But illness did; as mentioned Saturday mornings are usually spent taking photos for the kids football team my boy plays for. It’s progressed from a few photos just for the fun of it to being the official team photographer, and not just one team – there are now 4 age groups to photograph usually playing over 5 pitches so Saturday mornings are usually very busy. I’ve also started carrying two cameras around with me all the time, the 1D4 connected to the Sigma 150-500mm, and the 5D II (on loan from Dad… again… THANKS DAD!) connected to the Canon 24-105mm lens. This combination allows me to cover the whole of the pitch, whether near or far – but of course it’s really to make me look like a proper sports photographer (fool some of the people some of the time and all that). Anyway, my boy wasn’t feeling well so we didn’t go… the sure sign he’s not well, he’s not interested in playing football/rugby/tennis/badminton/swimming*. Contrary to how the media portrays the youth of today as housebound video game junkies – my boy prefers nothing more than being outside indulging in some sporting activity and whilst we have a Wii, he’s very rarely on it (usually only to appease me when I want to play one of the Lego games we have).
Staying at home did mean I was about when the postman delivered a package from America I’d been waiting for, the hotshot fitting for my flashgun I’d managed to break (but not fix). As predicted, with the replacement component – it took me less than two minutes to substitute the new part on to the flashgun and it’s good to have such an important “weapon” back in my arsenal.
I’ve been interested in computer hardware from the early 90s, and know my Northside from my Southside bus, my SSD from my HDD, my SATA from my SAS but walking into PCWorld today (think Frys in the US, well.. probably more Best Buy – but not in regards to price) and was overwhelmed with the choice when it comes to new machines. As mentioned previously (this is the part of the program that recaps what’s been shown/said before), my faithful old workhorse of a machine, a Dell Precision workstation has developed a number of hardware issues that aren’t going to go away and as it seems a waste to buy replacement parts for such an ancient PC I’ve decided to buy a new computer. Before actually stepping foot in the store I’d researched all available models with the requirements I had, processor speed, ram, video memory etc. – in the early days I used to build my own machines – when things were really geeky, but for the last 12 years the only machine that have entered our house have been Dell ones. I know with my artistic nature I should really be buying Apple hardware (I know Mark, really I should) but a Windows machine will suit me well enough (essentially they are the same machine these days, just a different operating system) – though I could get really geeky on you and say I prefer Linux when it comes to operating systems but then I might lose 90% of my target audience – not that I have trouble doing that anyway!
*Other sports (not listed) are available.
Andrew Skelton: 
Hey, Andrew. I have two suggestions that might help your readership.
Your blog posts are rather long but the print is pretty small. Both of those usually cause people to quit reading and take off. I would suggest using a larger font. I use 17px on my blog with a 24px line height.
Second, put some more paragraph breaks in. This isn’t high school English, so no one except the Grammar Police are going to grade you. I try never to put more than three sentences in any paragraph. The extra spacing really helps when reading a computer screen.
Try it and let me know what you think.
By: Russel Ray Photos on 08/05/2012
at 2:11 am