sinéad's lifestream

Christmas was very good to me.

I’ve already flown through the latest Buffy graphic novel (which isn’t that good I’m sad to report) and am half way through “What The Dog Saw” by Malcom Gladwell (bedside reading, one chapter before bed each night, it’s wonderful). But below is the remaining books I have left to both start and finish.

Really looking forward to “And Another Thing…” as I have been re-reading the Hitch-hikers series to set myself up and I’m almost finished now. I’ve really enjoyed my forth read of the trilogy of five, fingers crossed for the sixth.

I’ve made myself a book inbox before, and I was delighted that other people followed suit. Would love to see what’s in your book inbox now.

New York City is possibly the best place in the world to learn how to take photos. Everywhere you look there is something beautiful, interesting, gigantic or overwhelmingly familiar to snap away at.

I’ve talked about upgrading to an SLR for a long time, and was finally encouraged by my other half (a Canon 400d owner and a wonderful photographer/teacher) and the cheap prices of B&H in Manhattan. Straight after checking in to our hotel on 35th Street we rambled around the block to B&H and I picked up a Canon 450d, known in the USA as the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi – everything in the states sounds so much cooler.

We spent the next 5 days camera happy in New York, the results of which I’m really quite proud of. I’ve been taking photos for years, but have always been disappointed with the results of my experiments, until now. The differences between an SLR and a bridge camera are vaster than I realised and being able to carefully tweak all the settings for each set of photos you’re taking is a skill I’m going to attempt to master. Granted some of the photos I took in NYC aren’t perfect, but they make me smile nonetheless.

I feel like I’ve been able to capture the feelings I experienced there – the familiarity, the grandness, the beauty, the intrigue and the fun we had together. I’m looking forward to the next time I visit (somewhere in the near future), where I’ll bring back memories and photos of the city in snow and covered with Christmas.

There’s a Blackberry one too, though that one is a little bit more age appropriate.