Received a print delivery from the lab this morning ready for the next batch of albums as soon as they arrive from Australia.

Called in to see my mum on the way to the bank.

Spoke with a very nice person from the Inland Revenue apologising that they hadn’t replied to a fax I sent them last month!

I’m also currently having a dialogue with Royal Mail over my local Post Office’s reluctance to accept (and guarantee) next day Special Delivery items where the postage has been paid using Royal Mail’s SmartStamp system!

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary. – David Bailey

A beautiful day today, what a nice change after the last couple of days.

I’ve been using the SmartStamp system from the Royal Mail for a while to print my own postage stamps, it works really well and minimises trips to the local Post Office and I don’t run out of stamps. I’m not too sure about the logic of paying Royal Mail a monthly fee for being able to use the system. It seems to me that as I’m printing my own stamps this is a lower cost option for them anyway!

I’m fully up to date with all album production, just waiting for further deliveries of albums and prints from the lab before I have a few more to make up. I’m still working on a couple of album design for composite albums, hoping to have them completed today or tomorrow for approval by the customers.

“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph”. – Matt Hardy

It’s a very overcast, damp and dark day in Church Village.

Yesterday I sent off an order to Australia for some more Jorgensen albums, all done over the Internet. The Jorgensen Album Design software is really superb, it not only allows you to design beautiful albums but it also handles all the album order processing and export of images to be printed by the lab.

I’ve just created a CD with files for printing by the lab and popped it in the post.

I’ve been working on a couple of album designs today, both for composite page albums, one a Jorgensen E Album and the other an Image Book Album.

“There are a few photographers, and we are one of them, who still keep and develop the old skills that made good photography what it was in the past; and while we use machines and labor-saving devices for some purely routine procedures, the great bulk of our work depends on individual and creative handiwork. This is the reason good photographs cost more.” Louis Fabian Bachrach

Monday is the day of the week when I catch up with personal tasks. I generally work weekends, often with weddings on Friday and Saturday and processing the images on a Sunday. When I have a wedding free weekend I’m often meeting with couples over the weekend to discuss their future wedding plans. There’s also a lot of evening meetings, so I like to chill out a little on Mondays. I still answer the telephone and reply to emails but other than that it’s mainly a non-working day with little or no Camelot Photography work.

I checked out the basketball sites and the Rhondda Rebels won their home game against the Sheffield Hatters last Saturday – a great start for their first home game of the new season.

One of my hobbies (when I have time – a bit of a pun!) is restoring old pendulum clocks, the current project is restoring a Vienna Regulator made by Gustav Becker around 1890. The case is in very good condition but the movement has suffered from some rather strange recent maintenance. When I received the clock the movement was dripping with oil! The time keeping side of the clock is working well but the striking side requires some further work. I’ve stripped the movement and given it an initial clean but I need to order a few parts and set about stripping it down, giving it a thorough clean and proper oiling, together with a few replacement parts, reassembling and setting it up.

“Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.” Tony Benn, In “Independent,” (London), 21 Oct 1989.

The current ‘wedding season’ is slowly starting to come to an end and today I don’t have a wedding to photograph. 🙁

Like a lot of photographers when they don’t have a wedding it always involves a double check of the diary just to make absolutely sure! 🙂

My new web site is working fine so I’m hoping to have a relatively computer free day, although I’m trying to post something to this blog most days.

I’m sometimes asked where the name Camelot Photography came from, well it’s fairly straightforward. When I first started as a professional photograper in 1992 I thought long and hard about what to call myself. I didn’t really like Stephen Brennan Photography and as we were living at that time off Camelot Way in Thornhill, Cardiff I decided Camelot Photography would be a good name.

Changed the rear brake disks on the Passat this morning, silent braking has been restored! I still have to carry out a major service on the second BMW and then all the car maintenance tasks will be up to date.

Early evening shopping at Tesco, really quite a quiet day today!

“Never boss people around. It’s more important to click with people than to click the shutter.” – Alfred Eisenstaedt, “Collector’s edition of Life, the Eisie Issue ” . Spring 1998, page: 18

Most of the day has been spent sorting out the transfer of my web site to a new web host. It’s been a relatively painless process that has involved changing the domain name server entries to point to the new host and amending my email settings so that I can send and receive email. A few changes to some of the code on the new web site to incorporate some structural changes and setting some directory and file permissions. I’ve run a number of tests on the on-line viewing galleries and everything appears to be working. With the MySQL database set up I can now publish this blog live on my web site!

Spoke to Stuart this morning, he and Karen are getting married at Bryngarw House in a couple of weeks and we’ve arranged to get together on Sunday afternoon to go through all the final details.

“Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” Matt Hardy

Started early today by 7:45 am I’d checked my emails and had a quick surf on the professional photography forums, they are really great for keeping in touch with other photographers around the world, keeping up to speed on the latest techniques and trends and helping each other out with technical and business queries. I guess as I work from home they’ve become my ‘virtual water cooler’, the place where in a conventional office job you have a brief chat with colleagues as you grab a drink. Many of these ‘virtual’ colleagues around the world have become close personal friends over the years. It’s been some time since I worked in a conventional office environment. I spent many years working in IT for major corporates and really enjoyed the challenges of the various roles from project management through to technical support but being self employed and doing a job that I really love is priceless! I still manage to keep in touch with a number of my former work friends, it’s amazing the different things that some of them are doing these days as an example Dee and her family are now in Spain running a cafe and holiday accomodation and Sue recently emigrated to Canada with her family.

A nice cheque in the post from Lloyds TSB, half year share dividend – a bit like Monopoly but with real money!

Trip to the bank before lunch to pay in a batch of business cheques, a lot of customers now pay by debit or credit card but some still pay by cheque, the only down side of cheque payments for me is that I have to drive to the not so local bank to pay them in – but it gets me away from ‘real work’ for a little while!

Received a text message from Julie (my Welsh tutor) to say that she’s suffering with a cold so the Welsh Class this evening has been cancelled.

Made up a pair of Jorgensen Parent Albums for one of my customers, the finished albums look great – instant job satisfaction for me!

“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” – Diane Arbus