So, I've been away in London and Dresden for parts of the last month or so, plus I have been busy so there hasn't been much content in the recent months. There will be more to come as soon as I sort through all the photos.

My last batch of graffiti pictures for this year (from Windmill Lane).

Some street art on Grafton Street, just some random shots that looked interesting.

I'm yet again going on another trip away soon (to Hong Kong). I've uninstalled all of my applications from macports and I am now reinstalling a bunch of apps so I can process my photos during my holiday. So far I've re-installed,

• hugin - Cause I like doing panoramas when I get a chance.
• libraw - The new 0.12.0 release has a bunch of new demosaic methods which are nice to play with.
• pfstools - and friends for doing HDR images, but I suspect I will just end up using enblend instead
• enblend and enfuse - for stacking images to give a poorman's HDR image
• ImageMagick - so I can resize, blur, process images as I need too.
• RPP - for those moments where I need to manually go in and tweak an image.

As per usual nearly all the software is either opensource or free.

I've been pleasantly surprised with the results of RPP and in particular the TrueFilm simulations which simulate various films to get that classic look.

The first one is the default color mode, and the second one is a k64 film simulated mode.

I also tried the a25 b&w mode which I really liked as well. I think I will be sending the RPP developers a donation soon for such a nice and useful program.

I just wish I had shot more of my earlier photos (from my DSLR) as raws so I can process them again.

Another year and another holiday and christmas in Hong Kong, this is a first of a two part post with photos. These photos are from day 1 till day 7. It's mostly pictures of family members and places that we have visited. I might go back and comment on some of these photos at some point.

This is the second part of the post for Hong Kong 2010. There's significantly more photos here for this post. We went to China for two days on tour around Guangzhou. A good chunk of the photos were taken on our trip to China.

As with most of my more recent photos that I have been taking (on the 1000d), I've been shooting with raws and a uniwb whitebalance, I just throw all the raws at Rpp in batch mode leaving pretty much all the settings at the defaults. The only settings I customise is the TrueFilm option which I set to the K64 mode. I currently don't spend as much time as I should in fixing up the white balance of things. So far the automatic settings mostly work for me.

It's the end of 2010 I've just been on vacation to visit family back in Hong Kong and one of the first questions I get asked is "How is Ireland doing?, I hear you guys are in trouble". I'd usually answer, "Yes Ireland is pretty messed up financially. By the way, I'm expecting a paycut and increased taxes next month."

What wasn't a shock to me was that AIB had effectively been nationalised while I was away and there is still a slim chance that Ireland might still default in 2011. Yet there is still more money being poured into the banking system from taxes, levies and raiding state pension funds.

It's terrible that Ireland now owes so much money to the EU and IMF at such a high interest rate (6% as far as I recall). The EU and IMF are like loan sharks with a knife at the Irish government's throat forcing them to take the loan. I'm still of the opinion that the banks should not have been bailed out and that NAMA is still a terrible idea and defaulting would still have been a better option. The motto of "Fail fast and fail early" is definately not a bad idea, Ireland would be on the path of recovery much earlier.

Thanks to the crisis my pension with the university that I am working with is probably wiped out and "invested" into the broken banking system. I guess if the cost of bailing out the banks was so minimal to the taxpayer in the first place then Ireland should have nationalised one of the banks early on or else let one of the banks default.