I'm a member of the Ealing and Hampshire House Photographic Society (EHHPS) since the end of 2006, few months after I've moved to London from Montpellier (in the South of France).

The EHHPS is a local camera club near Ealing Broadway station. We have our weekly meeting every Thursday evenings from 8:00pm to 10:00pm in a room at the Ealing Town Hall. There is two competition every month: the Print Competition and the Digital Image Competition, and once a year the club is organizing a Panel of Print Competition which requires from the members to present a panel composed of a minimum of 3 and up to 6 printed photographs telling a story or within a theme.

At last year competition, I got the second place with my painting with light panel that you can see on my Flickr account: "My friend of light".

This year competition was held few hours ago. I presented with a new panel of 3 of my jumping shots taken earlier this year. The other panels were very good and to my surprise... I won! Oh yeah baby! The first place plus a trophy. That was so cool, I was really happy :-)

The competition was judged by Kevin Herbert.

I just discover this product on a website and thought it would work great with my SB-600 whenever I would need a lightstand but don't want to travel with one... If it can hold a compact camera it should be able to hold a small Nikon Speedlight SB-600... Leave it in a bag and if I encountered a situation where I need to set the flash somewhere I can just use that Monster Pod X and stick my flashgun virtually anywhere.

This could be really cool indead. But being sometimes spontaneous, I haven't done my research properly and did not see that article on Strobist.com which mentionned that Monster Pod X won't hold a SB-800...

But well, lets hope it will hold smaller flashes...

Computer virii are a real threat to us photographers as they can crash your computer or delete hard drive content. You sometime need to completely re-install your PC in order to regain useability. This Sunday I discovered that my PC was infected by several virii while I was away in Norway. My wife must have been accessing infected websites or emails. But all attempts to access any website were redirected to another one. Windows has also detected the infection and so was my antivirus but it was already too late and the virus has downloaded several other ones including Rootkit and Trojans. I was very concerned as I did not want to go thru all the process of reinstalling my computer and risk the lost of recent work.

So after 2 days analysing the situation and running all sort of antivirus and spyware removal tools I've been able to regain a stable system.

Being also a web developer, I'm being sent to Oslo (Norway) for a training course on eZ Publish, a advanced Content Management System (CMS) that we are using at the company.

I left London from Heathrow T5 at 1pm today and arrived at about 4.30pm, Oslo time. There was still some snow on the street and obviously it was quite cold but not that bad though. I was expecting the sun to be still high as we are up north but I did not realize that in winter the sun goes down even sooner than in London. At this period of the year the sun raised at 8am and set at 4.30pm... That's not cool for evening shots as I'm hand holding my camera, but at least I don't need to wake up to early to try some nice shots in the morning.