This Is A Blatant Filler Post

There's no games content to speak of in this post. If that's an issue, you may as well move on ...

This blog has been a little neglected of late, as my gaming, even just the Thinking About Things, has had to take a back-seat to illness and family stuff. The illness - last week - I could have done without, but we've also had my son's graduation from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, which was a bit of a proud parent moment. He's already getting job offers from within the radio industry, so fairly soon it's possible that some of you may hear him on air, or hear things he's producing.

Mostly recovered from my illness (an inner-ear infection, plus a reaction to the tablets I was given for it), we headed up to Sydney on Saturday so that I could shop around for a new camera. My trusty bridge camera is starting to show its age, so rather than wait until it dies completely my wife suggested I have an early Christmas present and get a new one. I took this as an opportunity to move to a proper, grown-up, camera, with different lenses and stuff. Here it is:

I went mirrorless, because a number of friends, whose opinion I trust in the matter of cameras, said that was the way they'd gone. I got three lenses for it, and now have to try them out, but this one seems the best for photographing soldiers:

Whilst I still think my trusty iPhone is best for in-game photography (being small, quick and unobtrusive) I will be trying out stuff with my new camera, so expect at least a few pictures from it here in the coming weeks.

I actually took it out yesterday. We went on a steam-train to the picturesque seaside town of Kiama about an hour's journey to the south of us. Just the one lens, so I was a little limited in what I could do, but really it was just a chance to get used to the controls. I took the portrait lens (which is also good for other stuff) so most of my pictures were of either my wife and son, or the two friends we went with (who you will recognise from our occasional Sunday games afternoons).

Catherine

Cei

Jon and Claudia

Unfortunately the lens doesn't work so well for self-portraits, and I didn't trust anyone else with my new toy, so I had to rely on my phone or on other people to get pictures of myself. Here's three of us posing with Jon's restored 1961 Holden.

Kiama has a nice second-hand bookshop, and I bought this, based purely on the title. It looks to be something of a ripping yarn, by an author of other ripping yarns who was also the son of a more popular author of ripping yarns. Ripping!