window ledge

...in the supermarket to the side of the hotel. This place was crawling with photographers this morning - I felt very self-conscious whipping out a practical point and shoot (which, oddly enough, was all that I'd taken with me on my sortie to buy a cappuccino) when everyone else seemed to have at least two Nikons slung round their neck. For today was the Canadian News Photographers Association convention taking place in the hotel, and I felt that, indeed, maybe I should stay there, and not head off to give a keynote at another conference... But the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario proved to be excellent, and even though my paper (on neo-Victorian photography) wasn't as coherent as I would have liked in parts, I was so richly supplied afterwards with ideas and material and questions that my whole faith in conferences was richly renewed.

Given that I was talking about technical manipulation of images today - largely through manual means, though Photoshop played a role in some of my examples, one would have thought that I'd have done a better job on this image, which is crying out for the background to be Gaussian Blurred and desaturated. But without a Wacom tablet, and on a very small laptop, this proved to be more frustrating than trying, say, to crochet a lobster, so I gave up. Even without some help, though, these still gleam out as a highly cheerful collection of vases.