Wet and Dark

My goodness it has been so wet and dark today. I almost blipped a picture of Caley doing his own version of Singing and Dancing in the Rain but such pictures don’t look their best at ISO 6400; another day maybe.
We got the tree today. I went to choose one without supervision and there weren’t that many left to select from. I was so relieved that the choice was greeted with approval when I got home. The problem is that you see one that looks nice and well-proportioned but often the lower branches that lend to that effect need removed in order that it can be accommodated within the bucket with some stability. Such brutal pruning can leave you with a shapeless top heavy looking plant. I shopped carefully with this in mind.
Mrs Cakes already has some lights up on it; just plain white lamps, no tinsel or bobbles so far, I think it looks really good just like that.
Anyway, on my way back from the tree man I went down past the River Roy near Achaderry. It was absolutely raging. The banks are high and steep here too and a slip in the wrong place wouldn’t be good. Normally to get that flowing water effect you are actively chasing out the long shutter speed but it was so dark by this point the “natural” shutter speed was too slow and making the water look completely washed out. It was also very difficult to keep spray from the lens.
One more thing; I think I have found a positive aspect to Windows 8. On my previous PC the standard windows photo viewer allowed quick preview of jpg files only. Thus, if you shot raw as well (and I often do) you had to set the camera to raw plus at least a low quality jpg to offer the option of quick review. It was a right pain because when you came to delete bad shots you had to remember to delete the corresponding raw file too. By some magic windows 8 allows quick review of raw (well at least Nikon NEFs) which I am pleased about. No more pairs of files and cumbersome file management, just one raw image to keep or delete. I found Nikon's own viewer incredibly slow and awkward and I didn't have access to LightRoom until recently either.