I've been living in London since June 2006. By September/October 2006, if memory serves, I've joined the Ealing & Hampshire House Photography Society (EHHPS) after Googling for some camera club in my area. The club exists for quite some years now and meets every Thursday evening at 8pm at the Ealing Town Hall. There are two competitions per month, one print and one digital and we usually socialise in a pub nearby after each meeting.

After a little while I've joined few other clubs and groups such as the LPMG and the London Strobist group.

Joining a camera club is very useful and fun. It allows you to show your work and see the ones from other photographers. This is great as you can discuss ones technique and learn from that. Competitions from photographic societies are interesting, having good or bad marks does not always mean that your picture is a wow or a crap, but it helps with understanding and improving your skills in some areas.

Christmas is a wonderful period where everyone is thinking of all their beloved. I think a lot of people, even if they are not catholic, are enjoying that date. It's not only because it is a bank holidays but also for the atmosphere and an opportunity to be with the family remembering every good things that happened in the year.

For people like me, far away from the family and that are not able to go back home, friends are the family.

I wish you all to spend a wonderful Christmas time in your family or among your friends, enjoy the good time together eating nice food and giving out meaningful presents.

May you end 2008 in joy and happiness and may 2009 bring you even more!

Last week David Hobby came to London to give us a great seminar about off-camera flash photography using small and portable flashguns (speedlights). For this occasion the London Strobist group had organized a meetup at The Flash Centre. David was supposed to attend but he caught a stomach bug. We did have the presence of Neil Turner and Drew Gardener & Lucinda.

The seminar was held twice, one on Saturday and again on Sunday at ULU by Euston (Central London). David went thru the basics of his popular off-camera flash techniques followed by a demonstration with some of us. At the end of the day, Peter from California Sunbounce offered a Sunbounce Micro-Mini as a price for the winner which was selected by elimination on tossing a coin. Guess who was the lucky guy? ...me! That was awesome, I was so pleased as you can imagine.

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.

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.