My best evening

I spent quite a bit of this morning working on my geo-clustering script, but got stuck and couldn't work out what the problem was. So I spent the rest of the morning and the afternoon taking, sorting, uploading, and processing photos. I also read a few forum threads on dpreview.

I had a really exciting evening buying a new camera and helping L make a video.

I was looking at a camera website that had been emailed to me as being a cheap camera website, not looking to buy anything, but just to see what the prices were like. The prices did look quite good to me. Then I saw they were selling the Fuji IS-Pro for over £1000. I remembered that it was about £500 on Warehouse Express, so I looked on the WEX website, but it was no longer listed.

So I checked the Fuji website, which gives a list of suppliers that you can buy the Fuji IS-Pro from. But when you click through to the retailer, it is just the Fuji category or search page on their website with a search query like Fuji or Fujifilm. And when you look through the items on each retailers website, none of them actually sell the Fuji IS-Pro!

So I google searched, and found Clifton Cameras were selling them for £350. But they had a thing saying something like 'Very special limited offer'. So given that

• The Fuji IS-Pro is hard to find available for sale
• It is normally around £1000
• It was only available at the discounted price for a limited period

I decided that I might as well go ahead and purchase it. Unfortunately the user agreement that you have to sign upon purchase precludes you from reselling it, otherwise I could probably buy a few and flip them on ebay. I think there was one on ebay recently (in the US) that went for the equivalent of over £1000, but it didn't even meet the seller's reserve price!

Of course, it will be annoying if Nikon or Canon (or Fuji) announce a new camera shortly that does IR, since the IS-Pro is quite old and lacking in things like high ISO quality and megapixel count.

For the video, I was helping L make a birthday video for YoshiElectron as it is his (YE's) birthday today. Unfortunately the eyetoy wasn't working on Mauser's comp (probably due to the comp being virused). And Mauser has my old camera (which does low quality video) on holiday with him. So we decided to do a stop motion video.

Obviously, this takes quite a lot longer to both set up and film, and then put together on the computer. So doing that took most of the evening, even though the video is only very short. Actually, L cut quite a lot of the frames from the final video.