Monthly Archives: October 2005
Sunday Times: All About Pensions
The Sunday Times last week published several articles on pensions. There’s some good advice lurking there so go read them if you’re planning on living until after retirement!
- Comment: Kathryn Cooper: The grim truth about pension performance UK orientated, but reveals among other things that some institutions may add funds to their portfolios simply to increase charges.
- Choose the pension that fits – if you’re self-employed, starting a pension now before the October deadline can reduce your tax bill for last year as well as this year!
- The pension planner’s pension plan – what would the expert do?
- Can I save enough to retire on two-thirds of my salary? – Gulp! At age 36 he would have to save 18% of his current salary!
Flight Over Water
Caught in mid-flight at the Lough, Cork
Post processing:
- Converted from RAW with gimp-ufraw
- Rotated and cropped a much larger image, this is why the extra mega pixels are handy!
- Cleanup with Dcam noise, sharpen with unsharp mask.
- Colour adjustment with colour mixer.
- Resize and unsharp mask again.
- Duplicate Layer. Bottom layer is blurred with a radius of 15 pixels, and brightened significantly.
- Set layer mode of top layer to “Overlay” to give the soft light/starry light effect.
Us Day
October 1st is here and Ray and co were on the radio this morning encouraging everyone to get out there and take some photos! They were originally meant to broadcast from 11 to 1, but they locked themselves in the studio until 2pm! The discussion did degenerate into talking about handbags but it was great anyway!
I bumped into Ryan but he went his own way after half an hour. To be honest, it wasn’t a great day for me – frequent showers meant I had to wear a jacket, but between showers it was reasonably warm. Add that to a late night last night and I was struggling to keep my interest going. I have a few good shots which I will submit to Today FM, and eventually they’ll appear here too, but as Ryan said, there wasn’t much happening in the city.
It’s looking like a nice evening so I may take a walk about later around Blarney, you never know what might happen!
Edit: There’s a possible 51 shots from my walk around town that I’ll edit and submit. I have to work on them properly, but Bibblelite does a great job batch converting RAW files to Jpeg, and getting the colour balance right. Dcraw and UFraw both have problems with auto-wb on the Canon 20D in my experience.
Later still… I realised today (Sunday), that ufraw doesn’t keep the exif data when I import RAW files into the GIMP. If they check that for date and time info they might presume I was cheating and posting older images. I could tell them, “RAW images on request” I suppose.