Monday 13 December 2010

offline

By tomorrow morning the puppies will be one week old and it's been a mixed bag of a week.

First of all, I had my standard 2 nights completely devoid of sleep on the night that the puppies were born and the following one. All the cold viruses that I've been dodging for, oh, about 2 years now grabbed their chance and I came down with the first cold I've had in absolutely ages. Without wanting to tempt fate, today I'm getting the first signs that I might win that battle.

The 2 sleepless nights were followed by 3 nights of Keksi needing to go out every hour during the night (and during the day, to be fair). Feeling as rough as I did, I was so grateful for Jay taking his share of the poo-by-torchlight trips.

Very quickly, though, we have now already progressed to one trip per night. Amazing. That's about half the time of sister Taika and mum Neka, who were both going out through the night for a long time after their puppies arrived.

In addition to the cold, the other problem we've been facing this week is several days of intermittent internet connection, mixed with unstable internet connection, with a bit of absolutely no internet connection at all thrown in from time to time for good measure. So if you're not my friend on Facebook and you've been wondering why no updates and why no photos or videos, then that's why.

Well, that's partly why. Mainly.

Have you noticed the difference in quality of the photos on the blog of late? Ok, so perhaps the quality of the photography is no better, but the clarity & colour of the photos - much better! We have a new camera at last and it's a beauty, a Canon 550D SLR. It even takes videos of wonderful quality.

Although it does a dandy auto-focus, it's not exactly point-and-shoot or, indeed, idiot-proof. I thought that I would have plenty of time while waiting for Keksi's puppies to come to peruse the manual and learn at least the basics. So far, Jay has learned the basics and he tells me what I need to know. I'm sure I'll find some time sometime to do that aforementioned perusing.

In the meantime, I took a rather cracking video of the puppies nursing. The colour was beautiful, the sound was clear, my hand was steady, the subject matter was cute. All the necessary ingredients were in place. When I tried to upload it I discovered that I had recorded it in super-hi-definition and the file size was up around Avatar sized. Well, that explained why the quality was quite so good.

So we fiddled around a bit and adjusted the video recording quality and then I had another go at filming the puppies' little wagging tails. By that time the internet connection had slowed to 1993. So, today, still no video. But I'll have a go at uploading a small photo. Tiny. See if that works.

In the meantime, everything else this week puppy-wise has been going just great.

2 comments:

Paula Glover said...

Yay! You're back :)

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure that's the camera I bought for Dex to film the videos for A Giving Tribute's website. The quality is so amazing it's actually the preferred choice for film-makers!! The results so far are very impressive. Long gone are the days when they lugged around massive cameras! Have fun with it!