Blue jay test

London Daily Photo has some new equipment. Two new cameras, a Canon S90 and a Fuji HS10, plus a new notebook computer - a Dell Studio 16 XPS with a 250GB SSD drive. Why all the new toys? LDP is about to go on a hiatus and Rockinon Travel will be getting a little needed attention.

You see, my wife and I are taking my Morgan and hitting the road come the end of the month. Our daughter, her husband and Miss Baby are going to keep the home fires burning while we are out gallivanting. (Maybe I should teach them to blog?)

We're going to drive right across the top of the U.S., hitting Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, and Yosemite before reaching the Pacific and visiting San Simeon. Then it is up the coast to San Francisco and then on up the coast all the way to Washington state.

Then we are heading into the mountains and north to Canada. Once in Canada, we are heading home.

It will be a long trip in an aging British roadster. But then, I am an aging British roadster owner. We were both new when we met some forty years ago. (Actually the Morgan was new; I already had a couple of decades under my belt.) No comment on my wife's age. She's ageless.

I'll try and blog whenever possible, posting both stories and photos.

Today's picture is a blue jay at our backyard feeder. It is not a great shot but it is interesting as it was shot from inside our kitchen through the window looking out onto our backyard. The Fuji has a 24mm to 720mm lens and it works well. Unfortunately, the small, electronic viewfinder goes dark when you take a picture and the camera does suffer from shutter lag. (I keep hunting for settings to minimize the drawbacks.) Mix these two minuses together and you have a situation that many would find intolerable.

When I am more familiar with both cameras, I'll post a review on the Rockinon photo blog.

April showers are a month late

It has been cool lately, frosty in fact, but it has also been very wet --- lots of rain. It even snowed briefly this morning. Luckily it did not keep snowing. With the leaves already on the trees, snow can linger on the limbs of the larger, aging trees and tear limbs free if too much snow falls.

Red-Winged Blackbird

A red-winged blackbird at a backyard feeder in London, Ontario, Canada.

I thought that red-winged blackbirds were mainly birds of marsh areas as they are very common in the wetlands bordering Lake Erie. But, I guess I was wrong as they are very common this spring at our bird feeder.

PodCamp London

Steve Groves: Ldn. Free Press web strategist.

This weekend was Podcast London. There is a strong "geek" community here in London, Ontario. I use the word geek because the group of computer wizards themselves use the term in a humorous, modest manner.

An intrigued Ryan Wiseman, left, meets with Nick Wynja.

These are bright, in many cases brilliant, people. And Saturday they shared some of their knowledge.


A young man, Nick Wynja, gave a demonstration on shooting and editing video using nothing more than an iPhone. He can have the finished ready-for-air clip back at the television station before the competition has returned to their cars.

Newspapers, with their growing Internet video presence, could also use this technology to advantage.

Work at a paper? Check out this VeriCoder Technology link and their 1st Video app.

An sound editor is a word conductor.

Another speaker talked about editing sound with respect. He approached a speech recording as others might approach a piece of music.

There is a rhythm, a cadence, to our speech. John Meadows told us, "If people can hear your edit, your edit isn't working."

Rod Lucier points to the Creative Commons symbols in use.

Rodd Lucier, left, discussed copyright and the  development of the Creative Commons designations and symbols.

For an explanation of the various CC symbols, check out the Creative Commons site.

All images shot at the event are covered under the Creative Commons designation.

It spells NUJV. Huh?

Speaker, Nik Harron, told the audience the Beatles, in this famous picture, are spelling out a word in semaphore and it isn't "Help." Spelling help was the original idea but it was decided "those letters didn't look good." NUJV appears in the picture. 

I think that is another way to spell "Oops!" 

Sprouting signs

The chap tilling his garden is a fellow with whom I once worked. He has a home bordering the coves just west of the city core. The coves are formed by an oxbow in the Thames River as it leaves London. The soil is fairly good but a bit sandy when you dig down. I don't know for sure, but my guess is that the billboard on his property yields a better return than the vegetables he grows each year.

By request_Little Miss Baby

Had a couple of requests for Little Miss Baby. Now into her eighth month, Little Miss Baby is developing quite the personality. She loves to laugh and giggle. Sometimes she laughs so long and so hard that she gets the hiccups.

The New York Times had an interested piece on The Moral Life of Babies. Jean-Jacques Rousseau apparently called babies “perfect idiots.” Rousseau obviously didn't spend much time around babies, but he certainly did make a perfect idiot of himself with his insight.

If you want proof that babies are able to think, check out my video of my manipulative little eight-month-old granddaughter. Now, what's the morality of this?

Oh Canada. . .

I've featured this downtown London building before but I just loved the way the Canadian Maple Leaf flag lined up with the building in this shot.

Before Canada had the red maple leaf adorned flag we had the Canadian Red Ensign. The Red Ensign carried the Union Jack in a corner as part of its design.

I guess feelings are still running a little high over the dropping of the Red Ensign as I was actually stopped on the street by a gentleman who noticed me shooting today's picture. He wanted to discuss the loss of the Red Ensign --- a loss that happen about 45 years ago in 1965.