Three

It's reached the stage where it's still dark when the train gets into Waverley and this morning the sky was blanketed in grey so the only real point in the wandering was to have a wander. Still, I saw a nice wee slice of the city that I'll do some day when the light's a bit nicer and it's likely to be a nicer picture now that Nik Software have seen fit to launch their new HDR plug-in for Aperture and which I got for free having coughed up for their other plug-ins not that long ago. It's pushing my wee Mac Mini to the limits - I need to shut down everything else for it to work.

So, this is me trying it out. It's capable of great subtlety and I quite like the fact that it doesn't look too obviously HDR (does it?). Three frames, two stops either side of my standard under-exposure of 2/3 of a stop and this is what you get. I'm a bit disappointed that there was nothing flaring at Grangemouth. Cheesy, although I like the wee gulls silhouetted in the foreground. But there was little else around today. Lunchtime was as drab as the morning and the wander was only worthwhile for the meeting and the coffee with Mr Sitting.

Finished James Robertson's latest tome And the land lay still. A hugely ambitious project attempting to tell the story of Scotland from the end of the Second World War to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament. Although a lot of the writing is excellent, it mainly just doesn't work as a story. Started reading a nice book that Mr Sitting loaned me - Findings by Kathleen Jamie. Lovely lyrical writing. Mind, I near shat myself when he told me she was poet. I thought I'd just have to take it and pretend that I liked it. Could never see the point of poetry. Philistine, I know. But thankfully it's prose.