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!

Ever woke up on a Sunday morning feeling bored and wondering what you can do? Then you want to go out and take some pictures but drawing the curtains just reveals a dull and depressive cloudy day. Well I can tell you this happens to me quite regularly here in London... But what can you do? I can say bye to everything here and go back to Montpellier in the south of France or back to my parents there in New Caledonia that wonderful tropical island. But I can also accept Frank's invitation to go by the coast and instead of staying at home vegging out in front of the telly...

In the "Fave Links" category, I will try to regularly post links to some of my favorites photography related websites and/or videos.

Today I've found some few interesting videos on YouTube, it's all about other photographers' hints and tips they want to share with the community. It's very interesting to see how other photographers are dealing with their job and what they can advise you to do in some situations. Some tips may or may not suit you so just keep the one you feel for it, don't reject the rest but keep them somewhere (in your head or if your memory is not good enough like mine, in your bloc note) as they may be useful one day.

Nikon Solutions Expo was being held at the Olympia Conference Centre in London on December 9th and 10th, it's showcasing the latest digital imaging products, services and techniques, plus interactive photo opportunities, seminars, tutorials and expert advice.

I found the expo small if you compare it to Focus for example and the seminars and interactive tutorials were basics but I guess it is interesting for consumers that want to discover the product or learn to use the one they just bought and it was an opportunity to try to get some shots of models such as Katie Green the ex Wonderbra model. It was very difficult to get a session with the model as you can imagine the workshop attracted a lot of photographers and only a few could get an individual session. So I had to steal some shots from where I was. Hopefully the workshop was also about off-camera flash using Nikon Speedlights and CLS (Creative Lighting System), I was thus able to use my D300 popup flash to trigger the flashes used at the workshop. I did take care of waiting for the main photographer to take his shot first and while he was waiting for his pictured to be transfered thru WiFi to his computer I took mine :-D

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.

Few months ago I've said bye "bye!" to Three, my UK mobile phone provider and say "hi!" to O2 with their offer for an iPhone 3G v2.0. And I'm glad to have done this. Browsing the Internet is so more intuitive and easy, the multi-touch (zooming with two fingers) screen is awesome. And as a photographer the iPhone is a very neat tool to use as a pocket portfolio, the LCD is bright and sharp and you can rotate your pictures just by physically rotating the phone.

The Apple Apps Store also offers a bunch of free and paid applications and some of them are quite interesting for a photographer.