2011 has arrived so fast.

The days seem to fly by so fast when I'm busy.

So what's busy about being retired from paid employment? Well first the salary is ZERO. This means that there's plenty of TIME, right? NO.

What it means, is that in a household that includes a very busy executive wife, I'm running all the household, being the travel agent, social secretary, shopper, technician & fixer of everything, time is very short.

Oh, and accompanying Moira on her many trips taking photos and enjoying the company of so many friends and Moira's international colleagues.

We do seem to have traveled so much these last 3 years.

In particular I guess the challenges from a photographic perspective has been the involvement with IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) & then IFLA making me their first official photographer. A fantastic honour for me.

I first attended IFLA in Quebec in 2008, Canada as an accompanying person & recorded in photos the activities of the IFLA section on "Library and Research Services for Parliaments".

Subsequently I was spread over many more section meetings & events at IFLA 2009 in Milan, Italy when they accredited me as a photographer.

To my delight, IFLA appointed me as their official photographer before the Congress in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2010 & I look forward to the congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico in August.

During the course of these trips to IFLA, Moira & I have added holidays in the area. These certainly give ample opportunity to clear the cobwebs & reinforce in one the beauty & wonder of our world.

In a couple of weeks we'll be off to Canberra, Australia for a conference/workshop/training hosted by the Australian Government's Parliamentary Library. I'm sure with the wide cultural diversity of the participants, I'll have a wonderful opportunity for many amazing photos.

You can see a selection of my library/conference photos here and I'll post the ones from Canberra here.

And the photos we take on holiday you can browse here if you have minutes or hours to spare.

Photos of mine

I thought that I'd start this Blog with my passion about photography.

I've been interested in photography for about 40 years and bought my first SLR camera, a Canon FTQL in 1971.

Way back then it was mostly family & holiday pics with some work related ones when I travelled in New Zealand & overseas mostly to Geneva, Switzerland.

Then in 2004 I bought my first digital SLR, a Canon 10D. Of course it was now so much simpler, viewing pics as you took them & downloading to the PC.

No more expensive films & developing & getting prints.

During the latter part of 2007 I replaced the Canon 10D with Canon 1D Mark 3 professional body. And oh what a change this body brought to the way I thought about picture taking. There are so many customisable functions careful study of the manual became mandatory.

Mostly I use Google's Picasa as the workflow tool & Google's Picasaweb albumns for those pics I post to the web

But you can't do everything with Picasa so I have several other tools:

- ImageAlign Pro, principally for correcting perspective,

- NoiseNinja, for removing noise in high ISO images,

- Canon DPP, sometimes for workflow,

- Capture One Pro, for RAW file conversion to jpeg. I used to always capture images in RAW format. However for the type of work I do mostly, I have found that jpeg is quite good enough. It's horses for courses really.

- Irfanview, for various jobs.

I've now uploaded many folders of images to Picasaweb & perhaps you'd like to sample some of them here in a slideshow.