Shark's fun slices sugar-bed slices that pretty redhead.

B-Movie rocked so hard. I had my three lovelies (redcountess the wife, arkady the girlfriend and quiet000001 the visiting friend who is very nice and very photogenic), one camera and four charged batteries, but just the one CompactFlash card ... which was a grievous error, as I filled it in about an hour! I blame the excess lusciousness available at a summer B-Movie. Fortunately, d_floorlandmine, who is my new Personal Saviour, had a spare 256MB CF on him. 220 shots ... if I keep a 400 or 500, I'll be buying a 1 gig card as soon as is feasible.

(How on earth did I manage to get no pics at all of valkyriekaren? Tch!)

Sold the_rin her shiny new old PowerShot S110 (Ixus v) which she should enjoy hugely, got bucks from Simon for the Ixus 330 (which he was going wild with) and reassured the beautiful and vivacious eyeliner297 that I would stalk and capture the Ixus of her dreams. And took about a zillion slices of her soul.

I gave 8×10 shots to ciphergoth for spikeylady (this one), nisaba (these ones — always keep your favoured models sweet) and latexiron (this one — "Happy 40th birthday!"). Hazards of printing goth photos: the printer is now complaining of running out of black. I also gave flavius_m six packs of cloves, but all my shots of him look the same.

flickgc is a ridiculously smug anticipatory bride. Here's to domesticity.

I was so enormously happy that Liz made it out tonight. She saw friends she hasn't seen in two years. Her health will probably continue to be up and down, but if we keep seizing on the upswings as they come it will be wonderful. Thank you all for your delight in seeing her out as well.

ali_anarres is not in fact a f*rry. But after tonight's shots, she will be in their dreams.

Who on earth is Alyssa Wozniak?

I've just been clearing my spam. Quite a lot of it includes the name "Alyssa Wozniak" in the subject or early in the text. While this is very helpful to Bayesian spam filters (I'll probably need to check my spamtrap for replies to this post), it leaves me wondering who the heck she is or was. Google is no help.

Why "Alyssa Wozniak"? Who is she? What did she do to the spammers? How's your spamtrap for Alyssa Wozniak goodness?

Club-testing the Ixus 400.

Last night's pics. Photo policy. The Ixus 400 is an unspeakably wonderful club camera, and takes shots you can shrink and web immediately. Barring the red eye. I so so so want one (or a 430, or 500) of my very own.

I thought a few shots were too washed out, and the flash seemed much stronger than the one on the Ixus 50; I turned the EV down to -1/3 and tried taking pics with my finger over the flash. Turns out I'd set the camera to ISO 400. (The ISO setting on a digital camera just amplifies the signal from the CCD, adding noise and occasional washing out, and you really don't ever want to set it higher than the base setting unless you absolutely need to.)

That said, almost every shot was usable straight out the camera. Except for the blasted red eye — and some people have eyes so light it's all but impossible not to get red eye, e.g. bluehelen, even when I got her to pose in specifically red-eye-avoidant directions. I'll need to try again at ISO 50. About three-quarters of the shots needed the red eye removed by hand, which took way too long. I know red eye is caused by the flash being mounted on the camera at all, but hopefully keeping it to ISO 50 will alleviate it slightly.

Whereas the Ixus 50 autorotate actually rotates the JPEG, the 400 just puts "ninety degrees clockwise, please!" in the Exif tag. KDE recognises this but GIMP and Coppermine don't. Bah.

(KDE 3.5 is wonderfully smart and helpful with cameras, by the way. It recognised the Ixus 400 and connected it like a USB hard disk, even if Canon is the one major brand that doesn't do umass. Anyone who says Linux is harder than Windows needs to try Kubuntu Dapper.)

As ali_anarres put it: "There should be more B-Movies where dressing to theme involves wearing very little clothing and wandering round grinning all night."

Today appears to be Camera Bargain Day. If your eBay-fu is strong, you might want a look. Remind me never to end an auction on a Saturday. I won five cameras today (three working, two E18), actually refrained from bidding on two more bargains and a shiny bargain Casio EX-S600 showed up in the post this morning. (hairyears, that's two models up from your EX-S100. And it is so shiny.) I need to Haul Arse on getting these things sold — that's the condition redcountess puts on me buying them! Anyone still keen on a nice camera, I'll keep you updated.