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Once more I find myself delving into the archive for my daily photo... the PaD police will be after me! Yet again there is a damn fine reason for this. At least one. Once I think what it may be, I'll be sure to let you know. Wait... I have it... the reason is... I was too busy doing other things, that by the time I remembered I still had to do my PaD, it was too late, too dark and I was too uninspired. Let me explain further. For the past few nights I have been uploading low-res copies of my un-photoshopped archive to my other Pbase page, which I am going to use as a type of contact sheet of all the images I have stored on CD. My thinking is that I will eventually work my way through the archive and sort out the wheat from the chaff and pick which images ought to be processed and saved to an online repository from which prints may be made (hopefully for a buying public), and which images can safely be disposed of. This is taking longer than anticipated, as every image has to be converted from its hi-res native format (RAF, NEF or TIF) to lo-res JPEG. The software that manages this conversion will not win any prizes for speed. Once converted, they have to be ZIPped and uploaded - and that takes more time. Also, I have been tardy in preparing my monthly 50 prints - I just finished May! So I had that to do. Laziness dictated that I took the files to the supermarket to be printed, rather than take them to Jessops as I usually do. I thought that they couldn't possibly make an arse of it, since I had spent so much time getting them just right. What a naive fool I am: they cropped them all, managed to overexpose them and altered all the colours! Even worse, they are printed on wafer thin Kodak paper, and they are very, very glossy. I will be getting them redone at Jessops. Disappointed with the quality of my prints, I consoled myself by listening to Celtic thrashing Aberdeen (sorry, Dominic). Then I had grilled swordfish for supper! How posh is that (for Scotland)! Oh... this image was taken at Auchmithie way back on 5 January, when Gavin and I braved a howling North Sea gale to go walking along Arbroath's Seaton Cliffs. Tomorrow I am going to Lunan Bay, Boddin and Montrose, so hopefully I will get some nice maritime images.

Last year I was preparing for a fortnight researching in Lisbon