The Huddle.

As part of Penicuik's contribution to the Science Festival, the cinema is showing Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth." It's a bit ironic that, several years ago, I requested that we show this film but, even in my position as Cinema Convener (which should carry great honour and privilege), I was shouted down. I even went as far as buying my own copy of the DVD.
Tonight, since it is a special occasion, we have a Professor Emeritus from Mbra Uni to do a Q&A session. I'm only aware of one "flat Earther" amongst our usual audience so it should be a good evening.

There is a very loose connection with the blip; it was taken at the wild flower meadow in The Glen which we planted two years ago but, I'm afraid that my botany isn't up to identifying this particular umbellifer. The weather immediately after the planting was so appalling that nothing germinated, but we were advised that the seeds would remain viable and the seed would germinate the following year. The prediction was obviously sound.

To achieve a manageable exposure and depth of field I needed to use flash and I've been working on techniques to avoid the background blacking out. Today I tried something new, producing two jpegs from one raw file, one with the light bits (foreground) optimised and the other with the dark bits (background) lightened and the light bits darkened. They were combined using layers and the "lighter colour" option. As I write this, I realise that I could have made it easier by using curves to take the light foreground right out of the equation and could also reduce the shutter speed.