My weekend

Wow. Two blog posts in two days. And not only that, but two original posts that aren't printed elsewhere first. This must be me setting some kind of record.

Anyway, this weekend I've been mainly trying to stave off the boredom that having a wife currently living 500 or so miles away causes. Thankfully, I have two very caring and entertaining friends in Johanna and Debbie who helped me keep a smile on my coupon with a walk up the Water of Leith and lashings of rum and ginger beer.

Today, I attempted to fight off my hangover by going for a trek up Corstorphine Hill. It certainly seemed to work - instead of fighting the gnarling effects of a pulsing headache, I was more concerned about my general lack of fitness when pitifully trying to conquer the hill's not insubstantial slopes.

Now I'm back on the couch, having booked some adhoc flights to Colchester for next weekend, contemplating raiding the freezer for that tub of Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream. I swear, there was a time when I used to have an interesting life. Isn't' it odd how it's now, when I'm at my most boring, that I've decided to blog more frequently and more personally? I guess that says something.

Birdwatching in Edinburgh

This week for the place I still call work I was asked to take my camera to a guided birdwatch my company had put on with Edinburgh and Lothians Greenspace Trust (EGLT). It was a fairly early start to the day, 7.30am, but thankfully a decent amount of feathered-friend spotters took up the opportunity to be led around the Canonmills area of the Water of Leith with birdsman Mike Bennie.

It was a pretty fun morning. There was a lot of construction work going on at the time so there wasn't as much birdlife shaking its tail feather as we would have liked, but Mike - ever the professoinal - managed to make even the most mundane birds sound relatively interesting.

Photo-wise, I'm not that happy with what I took. But it's a learning process. One of the major difficulties I found was getting frontal shots, rather than from behind. They either looked directly at the camera or acted in the most bizarre manner. In marketing, they call this the Hawthorne Effect. I'm sure professional photographers have another, more expletive speckled term for it, however. Very infuriating.

It's nice to shoot with the D700 though. I'm certain the quality of the camera is making up for my lack of prowess, technically. I'm very much looking forward to getting my paws on Su's D3 once I'm down in Colchester. If she'll let me, that is!