My wife, Mela, is almost totally deaf. She wears a bone-conducting hearing aid on a band that fits on her head. People tend to stare at this and she is quite self-conscious about it so she is not fond of being photographed. This afternoon I was shooting some pics of my sons and friends playing in the pool and was standing next to Mela who was sitting on a low wall. I lined up a shot, called to her and clicked the shutter as she looked up. As this was unexpected she didn't have time to adopt the defensive glare she so often does when she sees the camera pointing at her. An added bonus is that her hearing aid band is not visible in the photo and we both think that this is one of the nicest photos anyone has ever taken of her.

Despite the fact that I only have a poxy 56kb dial-up connection here at home I downloaded all the tracks from The Kleptones' A Night At The Hip-Hopera. It took almost a full day but I'm not sorry and have been listening to it almost non-stop since I downloaded it.

This album is what is apparently known as a mashup and uses Queen's music as a basis for a new creation consisting of a mix of new lyrics and samples. I'm not really a great fan of hip-hop or remixes but this is really well done and I love it. It seems that the main site has bandwidth problems and is no longer hosting the music tracks. They do provide links to a few other sites that are making it available for download and I downloaded my copy from one of them, waxy.org.

If you don't have this yet, you absolutely must check it out.

Well, it looks as though summer has arrived. It was a fairly hot day today and I went for a ride on my bike this morning (let's pretend that I'm writing this before midnight). There was only a light breeze so cycling wasn't the unpleasant chore I can be when the wind is really blowing, as it so often does here.

The really cool thing about summers here is the long evenings when it's time to walk on the beach. Went walking there this evening and there were quite a few people out. I was really pleased with the performance of my camera. The old one did not cope well with low light, having only 100 ISO, but as the new one has a minimum ISO of 200 and can do 400, or 800 at lower resolution, I am able to shoot more on these walks. I love taking photos of people just to see the interesting outfits and expressions that can be captured. Here is one from this evening's walk.

You see some strange things at the beach. Today was not very hot but sunny, about 19°C, and there were quite a few people on the beach, playing games, swimming or just sitting in the sun. Then there was this guy.

He was clad completely in black, jeans, t-shirt, boots, leather jacket, all black. He was alone, flying a kite, and I guessed that he might have come to the beach by motorcycle. I didn't see any motorcycles parked nearby though.

I lay on the ground and used my close-up lenses to take this. The largest of the flowers was no more than 1cm across.