Ever since they came and burnt the old place down.

[reddragdiva]

redcountess had her first Eurovision last night. Sober.

Antilight was a pleasant night out indeed. *pint* to barbedwirekiss for our names on the door. Antilight has ventilation and air-conditioning. Holy shit, we could see and breathe. Sound system is not bad. There's no way people would shag in the toilets — the male and female toilets are actually separate. Koko The Palace is basically a band venue, so the beer is 1664, Fosters, John Smith and Guinness. At £3.50 a pint. And we weren't inspired to dance to a damned thing. But we saw lots of nice people. Special hello to eyeliner297, who is being taught to love the camera back, and emarkienna, who is most cute and cuddly.

My main entertainment was going wild with the camera. I now know that what I need in a tiny camera is ISO 800 or 1600 emulation and image stabilisation. (An Ixus 800 is rather too pricey for taking out as yet, even if I could afford and justify one.) I was getting some really surprisingly good shots with no flash and ISO 400. The subjects appear to quite like not being COMPLETELY BLINDED too. The other thing I'd like is a single button to switch between flash/ISO 50/cloudy and no-flash/ISO 400/tungsten. (I believe the Casio "BestShot" feature can be abused to this end.) I fear people are going to start calling me Otto.

Got some good band shots, even with ISO 400 (though I really wanted 1600 and/or image stabiliser). The band was an Italian group called Bloody Mary. arkady loved them and we went up to say hi and ask if they had a CD on sale. They didn't have them on sale as such, so they gave her one free! And they, like everyone, loved Perseus.

We won't be at the picnic (as moved to Marlborough Head) today, as Liz has been run over repeatedly by the fibro truck. So I might do some housework. And get photos up, of course. I'm trying to rewrite my image scripts to use ImageMagick rather than netpbm. All I actually want is to preserve the Exif information without stupid temp-file tricks, though so far that's looking preferable. We'll see.

Update: Bloody Mary pics up. Mostly no-flash/ISO 400/tungsten on an Ixus 400. Flash was not my friend with the amount of dry ice they used. The people shots will be a few days as I gather approvals.