Because the morning light comes from the wrong side of our apartment, most of the photos I take of George in the mornings have a touch of flash thrown in.  Our lounge is actually not the best for taking photos in during the day - although late afternoons are lovely. Anyway, I usually bounce the flash off something (a wall, the ceiling, a couch, a cat) in order to diffuse the light a bit and make it a little less harsh - it makes the world of difference.  Direct flash is generally considered to be a big no no - yuk shadows and yuk bright white patches of flash all over the place.

But after reading a book by this most helpful chap, I learned a way to use direct flash without making it look like there was any flash at all.  It's quite simple, but extremely clever - notice that there are no shadows on George's face, and particularly  around his eyes.

So this photo only exists because I wanted to play with the flash and test out this cunning new technique.  It's pretty cool, I must say (the technique, not the photo - although George is pretty cute in his little onesie).

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Getting the hang of an iPhone

Shazam! I am a geek.

A few years ago I stumbled across an unknown album in my laptop's music library.  I was searching for an album (I can't actually remember what, perhaps it was Missy Elliot) and found an album by a random lady called Missy Higgins. I assume that one of our visitors dropped it onto my hard drive as they topped up their iPod in anticipation of the next leg of their journey, and as it was a quiet afternoon I turned it on and had a listen.

It was a pretty good album, and after a few plays both Rachel and I were quite happy to listen to more.  When her next album came out, we bought it online through iTunes - I don't actually have a physical copy.  This is what it looks like:

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It's a great album (clicking on the picture should take you to her official website where you can listen to a few of her songs), and her followup EP "More Than This" (yup - A Bryan Ferry cover) was pretty cool too.

Anyway, what was I getting to?  Ah yes - this weekend we were out in Ap Lei Chau getting a few things for his lordship and a few things for his lordship's court jesters (the cats).  As we walked into the pet store, they were playing what we thought was Missy Higgins. I hadn't heard the song, so I did what any ubergeek would do - I fired up a song recognition application on my iPhone and held it next to the speakers for 10 seconds:

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...and 20 seconds later:

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The clever old application (Shazam) identified the song, the artist, the album it came from, and even presented me with a link to buy an electronic version of the song.  So, this morning I downloaded the entire album from iTunes and have been listening to it today - it's a bit lighter and more "poppy" than Missy Higgins, but it's extremely catchy.

And there ends the celebration of how much of a geek I am. (Really, I'm the only person who finds this stuff interesting - I could have started this post with "Dear Diary...")

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