I was hoping to get out and about this bank holiday weekend to take some photographs... sadly I've been thwarted by the awful weather. It seems that if there's one thing you can count on with the British weather it's that it'll rain on bank holidays - most vexing!

So I thought I'd log on to da and, for a moment, I thought the site had gone mad - what has happened to my inbox!?!

It would appear that not only has my shot 'gnarled' been featured as a daily deviation - hurrah! But I've also won a 3 month subscription courtesy of *DuckOfSuper - woohoo!

I would just like to thank *DuckOfSuper for his kindness and generosity, but also all those who have taken the time to comment or favourite my work, thank you, it's much appreciated

Have just got back from a long weekend in North Yorkshire.

I didn't have much choice when I went, due to work etc. and too my horror I discovered it was high tide at sunrise and sunset - curses! Plus, of course, there was also a large storm front coming in that weekend which meant that the weather was dreadful, and the high seas were even higher than normal.

I've basically spent the last 3 days being freezing cold and soaking wet... and I'm not even sure if I got any good photos to show for it. One of my main reasons for going was to try and photograph the Black Nab & possibly the shipwreck at Saltwick Bay, sadly the very high tides meant all I saw of the Black Nab was a little tiny bit poking up through the waves, and no chance of getting to the shipwreck. A very uncomfortable shoot indeed, spent more time cleaning my filters and emptying freezing cold sea water out of my wellies than I did photographing

Oh well, way it goes! Beautiful part of the world however, am sure I'll be back again at some point.

Fingers crossed I managed to get something half decent - it's just finished transfering the last of the files over... time to find out!

Have finally managed to prise my wallet open and invest in a set of Lee filters. Not cheap by any means, but they are so much better.

Went out this morning to give them a test run and the results are very pleasing - no colour cast at all, the Lees are true neutral. The image quality seems much better as well, with the colours more vibrant and cleaner - the cokins always seemed to make everything look a little dirty.

I'm off to Yorkshire for a few days in April, looking forward to trying them out on the moors!

The weather has finally improved, so went out this morning to take my first photos in 2008! Was nice to get out and about, although Southwold proved to be somewhat more stormy than I was expecting.

Got completely soaked, as did my camera - I'm amazed the 350D is still working as it has no weatherproofing. Despite spending 90% of my time cleaning sea spray off my filters & lens it was a lot of fun, hopefully the dull overcast days of January are well and truely finished with!

A relative offered me a new case / motherboard / cpu over the new year that he had lying around, so I jumped at the chance to upgrade my ailing amd 600 to something with a bit more zing...

Not a wise decision as it turned out, as I've been battling against completely random and very irritating reboots for the last week or so. It's obviously either a hardware issue or a driver issue but I just couldn't track it down. So I've given up, admitted defeat and reinstated the trusty old amd 600.

Yes, it's very slow, but on the plus side it does actually work!