A cool Wednesday

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Pobol y Cwm fans may be interested to know that Lisa Victoria who plays Sheryl in the popular Welsh TV series now has her own web site. It’s also nice to see some familiar faces returning to the series including Debbie Moon who plays Rhian Haf, Rhys ap William who plays Cai and Catrin Arwel who plays Emma.

Now that the peak of the wedding season is over I’m currently working on a number of wedding album designs and I spent the afternoon working on my accounts.

David and Hannah called in this evening. 🙂

Dosbarth Cymraeg

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Es i Dosbarth Cymraeg bore yma.

Welsh classes started again this morning, once again struggling a little on numbers attending, we’ll have to wait and see what happens next week, hopefully a few more people will be there. A lot of changes this year now that the University of Glamorgan have taken over the administration of the courses, a new syllabus complete with new books. Only two more years to go to complete the course!

Cars!

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The central locking is working fine today on the Passat! I connected my laptop to the diagnostic socket and it is showing that Key 2 was giving some intermittent problems, I cleared the fault code, I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens, at least the boot lock is now free so I can unlock the car if I have any further problems. I’ve been driving the Nissan Patrol today though. 🙂

The RAC man rescues me!

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I parked the Volkswagen Passat for a short while but when I returned and pressed the unlock button on the remote control nothing happened. I wasn’t very far from LDS Motor Factors so I walked there and bought two new batteries for the remote and returned to the car, unfortunately still nothing happened when the remote was pressed. Rather than hang around outside and wait for the RAC to arrive I walked home and picked up the Nissan Patrol and drove back to the Passat and called the RAC. It took just over three hours for the RAC to arrive (in a Nissan Patrol!) but their control centre phoned frequently to apologise for the delay and to keep me updated on the likely arrival time. The usual method of passing a rod through the door frame unfortunately didn’t work as the central locking deadlocks when activated. The door locks had unfortunately never been used with the key so both the driver and passenger locks were seized, fortunately it was possible to free the boot lock and unlock the car. The RAC patrol man then followed me back home and dropped me back so I could pick up the Nissan Patrol. I suppose the lesson from this is that even though the car has remote central locking you need to use the key in each lock now and again just to stop the locks seizing, also if Volkswagen had designed the air con intake properly the electronic control units under the passenger seat wouldn’t have a tendency to get flooded and cause all sorts of intermittent problems. 🙁

A busy week

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I’ve completed all the initial processing of the images from Dean and Cath’s wedding. Their web gallery was loaded onto our web site on Monday morning. We started photographing the wedding preparations at 11 o’clock in the morning and continued right through to around 11:30 in the evening and we had over 400 images to process. Our Nikon D2X and Fuji cameras performed flawlessly and captured some great images in some very challenging lighting which ranged from blazing sunshine to night time images outside.

All our images are captured in raw format to ensure maximum quality and then converted into high resolution jpeg files in Adobe Lightroom, while the slight corrections to some images for exposure and white balance is a fairly quick process the card downloads and the import into Lightroom and the export out of Lightroom takes a little time. Once we’ve created the high resolution images we then use BreezeBrowser Pro to create web resolution copies which are used to create the web viewing gallery and DVD slideshow.

While the images are being processed we hold copies on both our working computer and our file server (we also still have the images on the camera cards), once all the processing is completed we also create additional copies of the raw images and jpegs on DVD archives, the images from the camera cards are then no longer needed.

I sent the thumbnail proofs to the lab for printing on Tuesday evening and they were received back yesterday morning.

All the processing is now completed until Dean and Cath select the images for their wedding album or we receive orders from the web gallery which will be available to guests once Dean and Cath have viewed them.

I know a number of photographers who take several weeks to load up their web viewing galleries but with my workload I need to keep up to date with processing so everything is completed fairly quickly, for this reason we also produce album designs within a few days of receiving the list of selected photographs, once the album design is approved the album is ordered and the print files sent to the lab within a day.

Stuart and Rachel’s Wedding

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Today we had the pleasure of photographing Stuart and Rachel’s wedding at St Barnabas Church in Penygraig. It was a lovely wedding but unfortunately the rain didn’t let up so there are very few outdoor photographs.

Here’s a photograph of the happy couple.

Stuart and Rachel

And here’s their terrific cake from Rhianydd Easton at Dragons and Daffodils.

Cake