[that's another summer gone....]

FYI the current La Nina/El Nino status is 'neutral' and is forecast to remain so for the next 6 months or so. The time to start keeping an eye on it for any change (towards la nina or el nino conditions) is historically in the spring/early summer.

Not sure how useful any of it is for predicting UK rainfall though. IIRC, 1998 was a rotten wet summer in the uk (glasto!) yet it was a record breaking El Nino year that sent the global temperature stats soaring.

Anyway I've had a great year - roll on next spring!!

[getting a bit flash...?]

Naturally, I'm all for it

[Speed photograph viewing]

Nice one - as a budding gig photographer, will try out continuous shoot next time.

go for it - memory is cheap!

How do you deal with camera shake for gigs and fests?

Golden Rule number 1 is - STOP DANCING

Then No.2 I guess is to maximise shutter speed by making use of high ISO and widest apertures (but note that high ISO's can produce 'noisy' images - especially at low shutter speeds. Some cameras are better than others at this so it depends what you're using how far you can push the ISO)

Then more generally: chose your moment - anticipate the subjects movements rather than chase them around the stage, watch the stage lighting for times and places where it's brightest and anticipate accordingly (this is another good reason to use continuous shooting sometimes - to catch the best lights!), hold the camera as steady as possible - make use of things to lean against if they're there, get closer if you can rather than use zoom. Cameras with image stabilisation are a great help as welll.

I could expand on all these points and inject a ton of caveats but you can't beat finding out what works and when for yourself (and indeed I'm still learning!)

[Speed photograph viewing]

Very enjoyable mate

Is that easy to do with Movie Maker?

I always have around 200+ pics from festivals and fancy trying it..

I tried a couple of different methods but MM was the simplest - once you've downsized the pics you just import them in one go. Only thing I didn't like was the duration timer is in eighths of a second and I would have preferred to finer tune the speed. Set the duration default in options before loading your pics btw or you have to do it for each frame.

[118 118]

aha!

good luck with the new job Scot

[Wavefore excels]

I thought it would be good (being the Sunrise lot behind it)

Might have to figure out how to leave some gas in the tank for next year if it's on but it's hard to imagine how based on this year (maybe I should take the week off and go straight from bestival to waveform via a beach somewhere - now THAT would be a finale!! )

I salute your list!

[So the results are in:]

Good result Scot - I'll raise a glass to your health tonight

[Happy New Year! Mabon again!]

Well i think that's everything...

Except you didn't mention that it's the Autumn Equinox

from Wiki:

An equinox in astronomy is the moment when the Sun can be observed to be directly above the equator. The event occurs twice a year, around March 20 and September 23. More technically, the equinox happens when the Sun is at one of two opposite points on the celestial sphere where the celestial equator and ecliptic intersect. In a wider sense, the equinoxes are the two days each year when the center of the Sun spends an equal amount of time above and below the horizon at every location on Earth. The word equinox derives from the Latin words aequus (equal) and nox (night).

In practice, at the equinox, the day is longer than the night. Commonly the day is defined as the period that sunlight reaches the ground in the absence of local obstacles. This is firstly because the Sun is not a single point of light, but appears to be a disc. So when the center of the Sun is still below the horizon, the upper limb is already visible and emits light. Furthermore, the atmosphere refracts light downwards, so even when the upper limb of the Sun is still below the horizon, its rays already reach around the horizon to the ground. These effects together make the day about 14 minutes longer than the night (at the equator, and more towards the poles). The real equality of day and night happens a few days towards the winter side of the equinox.

Note: Equal nights is an abstraction strictly speaking only true when Earth and Sun are considered particles, that is ignoring atmospheric effects, parallax, perturbations, et cetera, (as discussed below). It is not supposed to be exactly measurable.