After two days of 30+ degree temperatures which left my place feeling like an oven when I came home, a gusty southerly came through yesterday and dropped the temperature by as much as 10 degrees. The accompanying rain could be heard beating down, if not torrentially certainly with great steadiness and no small amount of volume, when I woke up this morning.

The mono colour represents the mood of the morning, though the single colour patch in the planter box is a reminder that it's only the first day of February and while this has been a relatively mild summer overall so far, it's not yet done with us nor we with it. It's also a reminder that I need to expand my post-processing repertoire well beyond the almost cliche of selective colour, especially given some of the shots that I've seen in some other PADs recently. Winter will be when I must make time to Speak to The Deke.

In the interim, however, I may have larger problems. The Olympus seems to have picked up a nasty hunting problem. I don't mean the amount of time that the autofocus takes to acquire a lock initially, I mean the fact that when it does so the lens pulsates like it's having an epileptic fit which is why this shot is not one of the Oly's finest efforts, focus-wise. I'm going to try it out with the Pancake tomorrow and see whether the problem still exists but given that the Olympus is my weapon of choice (and only practical choice) for PADing if it goes out of service then either I'll have to lug one of the Canons around every day (and there's a limit to how long I can do that) or alternatively I'll be doing an awful lot of still life shots. Or, of course, take a break from PADing but there's no way that I want to do that in February. Or at all, this year, if I can avoid it.

Last Year