Camelot Photography Blog

Today I assisted my friend Jen who was photographing the wedding of Harry and Liz at Llandaff Cathedral. The weather was very wet but fortunately the rain stopped for the group photographs outside the cathedral. It was a lovely wedding with the reception at the Museum in Cathays Park. I’m not going to post any images of the wedding but here is one of the interior of Llandaff Cathedral showing Jacob Epstein’s aluminium figure of Christ in Majesty suspended above the nave on a concrete arch designed by George Pace.

Today we had the pleasure of photographing Adam and Lauran’s wedding at St Illtud’s Church, it was a lovely day, Lauran wore a beautiful dress with a stunning design. Here are a couple of images from the day.

Today I had the pleasure of photographing Rob & Kelly’s wedding at the Maes Manor in Blackwood. It was a lovely wedding and everyone had a great time.

Rob and Kelly

A Happy St David’s Day.

A Merry Christmas to everyone.

It’s so long since I last added a post! I’ve been really busy and a lot of things have been happening but I must post here more often.

I met with Victoria and Layton to go through the final details for their wedding which is taking place at DeCourcey’s, they’re a lovely couple and I’m really looking forward to photographing their special day.

I’ve just finished processing a load of images taken at an Italian wedding on a Nikon D700 camera, the quality of images is absolutely amazing particularly in low light at high sensitivity, the auto white balance is superb and very little post processing work is required on the images.

My HP desktop computer had a really noisy fan on the graphics card (it’s a common fault on that particular card) and the pc was collected by courier on the Friday afternoon and was back with me on the following Tuesday a superb turnaround. The graphics card was replaced and the BIOS updated to the latest version, the hard drive was unfortunately restored to a ‘factory fresh’ copy. Fortunately I created an image of the hard drive before sending it back and was able to restore everything very quickly. While the pc was away being repaired I was using my back up machine which is only a single core machine, I certainly missed the power of the HP machine!

I’m currently studying a third level course with the Open University which requires me to use versions of Eclipse software provided by the OU, unfortunately the supplied version doesn’t run properly under Windows Vista 64 and I have been using my notebook running XP for the course but I finally installed a virtual version of XP on my desktop using VMWare and the software is running correctly, it’s so much easier just using the one machine.

I was privileged to photograph so many terrific weddings last year, it was a lovely time.

The Passat was back from the garage just before Christmas with a new timing belt, and a large number of new valves, the largest garage repair bill so far.

Christmas was over all too quickly, it was great to spend time relaxing with the family. I unfortunately had the delightful nora virus on Christmas Eve and Rose’s turn came on Christmas Day which resulted in her spending all day in bed unable to eat. I cooked the family lunches on Christmas Day – traditional turkey with all the trimings and Boxing Day – leg of lamb and turkey.

Since Christmas I’ve been fairly busy with my accounts,VAT and tax returns, just a little more work to complete and then I can file my tax return on-line.

I’m pleased to be able to announce that one of our most popular albums, the Madrid is now available with up to 25 pages (50 sides) but there’s even more good news. The Madrid in addition to the 10×10 inch size is now also available in both a larger 12×12 inch size and a smaller 8×8 inch size which is ideal for parent albums.

Madrid

On Saturday I delivered John and Amanda’s wedding album to them, they’re delighted with it and love the contemporary style of the album.

Saturday evening I went to a TSB reunion at Tiger Tiger in Cardiff, it was really great to see so many former colleagues that I haven’t seen for a number of years. It was twenty years ago that what was then TSB General Insurance relocated from Andover to Newport. Quite a number of us worked in Andover prior to the move to Newport although very few from that time are still working at what is now Lloyds TSB. It was a very enjoyable evening.

When I recently upgraded to Photoshop CS4 I had an annoying problem that it wouldn’t run under my normal user account. Following quite a bit of investigation it appears that there is some corruption in my normal user account. Deleting and re-instating the user account was only a partial success – Photoshop CS4 ran perfectly but there were problems with other applications.

I decided that it was time for a complete upgrade and I’m now running a new machine with Windows Vista 64, triple core processor and 4G of ram, the performance improvement is wonderful.

I used Laplink PCmover to migrate applications and data from the existing Windows XP machine to the new Vista 64 platform and once again it worked perfectly saving so much time over individually re-installing each program.

One issue with the new platform is that Norton Ghost 10 is not supported on Vista 64 so I upgraded to Ghost 14, which unfortunately despite many hours with Symantec support could not be made to work correctly. Symantec provided a refund on the purchase price and I’m now running R-Drive Image to create images of my hard drives – it works flawlessly.