

I spotted this quaint little row of mailboxes early one morning as H & I sped towards the ‘other big smoke’. Nice little rural photo op.

One more from the caves – a formation called The Wedding Cake. This one was easy to see the namesake, but when they started describing other formations as being like ‘Shrek’ and other pop references it seemed too much of a cloud-gazing stretch for my tastes.

One more from the caves – a formation called The Wedding Cake. This one was easy to see the namesake, but when they started describing other formations as being like ‘Shrek’ and other pop references it seemed too much of a cloud-gazing stretch for my tastes.

They called this formation the Fairy Castle, and I have to say it’s a nice bit of lighting the has the ceiling formation reflected in the pool beneath.

Another from the caves. Some miscellaneous bones they came across as they excavated the depths.

I was kinda grateful that our guide in the caves had a bit of patience, because she didn’t give me any shit when I’d linger until the group cleared so I could get a clear shot of the formations. But she was quick to point out, when I walked along with tripod collapsed but fully extended, that they normally they didn’t allow tripods in the caves. She urged me to be careful not to knock the ceiling with my camera – don’t worry, I reassured her, it’d take me as long to pay it off as it would for your caves to reform. I’m not sure she agreed.

The first thing to get thrown by the wayside when work gets busy is Detour. Just the way it goes when I’m working 12-18 hour days. But I always come back. So, sorry about the absence, but feat not I’m back with some new material that I’m hoping it worth the wait.

H & I took a road trip and headed down to the ‘local’ limestone caves, so I’ve got a few shots from there that’ll help me get back up to date. The caves were alright, but I’ll be brutally honest and say I’ve seen better (more extensive) in Wales and England when I was a kid.

Not just for the cool frats and sororities, alpha beta gama, that shit’ll kill ya. Or give you a really weird rash – kinda like those frat/sorority kids.

Geiger counter, now that’s one piece of kit I think we can all agree is cool. It detects shit we can’t see, smell or taste, and it makes a clicking noise. Almost as good as the machine that goes PING!

A nice rust texture on the railway car from yesterday. Actually, it’s visible in the near corner of the car in Rolling Stock.

Lazy. Sky. Will do for now.