I have been using Flickr for five years and I like it. I have a Pro account which means I have unlimited uploads and storage, and no advertisements. For this I pay $24.95 and consider it money well spent.

Today Yahoo, the owner of Flickr, announced a new arrangement which kicks Pro account holders in the balls by eliminating their accounts once their current subscription has expired. Instead, they are offering a free account (good) with advertisements (bad) and a storage limit of 1TB (bad, although probably irrelevant to most).

Facebook is an excellent medium for discovering the lunch menu of people you worked with twenty years ago. It’s also quite good for cat photos. But there are many frustrations to avoid or overcome. Here are some of them:

The trite quotation.

I can’t begin to describe how much this motivates me. Here’s another life-changing thought:

During one of my regular trawls around YouTube, I was presented with the the option of viewing a video from “Learn Thai With Mod”, which apparently would teach me some “new cool Thai word and slang.”

My knowledge of Thai remains hopeless, so here was a chance to impress she who must be obeyed with a new phrase, one which I could proudly use out of context for a couple of days before forgetting it completely, just like all the other phrases I have forgotten.

Had you glanced at the contents of my shopping basket a couple of months ago, it would have been an uninspiring sight. At least one bar of chocolate, some biscuits, assorted snacks and just maybe a couple of apples; the latter destined to be ignored and later discarded. The only purpose of the contents was to amuse my mouth in between meals of processed food of dubious nutritional value.

In comparison, this is what I brought home from the shops this morning:

On of the features of the E-M5 I had not played with is called Live Time.

Live Time is designed for long exposure shots when you are not entirely sure how long an exposure you need. But set the shutter onto Live Time and press the button to start exposing the shot and the rear screen will update and show you how the shot is looking as the exposure progresses. Once you have the look you want, press the shutter again to finish the exposure.

Here’s an Olympus example of Live Time in action:

For my first attempt I found some waves splashing on some rocks at sunset, set the F stop to F16 to maximise the exposure, and then started Live Time. This one was 3.3 seconds:

Received an email on Sunday from The Son titled “What did you do on Saturday?” with the accompanying text:

“I spent 8 hours taking pictures of models.

I win.”

As I had spent Saturday with a mop and vacuum cleaner, I had to concede defeat.

He attached some tasty photos, which he has kindly allowed me to share.

The event was arranged by the photography club of his employer (my employer never had a photography club), and members rolled up weighed down by assorted DSLRs; apart from The Son and his friend who had their Micro Four Thirds gear. All the below were taken with a Panasonic GX1 with either the Panasonic 20mm lens or Olympus 45mm lens, proof once again that you don’t need a DSLR to take great photos. More important is an artistic flair (inherited from his mother) for the creative use of light.

A long time ago (four years), in a land far away (my smallest bedroom), there came a table of magnitude (3 metres) which was designed as being a piece of elegant furniture but was delivered looking like something from a farmyard.

In support of my improved eating regime, I decided I needed a suitable container for juice consumption on the go. So it was off to the local mall to check out the collection of Sigg waterbottles. There was not a wide choice, but I settled for something with a treatment that could be described as “well-used green”. Good enough for me.