The first day of winter

I woke up early and at 6.45am there was a huge bright moon shining in the sky, it was almost like the sun! I should have taken a photo of it but I was just too lazy to go get my tripod, big lens and go stand outside in the freezing cold to get a clear shot.

Today is the first day of winter - I know some people prefer to mark the start of the season based on the astronomical date of 21 December but I always prefer to mark the seasons by their meteorological dates of the 1st of the month. It was a perfect day - sunny, blue skies and such a beautiful day.

Funny who you meet on a dog walk - this morning Xena started playing with a 7 month old black lab, and they played all the time as we were walking along and the lab's owners were chatting to me about Xena. After about 10 minutes I realised that I was talking to Peter Crouch and his gorgeous wife Abbey - okay, I don't watch football but eventually the long skinny legs did register something in the recesses of my brain! He truly is very tall and very thin, and his wife is truly gorgeous. We walked the same circuit of the woods and Xena had a great time playing with their dog, and when we got back to the car park we were actually parked next to each other.

Last night at our camera club zoom meeting we had a very good talk by a very experienced competition judge, who actually trains other judges. He said that most images he judges could benefit from some 'optimisation'. The things he looks for in an image are impact, clarity of purpose (the message you are trying to get across), composition, and technical aspects. He spoke about cropping images to get rid of any unnecessary bits in the composition and to improve impact, something I have heard other pro photographers recommend. So for example he had an image of a lioness yawning, and when it was cropped to just show the head with the yawn and the large teeth,  it certainly became more dramatic. 

Tonight is my presentation to my camera group, it won't take very long but I have made a few notes of key words so I remember to mention certain things.