As you may have guessed, I sold one! Right at the end of the day, after quite a few people walking past and looking at things then just wandering off, a guy walked up and bought a 6×8″ print of my Huskisson photo. It’d cost me about $8 to make, and he paid $15 – bastard asked if there was any discount for cash, geez – so it was on its way.

All in all I made a loss on the day, paying $30 for the stall and making $8 profit on the photo. Oh well, it was a learning experience, and if I hadn’t gone I wouldn’t have known

I’m also trying to come up with a new business name and site/card to go with it – ricetek’s been around as an idea since 2002 – it doesn’t suit the way that I’m going with my life these days. If you know me, I’m working on my skills as a photographer and discovering a lot of things about how I see the world. I ask myself constantly what the story is behind every thing that I see, and how I can portray it to others. Places, things that are there for a reason – whether intentional or forgotten – and the questions that people ask about their lives.

But how to portray all these things? How to tell the story? This is what I’m working on now. Picture a cup – it’s simple – a cup. But what happens to this cup? You put coffee, tea, soft drink, cordial, water, wine, spirits or peanuts in it, and it holds something. Some people’s cups follow them through many different places, times and experiences. The cup of the man in the trenches for a war can serve many purposes. The coffee cup that lives on your desk in your office lives a relatively simple life. When people travel into space, the depths of the ocean, the deserts or the ice fields of the antarctic, they all need something that looks or serves the purposes of a cup. They all have their stories, and telling those stories well is a revealing process for the artist, let alone the viewer.

It’s probably something you don’t think of much, but that’s my job as a photographer. To make you think!

For now, I’m working on the idea of using “Cerdo Rudis” as my business name – Cerdo is latin for artist, and Rudis for “unskilled” or “raw” to signify not only my current skill level, but also the way that I seem to be developing my style. It’s raw, bringing the story out and showing what’s there, opening myself and the subject up to let the viewer of the art see into the depths. It’s hard to explain, but well, it’s me

So now I’ll probably keep ricetek for my personal and weird stuff, maybe my technology side, but cerdo rudis will be my new beginning, allowing me to house my art, and show people what I can do.

GPS odometer 1355+change

Today was a relatively short day travel-wise, since I started in Goulburn and was heading for canberra – roughly 100km of driving. Nothing terribly exciting to report as far as the travel went, the Federal Highway is pretty boring. I went past Lake George which is rather empty at the moment, so it looks like a giant flat plain.

Canberra’s just like everyone said, designed for the public servants and rather boring. Looking down some of the streets makes me think of what Movie World is like without all the glitz, a manufactured town by boring people for boring people. I would say it doesn’t have personality, but it does. It’s just a really boring one. The streets are nice and wide, very well planned out and so forth, but that just makes it look more empty than it is. There weren’t many people around the place except for old people and students at the tourist places and boring corporate types in the eateries at lunch time.

I walked around parliament house, which is rather… parliamentary. It’s not exciting, and anyone that says it is has to be a politics student or old. I took a few photos, just to see if I could make it un-boring, but I don’t think I achieved that, I’m just not that good.

Meeting up with Mum we stopped at a little italian place for lunch, because I was starving by then – breakfast was coffee and cigarettes. I got the Tattaglia Carbonara, a wonderful mix of bacon, mushrooms and a white wine sauce over fresh pasta – quite tasty. Caesar salad with calamari was mum’s dish, which seemed nice but the seafood didn’t taste too nice to me.

Our next stop was the Canberra Gallery, where we checked out a few different exhibitions including a celebration of 60 years of the Canberra Photographic Society. Some great shots, and a nice group of displays.

Next we went to the War Memorial, which is an impressive structure – as it should be – it’s quite amazing to see our military history. I saw one of my relatives on the giant wall of rememberance, wandered through the exhibits and even saw a photo of another one of my relatives on the Sandakan photo wall. This wall is quite saddening because it shows a photo of each person put to death in the Sandakan Prison camp.

So now I’m sitting on a couch in one of the rooms of the Crowne Casino, pondering what to have for dinner. I guess I’ll just find some nice little place and munch, then toddle around taking photos of things until I get tired

As a PS to this original post, I went out and had a shitty dinner – the WORST lasagne that I’ve ever had, tasted like it was made of last week’s leftover horse meat or something. Went back to the room, hung out, then went out again to grab some stuff out of the car and locked myself out of the room – go me!

I was at home, and Dad called me for my opinion on one (he was looking for a new one as well) and I rendered it, saying that it was a damn good buy. I ended up going and having a look, so we bought two.

It’s an Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz, with a 120Gb SATA HDD, 1gb Ram, Nvidia 7300 Go graphics, 15″ widescreen (1280×800) and all the other usual things (including bluetooth) So far I’ve played EVE Online with it, and done a bunch of other things and it seems to be a quite capable machine, especially since it was only $2500 including a 3 year warranty

The next test is to install linux on it – I’m not sure which distro I’m going to use – it’ll either be gentoo or ubuntu. I’ve been using ubuntu on my desktop for a while, and it “just works” … except for sound. Gentoo might get put on in that case.

This is a huge post, and even though I hate the LJ “cuts” this one probably deserves it for low bandwidth people and so forth…

Friday I did a bunch of shopping, getting some kickass gloves for the three boys (Brian, Mitchell and I) and a new tent for myself. I’m really ecstatic with the tent I bought – an OZTrail Star Lite (2006 Edition) which is designed for hiking. It weighs about 2kg’s, takes about ten minutes to setup and is big enough for two people to sleep in comfortably For $100 it well and truly satisfies all my needs for doofing and the (hopefully) upcoming super road trip o’ doom.

Twas a fun day, since the night before I was talking to Clairey and ended up picking her up in the morning so that we could hang out and cause mischief as we normally do We stopped off at The Confectionery Warehouse to pick up some lollies, hoping to have as much fun Mitchell and I did the week before at the Queensland Winter Solstice event. I ended up getting a big bag of 200 fruity lollipops, a bag of mentos and a bunch of other lollies just for me One of the cool things I picked up was a lollipop with a mini Etch-A-Sketch on it, sure to provide minutes of fun when I get bored one day

We stopped at my house for me to pack up and get ready to go, then to Brian’s to go shopping and drop most of the gear off to make it easier to pack the car. It wasn’t long until 5pm, so Clairey and I headed back into the city to pick up Mitchell after work with the intention of droping Clairey off so we could leave for the weekend. Rather than letting her sit at home and us go to the doof, she was now coming along! A stop at her house to pick up her gear, then to Mitchell’s and back to Brian’s to shoehorn the gear and the people into the car and we were off

It was skooshy, but we all fit in there, and we headed down to Brian’s uncle’s house on the NSW North Coast. I can’t remember if it’s Murwillumbah or Mullimbimby, but it’s a huge beautiful house in a beautiful location, and always heaps of fun.

It had rained overnight, making for a fun trip down O_o and some beautiful plants with water droplets in the morning that Mitchell found. One day I’ll teach him about aperture and how it affects depth of field in macro shots, but these photos came out pretty nice I really liked some shots he took one day of mushrooms in his garden, they were cool!

The morning brought an interesting challenge and an omen of things to come – Brian’s car wouldn’t start. Normal enough after a cold night in the elements, but after a jump start it wouldn’t kick over. Eventually it turned over and started, then ran fine for the rest of the day – but it was a bit weird for an EFI car to turn over but not run straight away.

This time we’d actually remembered to bring the directions, so the only time we had any problems navigating was finding our way through Lismore to head to Kyogle, then down to Casino. An hour after leaving Casino (including about 20km of dirt tracks) we were at the site!

As I’ve said before, the doof was located at Mt. Pikapene, a pine plantation area, which gave us a kickass pile of logs to pick through for firewood We setup camp, found some firewood just before it got dark and got a fire started to keep us toasty warm throughout the night. Actually getting the fire started was a bit of a pain, since it had been raining there as well. A litre or two of kerosene later splashed around and we’d got it going enough to dry the bigger bits out and keep them going.

Not long after that, the music started, so we danced around and chilled out and I polished off a bottle or so of 2004 Buckland Gap Cabernet Merlot which I picked up a quarter-dozen for $20 on the way down. A damn good drop for the money, I say!

Eventually it was time for a sleep, many crazy adventures later. It was nice that there was some half-decent grass around, making for a makeshift hay matress under the nylon of the tent – nothing worse than having to sleep on rocky ground in the freezing cold! I love my Holeproof Explorer wooly style socks, they keep me so amazingly warm – for the first time ever I actually had to wear two pairs of them, it was that cold!

Waking up in the morning, I cooked breakfast for myself – all day breakfast kicks ASS! Beans, sausages, potato, onions, all in a can easy to reheat in my funky new billy on the gas stove o’ burnination The music was pretty good, and the dance floor was packed for the whole day – quite a few people – which was good because they needed 400 paying entrants to cover costs.

The dancefloors were at a lower level than the carpark/camping area, and the ground was a bit muddy in some places, so someone decided to turn it into a proper waterslide. After an hour or two you could see those who’d been on (or near) the slide, being covered in a thick coating of mud or just being saturated.

As a reward for being one of the instigators of the sherbert-related fun at the Winter Solstice, the amazingly beautiful and wonderful person LauraLai bought me a giant sherbert straw as a present! I don’t know what I’m going to do with it all, eating it could nearly kill me! Thanks LauraLai!

The high point of Sunday was meeting some kickass foreign doofers – two gorgeous ladies that’d come over from Britain and a group from Israel who were great fun to talk to.

Unfortunately, with the highs come the lows – and Sunday afternoon came with a great big one. We packed up ready to leave, and the central locking had been playing up but we thought it was just the fact that the battery was flat after a cold night, and expected that a jump start should get us going again. That was not to be the case – an hour or two’s troubleshooting left us with a car that was no closer to starting, and without mobile reception or an ability to tow the car out, Brian and Shannyn got a lift back to Brisbane in the back of another group’s car, hoping to be able to sort something out overnight. Mitchell, Clairey and I were left at the doof, 20km from the closest town along roads we didn’t know, with no way of contacting the outside world and most of the doofers were gone, or were due to go early Monday morning.

Luckily, Mitchell got a lift with someone else that was heading back to Brisbane at 6am – allowing him to call into work and get the day off – and also to call my work to advise them that I may not make it. I setup the tent on Sunday night, throwing all the blankets and clothes and warm gear I could find in it because it was going to be a cold night without the fire, and Clairey and I bundled up inside and went to sleep.

Monday morning’s alarm clock was the sound of logging trucks driving past – which got our hopes up as far as the rescue went. They’re pretty cool trucks, some of them carry the back half of their trailer on the front half.

Setting up the tent was a good thing, because the car would have been really uncomfortable, and it rained that night – on Monday morning Clairey and I setup the tarp so that we’d have a little bit of shade and cover if the rain came back. It also gave us a bit more time to nap, seeing as we hadn’t slept well for the second night without a matress and in the cold.

By midday we were starting to wonder what was going to happen, having no way to contact the outside world always makes for an interesting time when you’re wanting to be somewhere else. About 2pm, we heard the welcome sounds of Brian’s Landcruiser, with car trailer in tow. Unfortunately he’d somehow hit the trailer on a fence that lay either side of a cattle grate, so there was a tyre to change and a bit of panelbeating to get it looking a little less broken.

After that was done, we had another go at jump starting the car, which didn’t work again – the starter motor would turn the engine over, but it just wouldn’t fire. While we were planning how to get the car up onto the trailer, luck jumped up and threw us a nice bonus – the courtesy light turned on, showing the car would start, and after a mad dash to get the jumper leads on, we got the car started! Huzzah indeed!

To save fuel, we put the car trailer on the commodore – it’s well capable of towing an empty trailer, and the ‘cruiser used enough fuel as it was. Then we were off! I knew that there would have to be a stop for fuel on the way back, but the battery was charging now that the engine was running, the only worry was the electrical bug that was affecting the car. Driving home, the indicators would flicker randomly, the central locking had a mind of its own, and the windscreen wipers would make their way haltingly across the windscreen in little jumps and starts. It wouldn’t do it constantly, but every so often the car woul remind us that something was not quite right.

Brian stopped for fuel in Casino, and not wanting to get in the way of the petrol station (with the trailer etc) we stopped on the other side of the road to wait with the engine running. As we went to leave, the car presented me with my favourite of its issues – when you put it in gear, you have to wait a second or two until it actually goes into gear with a clunk before driving off, else it’ll stall. Luckily, it started again first go, after giving me another ono-moment.

I got a bit lost in Lismore, not knowing exactly where to go, but after stopping for directions at a servo we were on our way again. By the time we got back across the border, the fuel was looking a bit low so we stopped at Coolangatta for fuel. I didn’t want to get stuck in the dark again with a non-working car – not to mention without a mobile, since it seems there’s no mobile phone stores anywhere in New South Wales, let alone servos that sell random accessories. After getting lined up next to the pump (yay for blocking the way with the trailer) I turned off the car, prayed and then tried to start it again. No go. Shit!

I decided to give it time, putting twenty bucks of fuel in it, paying then coming back for another go. Nothing. Hooray! I told the guy at the counter that we weren’t leaving the car there, just had to wait a little while because the car was borked, and had a smoke in the meantime. I finished my smoke, and as I walked over I noticed the little light was on again, so the mad dash was completed, key jammed in and twisted, and we were running again! I left Clairey in the car to look after it, so I could run over to the payphone and call work and beg for an E-Day (thank you David for giving me one) so I could get some sleep and have time to sort everything out.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, we drove home, dropped off Brian’s car and the trailer, grabbed whatever gear we could find and then I dropped Clairey home via Mitchell’s to say hello and tell him we got in alright. It was 9pm before I dropped Clairey off, and about ten before I got home, but boy was it great to have that first shower since Thursday night, use a toilet that wasn’t growing out of the ground, and then getting into a bed with a real mattress in a room with solid walls.

P.S. I’m probably not going to go to another Northern New South Wales doof for a while, TNG and the April Fools’ doof turned me off the whole community down there. It’s full of fuckwit stoners and people that just don’t seem as nice and as inviting as the Maleny/Queensland doof scene. If you’re in the crowd, the carpark or anywhere at a doof, and someone walks past where you are, give them a smile, respond to their hello, don’t stare them down and act all tough – get a life! And I know it’s not just me, a few Queensland people have mentioned it lately.

P.P.S. I wish Clairey hadn’t had such a shitty weekend, camping will definitely have to be on the cards sometime soon!

Putting on the handbrake and leaving it in neutral I jumped out of the car to investigate and called back to the house for someone to come and look after it (I was going to be late if I had to work out what to do with it) and in the meantime it had made its way out from under the car and was heading for the drain.

The phonecall went something like this (I called bob):
me: “uh, dude, come quick, there’s an echidna under my car”
him: “what?”
me: “yeah, you know… spikes, animal, echidna!”
him: [insert appropriate wtf-sounding noises here]
me: “yeah, it’s hiding, come help!”

Weirdest thing that I’ve called someone about since that time with the donkey and the waterme… never mind. Dad and bob got him into a box and put it in the ensuite, and he got out straight away and happily puttered around all night waking Mum and Dad up as its spines scraped past things. Eventually it went down between the shower and the bench, fell asleep and that’s where it stayed..

Getting it out from there was a serious pain – we tried being nice, leaving some water in the middle of the room in a box with the light off (since they are nocturnal, we thought it might come out for a drink) no go. Trying to grab it with a pair of big gardening gloves didn’t work either – bunching up in a defensive position made it stick in the corner harder. The same with trying to push it out with a ruler – jammed hard.

We called the koala center place in the local state forest, and they didn’t really know what to do with it, just suggesting to leave it in the local forest because it wasn’t injured. Aparrently there’s been quite a few things like this happening lately, animals going looking for water and getting lost in the suburbs.

Eventually dad got it out by just surprising it – getting a long ruler down between it and the wall quickly enough so that it didn’t have time to react – there wasn’t much chance of injuring it anyway because of all the spines in the way of where we were touching.

I’m kinda sad that I missed out on taking it back to the forest – I’d have loved to see it off and get some more photos – but it was taken back later that evening when I was asleep and put into an area with water and some nice scrub for it to live in. Who says I don’t have weird things happen to me on the way to work? Best reason ever to tell work you’re going to be late: “uh, there was an echidna under my car?” “what?” “yeah” “uh, ok then, see you when you get here.”

I decided a couple of months ago that cooking my own would be an interesting idea, starting with the one dish I could cook really well, which was pasta with my own sauce concoction. That worked really well, but wasn’t terribly healthy because it was loaded with ham, pepperoni and all sorts of fatty things. There’s no easy way to make it healthy, and to add a little variety I decided to change what I was cooking.

Devilled Sausages, Curried Sausages and a Chicken Rogan Josh were next. I made a few serves of each all at once, allowing me to have a single day of cooking for three weeks of food – easy to do and cheaper because I can buy the ingredients in bulk. The sausage meals were super-tasty, using Woolworths’ premium “heart smart” sausages which are amazingly tasty. Alas, the Rogan Josh was bearable, but I’m not going to do that again since it wasn’t exciting enough for multiple-meal goodness.

So I’d eaten all of those meals, and it was time to go shopping again. I thought that because I had a day or two to cook, and I wanted something good to eat, that I would hit up some recipe books and see what I could find in the “easy to make, freezable and good home cooking” category. I found Sausage Rolls and Chicken Parmagiana. I decided to make another small batch of Devilled Sausages because they were cheap, easy and tasty.

I made the Chicken first, since it’s really easy to make. I’ll make a recipe page and link to it from here. I cooked up the bacon with a nice big spoon of garlic, put it on top of the nice big chicken breasts, spooned salsa all over them, dumped the grated cheese on top and into the oven they went. Very simple, and very tasty. (Bob wasn’t impressed – he had to have a snack because he was hungry after just smelling them)

Chicken ready to go into the oven	Chicken cooked and lying in oily doom!
You really do need to drain off the leftover liquid from the combined forces of oil and liquid from the ingredients.
Leftover oily goo from Parma	Parma draining of ooze

Parma ready to freeze

While the chicken was cooking, I started on the sausage rolls (something I also need to make a recipe link for) They are simple also – mix up some milk and breadcrumbs and let that soak while you chop up two onions and two carrots really finely. Mix in about a kilo of premium beef mince (because it’s tastier) with the aforementioned ingredients and about a teaspoon of mixed spice, then make into rolls with puff pastry.

Sausage Roll breadcrumb mixture	Sausage roll filling
Stick them in the oven on a tray for half an hour or so at about 150 degrees to cook the filling, then 220 until they are nice and crispy brown. Perfect!
Sausage rolls fresh out of the oven	Sausage Rolls in a freezer container
Container stack	Mini Leftover bits

I had a bit of leftover mince and a bunch of pastry offcuts, so I made these mini snacks, cooking them the next morning for breakfast. Goddamn they’ll taste good for dinner

My next experiment will be to make blueberry and apple muffins – as much as I’d like to use ‘em instead of apples, bananas are too expensive at the moment

Shion, someone that we met at the April Fools’ Doof was due to come along as well – he’s a kickass Poi monk of super-1337 abilities – making some of our group look like real amatuers I couldn’t resist the opportunity to get some extended exposure photos of him, so the tripod and camera were taken along to give me something to do.

Bob and his tail Poi
Bob’s Poi don’t show up at night for long exposures, but this photo came out alright with the flash.

Brian one handed double Poi

Shion Painting Corkscrews with fire

Brian’s been practising using two Poi with the one hand, and this is a great example of how it looks with a long exposure shot using fire. Shion’s corkscrews are beautiful in real life, and this shot shows how you can paint some beautiful lines with an extended exposure – I like how it shows how the flame moves through the air.

Shion – Flower Pattern

Brian – Small Fire spin

That flower pattern was actually held for about thirty seconds – Shion’s amazing when it comes to being completely consistent with his moves. You could take quite a long shot and get a very concise pattern. The shot on the right shows Brian keeping the cords short on the Poi and spinning them between his hands and his body – scary if you’ve got loose clothing on, but it works nicely if you can do it

Shion

Shion – Fire Fan

The fire fans are quite amazing when there’s a good routine – as usual Shion makes it look great

Fire and lightning

Whirling LED Patterns

Towards the end of the night, instead of using fire, Shion busted out the LED Poi. The colours are great to watch in real life, but in the photo they make for truly surreal imagery. The photo on the right was right at the end when he wanted to see how some new moves would look, which I was happy to help with

It only took about an hour or so, with a few detours because the roads didn’t seem to match up with the directions we were heading until we realised things aren’t signposted as well as they could have been around that area (if you’re heading north on Old Gympie road, don’t continue going north to get to Mount Beerwah, you have to turn left, as the other side of the sign correctly shows).

The first part was getting to the base of the mountain, that was pretty much 700m of just stairs. Not a good start for those of us that are bloody unfit and are carrying a shiteload of camera gear. Getting to the bottom of the climb face, we took some photos and planned how we were going to climb up. It didn’t take long to realise that the joggers I was wearing were pretty much useless for climbing and that the gear needed to be a LOT more compact next time. I got utterly stuck because the handholds are designed for people with grippy shoes – Bob helped from the top side and a friendly climber gave me a lift past the place I got stuck at. Hooray!

“Gravity’s a Bitch” – it’s written on the seat, and standing here you realise it’s right

Looking across to the coast from the bottom.

As I said above, I got stuck on the first section of the climb, about half way up – there wasn’t many hand or footholds that my shoes would grip on, but I got up there. Once we passed that it wasn’t too hard at all. We took the time to rest (my legs were shaking from holding me in strange positions) and take some photos.

Bob Lounging around

Brian Pondering his camera

We continued higher, with some good medium-level climbing and some good challenges – arriving at the next plateau we found that it was going to be hard to get up the next section. While Bob went further up the hill, Brian and I took the opportunity to take some more photos and enjoy the unimpeded view as far as the eye could see. We realised at that point that the light was fading – mainly because of the rain that was heading our way.

Bob pondering the rain	Brian Pondering the rain
Looking over Brian’s shoulder at the highest point.	Looking towards the rain

The decision was made to get down off the hill, and I lowered the gear bag down from that point with rope so I could climb down, then we went back a slightly different way that included some quite large steps to make it a bit quicker. As we went down the rain started spitting, increasing to a light shower by the time we were off the climbing section.

As we got back to the carpark the rain was falling quite hard, confirming that we’d made a kickass decision to haul ass off the mountain. Slippery rocks, cold weather and no light equal a sucky time.

On the way back we stopped at a little fruit market, picking up a really nice pineapple drink – mostly big chunks of the fruit and very refreshing! There was some quite cheap fruit too – two dollars a kilo for apples, oranges and mandarins. Coming back to Brisbane I wish I had bought some bananas, they were $7/kg there for good ones, and it’s about $10/kg for terrible green ones here.

I had to sit around the airport for a while – my flight was half an hour after my parents’ I decided to get out my camera and see what I could shoot – I’m not completely happy with it, but this is the one photo that came out well.

So I flew out at 0530 Brisbane time and got there about 0830 Sydney time. Boy do I love daylight savings – not! I jumped off the plane, got my bags and met my parents who had found the rental car in the carpark, and they’d already grabbed some Krispy Kremes from a little stall in the QANTAS terminal. There’s a funny thing about the Hertz rental cars – in the airport they have a big carpark, and they just leave the cars with the keys in them – it’s just weird. We all packed into our little red Corolla and we were away!

I haven’t been to Sydney since I was in grade seven – and that was 1994! When we were there, we spent a fair bit of time in cabs and walking around to the touristy spots – I don’t remember much. We didn’t go into the CBD – that would have been crazy talk at 0900 when all we needed to do was to get out of the city.

Avoiding Wollongong, we headed down along the “coast road” through quite a few little towns along the way. Mum and Dad had seen the “Sea Bridge” in one of the on-flight magazines, and it was located in Stanwell Park, so we headed there. All I can say is, for the first tourist-style thing we did, wow. We went up to the hills above the bridge and across the bay, to have a look at what we could see. It was overcast and foggy (something that would stay until the Saturday) but I think it made it beautiful with the fog across the bay.

Then it was down from the cliffs, through the town and across to the bridge. It’s an impressive structure – I’ll edit this and find some more information later about the bridge. Anyway, here’s some photos of the sights from the south end of the bridge, which is slightly higher. If you’re in the area, I highly recommend just driving across it, if not stopping to have a look.

There’s a lot more to post – this is part one, click for part two.

After reading a lot of reviews. I went to Ted’s Camera Store and bought myself a Canon 350D with the 18-55 lens kit. I bought it in black, since the silver one looks faggy.

To put it in (with the bits and pieces I’m likely to collect) I got myself a nice Lowepro “Nova 2 AW” bag, which will fit the camera and two lenses with a bunch of other smaller stuff. Only set me back $60, and it’s well built with lots of padding and strong sides. The memory card is a Sandisk Ultra II 1GB Compact Flash card. I also got the “add two years to your warranty” thingy, just iin case it decides to kick the bucket in the meantime.

Well, I’ve taken a few photos, just to see how it works, and it has a nice feel to it. We’ll see how I go in a week when I’ve been using it more.