Exercising, gardening and photoing

Got up quite early this morning, about 6am. Had breakfast, then went on the internet (it was raining). Cropped some of the insect pics from the last few days, then posted them to http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk to see if I could get any IDs, hopefully I can get an ID for the little beetle, but the other pics aren't very good so I won't be surprised if I don't get IDs for them.

Went on Wii fit, then did some japanese. Then I saw that Moohar was about to put the washing machine on, so I stopped her and took some pics from inside of the washing machine of me putting the ball of washing liquid in it. When I finished doing that it was lunch time.

After lunch I went in the garden and did some digging, digging up the turf in the corner between the pond and the greenhouse and the wall. We'll plant some wild flowers and hopefully other plants that insects, caterpillars and butterflies like. I need to do some research on which plants they like, we've got some buddleia down there now that I dug up from behind the greenhouse and planted there.

After that I took some photos of a green Elephant hawk moth caterpillar. When it gets scared it tucks it's little head back into it's big body. I copied the pics onto my comp and then loaded up Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP). Some of the pics were overexposed, and I couldn't see how to adjust the exposure so I searched for 'DPP tutorial' and came across a bunch of video tutorials on the canon website. I watched all the tutorials, and they were very helpful.

After watching the tutorials, it made me think that there probably wasn't much point using DPP to process the RAW files. I thought that DPP would apply automatic chromatic abberation and vignetting adjustments, but it doesn't (at least not for the MPE65 since it is not listed as a supported lens). I tried processing one of the overexposed through DPP and through Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and found that ACR gave a better output (although not as sharp, just needed to run a USM to equalize the sharpening).

DPP does have a nice dust removal brush, and you can copy this and apply it to multiple images. I think you can do the same thing in ACR using the healing brush / clone stamp tool, although I'm not sure whether DPP or ACR works best there. I think I will probably use ACR for converting the files, then if I find it isn't too good for removing dust, I can run the converted TIFFs through DPP for dust removal. Luckily I don't think I have any dust on the sensor at the moment.

After dinner me, jin, Ben and Moohar watched the Olympics opening ceremony, which was long, but good. It was interesting because it was all about old Chinese traditions which the communists previously tried to get rid of, and there wasn't really anything about communism in it at all. I guess tourism is more important to them than upholding their party values.

Then me, Ben and Amerika-jin watched the rest of Pee-wee's Big Adventure. After that I processed my pics from today and yesterday.

Food
Breakfast: Almonds, oats and more cereal; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Fried chicken that Ben made yesterday; ½ cheddar cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich; ½ ham sandwich; clementine; slice of Maccy's gingerbread cake; ¼ chocolate muffin; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2x fishcakes; peas; potatoes; butter. Pudding was rice pudding with blackcurrant jam. Coffee. 1 x Roses.