Linda K

and yet no one thought about raising mandatory desexing of pets before being sold, that at least would have some consequence for long term reductions - yet again registered breeders being bashed about us breeding wily nilly with no thoughts for the future (can see that even with some of the posts above), and AR spouting they want animals bred in home, not concrete pens, yet their insistance on a code of practice here for breeding cats and dogs is seeing that very thing being legislated as something needed to be done (ie being forced to breed & litter in pens outside, not within the home). Very onesided as far as input went, where was any representatives of registered breeders - shows that we as registered breeders are lumped in with the BYB and mills, despite some people blinkered thinking that there is a distinction made - there isn't by the AR brigade, and this is all the more clear in instances like this

sadly though there are not too many out there who do distinguish between registered hobby breeders and commercial breeders. Will be watching this though to see how it is being portrayed

the Orijen debacle of several years ago was a major concern for many cat owners, with many cats dying or suffering all sorts of major food allergies as a result of eating batches that had not been irradiated. I photographed a gorgeous Burmese cat that had gone through over a year of major treatment to recover, and was able to leap around thankfully back to her old self - at its worst she had been unable to walk.

was just about to say the same thing Steph - just take a look at gumtree and look at all the dogs and cats being offered FTGH as their owners are now going back OS and can;t take the pet with them, and urgently need a home. Good reason for the RSPCA and others to be cautious as to who they adopt to.

first of all, big congrats, kids are hard - I know, I do it for a living. Agree with what has been said already, and also think the colour is off. One other thing - the backdrop is too close and the wrinkles in it distract me - would have moved that a bit further back, and take the time to get any wrinkles out first - it might be painful to do, but it is worth spending an extra 5 or 10 minutes there rather than having to photoshop each image - BTDT , it is a lesson you learn pretty quickly. Not worried by having to use a bumbo to help bub sit up, but agree that you can then disguise it by using fabric either in the same colour as the backdrop or what they are wearing, or a neutral colour, so it is not such a standout. Watch the limb chops, fingers and hands cut off aren't always a good thing, and then leaves you no room to crop in should you need to do a bit of cropping later - I always do what Huga has said - take a step back so you do have that room. Also get down to their level - eyes look better where you and they are at the same level so you have that connection, rather than looking up. Also watch where the clothing bunches up like the last one, it makes them look a bit swamped by the clothing. Love the smiling one, great connection there!!!

WOW - she should have been thankful that your dog was well behaved enough to not respond, and she should have been more embarrassed that her child was behaving like that and so near to the water without her paying attention. She should have thanked you that you were at least on the ball since she wasn't, and not got all snippy.

yep, felt really sorry for the poor cats, and the number that looked like they had eye issues - ugh - and these all came from the original 3 by the sounds, none of which were desexed. Most of what he was calling wee on the walls too would have been tom marking. Just so sad, but imagine the reason we did not see what happened to the cats was that most of them were probably PTS

thanks for the heads up, will look out for it

Romana, looks like you are doing as well with the dog breeding as you did with the cat breeding.

me neither - do the rexes all have curly coats like devon rex cats, or do you get straight haired rexes and curly rexes (like a Selkirk rex in a cat, where you can get longhair and shorthair, with or without curl?) They are gorgeous.

he is a living legend, that is for sure

has to do with both - but a camera can only write to a card as fast as its maximum write speed will allow. Believe the fastest Canon is the IDS which is specific for pro sports photogs, and so has a high transfer speed. But if there is a slow card being used, then even if the camera is capable of writing fast, if there is a slow card then that will slow down the transfer of data - so you will get the best results overall with a fast card and a fast camera. If you are already using the fast card, then it won't go any faster unless you cut image quality

yep, exactly what they said - the 50mm 1.4 rocks because it is the cheapest way fr even the enthusiast to be able to shoot wide open with a decent lens, compared to the arm and leg you need to give up for the others. Being what they called in the old days "normal" lens, also referred to it is the same as the naked eye, pretty much what you see through the lens is the same as you would view it - you do not have compression from the telephoto effect that you do with a longer lens, nor the wide angle distortion from a shorter lens. It is also a great way to learn and get used to working with, it is nice and light, and I love mine - if I could only ever have 1 lens for the rest of my life, it would be this one and I would make do with foot zooming.

TLC - just saw your question - OK, what you need to picture is that the quality of the light coming through to the sensor is firstly affected by the filter on the lens (so a cheapo filter on an expensive lens will distort the light before it even passes through the lens). Generally the more expensive the lens, the better the glass quality is, so light is unaffected - cheaper glass may have more imperfections in it, so image is not as sharp (there are more tolerances for allowance of the lens corresponding to certain standards) The light then next hits the sensor of the camera, and this is then where the sensor size comes into play as to how much compressing is done. Lastly it is then effected by any setting in camera before the image is saved to the card - eg if it is set to save as large jpeg, data will be compressed, whereas as RAW, it will not be compressed Image quality can then further be effected by whether the camera is dirty - ie dirty lens, dirty sensor, which can either make images less sharp or lots of crud showing up. Why then do manufacturers still make so many bodies - same reason car manufactures make so many cars, when they all do the same thing - ie get us from point a to point b - not everyone is after the premium image quality, some people do just want a point and shoot and don;t want the extra features an SLR has, some people want some of the features of an SLR but still want the camera to make all the choices for them, some people want to dabble a bit more but don;t need the whole hog, and then there are those made for people who will put cameras through far more work in a couple of years than most others would in a lifetime (so as a result, have cameras that can cope with more shutter actuations than the average SLR) - different horses for different courses. Same with the lenses Why keep making newer ones, and hyping people up to buy the latest thing - becuase sadly that is the type of society they have turned us into, we must always have the latest and bestest, without necessarily thinking why this will be better than what we already have. Agree totally with snook on that point that before getting sucked in on getting something new, anyone doing that needs to think why what you have already is not achieving what you want. Look forward to seeing some more indoor shots!!!

snook - I wish there was a like button - can;t count how many people have said to me (and I know it is a common comment) - your pictures look so great - what camera and lens do you use. Same as asking a painter what brush and paint brand they use, r a skier what type of skis they use - someone else using the same thing is not automatically going to get exactly the same results. Heck I remember one of my first workshops I did, where we all stood at exactly the same spot, next to each other, many of us using the same cameras and same lenses, and not one shot looked alike, as choices of focal point, composition, shutter speed, etc all made completely different images. I am also put in mind of an article from a UK magazine, where they did a similar type of thing as the ABC TV show, where they gave some pro photogs a variety of camera, such as mobile phones, holgas etc and sent them out to capture images - these did not look at all snap shotty like most people would do with them. I also found this excellent blog post - My link

Thanks Dasha, interesting to hear how the different set-ups work at Melbourne, the cats were not allowed out at all, they had to stay in their pens at all times (the only exception we got was for the boy with the poo smeared on his bum that they had missed, and that was only because the AQIS employee was not certain at being able to wash the rear end, so my friend went with him and they butt-bathed him in the sink - took all of 4 minutes to get rid of it - if we had had to dry comb it only with powder it would have taken way longer, so happy we were granted that exemption. We did see though 1 poor cat who came in already with such horrendous matts on him (longhair) (he was in the enclosure next to our cats), who I felt so sorry for, the AQIS guy told us they could not get near him to even attempt to groom him, let alone get those out, they were so bad they were going to be needed to be cut out as his whole side was involved (certainly don't blame them at all for that, as for sure they are not paid to remove things like that)

noise is sadly the tradeoff for pushing the ISO to its limits, esp with the non-pro SLR cameras. Exposure must also be exactly spot on otherwise more noise will be added when adjusting it in your editing software. Looking at the EXIF< not a lot more that you could have done here, as you couldn't open wider, reduce shutter (or risk images getting OOF), or go higher with ISO (or noise may have been even worse), so agree that you may need to add a flash. 2 tips (one of which looks like you are already doing anyway - don;t go for an inbetween ISO, stick to the main ones - like 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400 etc - the inbetween ones are not actual ISO but extrapolations based on the lower ISO and adjust, and do not have the same clarity of information, it is based on the camera guessing the pixel data to adjust), and keep the composition clean and simple. The main thing that shows a snapshot is that lack of thought and care to ensuring the image is clean, simple and no distracting elements to it.

I think one of the things to consider when making camera choice rather than full frame / crop etc is the sensor size. Agree with Huga, to me it was a no brainer at the time I bought my bodies which I use in my buisness - the larger sensor means that more information can be retained by the camera at time shooting, and pixels are not thrown out or compressed by the camera when taking shots so tht I have the best quality image retained available to me. For me as a pro, this is important when I could potentially have clients wanting to blow up images as large as they want. I did previously also have a crop sensor, and certainly saw way more improvement in quality once shooting over ISO 400 (which would be the bulk of my shooting LOL) For the average man on the street, who is probably not going to blow stuff up much bigger than 8 x 10 (which most people think is HUGE) I doubt they would notice any difference. Like Huga said, this is also just my opinion only :)

don;t worry about changing lenses - nothing to fear. the only thing I picked up to do is make sure you turn the camera off first, as otherwise the static charge will cause particles to be attracted inside to the sensor - turn it off and the static charge is not there Agree to use the lenses first and work out what you want, then buy it - agree with Huga that I prefer primes, have a 50mm, 85mm and 105mm and they are my main workhorses for everything. Do have a 16-35 fixed width in case I need to go wider, but rarely need to. My 50mm 1.4 and foot zooming would be my main lens of choice

totally agree with all the above - shutter speed is the no 1 killer of a sharp image, followed by - dirty lens, and focus being put on the wrong part of the picture

Dasha - how do the dogs work then in the grooming area (interested as only been there the once, and couldn't obviously go anywhere else but the one bank of cages where the cats I was visiting was) - how many dogs can be in there at the same time, and what is the setup like? Only know that on one of our visits, we found one of the cats had a huge clump of no 2 on his backside, which had impacted in and started to chafe, and had been there at least a couple of days by the damage it had done, as well as the amount that was there so they had obviously not checked him too much for at least that time. Since we could not get into any grooming areas, he had to be butt bathed in a sink and left to dry naturally. Would have killed then for a sink and liberty dryer!!! What you said about transmissable stuff then makes sense, and makes me feel better about things being not done (still took no chances myself since things like ringworm are not something a longhaired cat owner wants to bring into their home!!!)

agree with it currently being very lax anyway, having just looked after some cats for a friend in quarantine (cats came into Vic and she lived in rural NSW), there was no suggestion on leaving that anyone should disinfect or anything, so if any animals there were infected, very easy for any visitor to take the disease out and spread it (I did however carry F10 in a spray bottle, and did spray my hands and clothes after exiting, and did change outfits before and after visiting and did not handle my own cats when I got home until I had done so. Do not imagine everyone is as vigilant though, nor do they tell you to - only not to touch any other animal, and in the case of cats, you can;t take them out of their enclosure at all (not even to groom, which in the case of longhairs is not right), you can;t even look at any other enclosure (kind of hard though when they are 4 cat runs in each bank). We did notice too that the blankets in the cat beds were not changed AT ALL during the 30 days they were there. Fully happy with 10 days instead of 30, and even more that they will be just down the road from us - might be some jobs on offer in a few years!!!

Sad to hear that you have lost the images, there is no greater a heartbreaking feeling than seeing it coming up telling you there are no images when you know darn well there should be word to the wise - NEVER delete either via the camera while shooting, or using the computer itself to delete - doing so can cause all sorts of issues on the card, as it may also delete other pixels you want, or overwrite what you have already shot. I can sympathise with you, as had exactly the same thing happen to me 6 years ago - family trip, shot 3 cards while we were away, had all of the first card, and the remainder on card 3, but card 2m which had some totally awesome ones on there of my kids - dudded, and could not get any images at all off it. I now always format a card once I have gotten the images off it (which wipes it clean, and is then meant to help remove any problems), by using the option in my cameras menu, but will never wipe until photos have been safely downloaded and backed up. Once a card give any problems, I toss them - it may never do anything wrong again, but would rather throw away the card than take another risk at losing images. I also now only use Lexar Platinum or professional cards, the one I had an issue with was a fuji and cheaper brand I can't recall

fellow cat breeder had a 22 year old cat who died in between their 22 & 23 birthday. Oldest cat I have had personally was 1 18 and 1 16, so I would say your old timer is doing really well, Bless you for making his golden years the best for him

far more concerned about the people that let toddlers and older kids sit in shopping trolleys that I might then use afterwards (and god knows they are not cleaned in between people using them and who knows if the kids have pooey bottoms or not when they are sitting in the whole trolley, not just the seat portion), than I am about a restaurant where dishes and table are washed in between users. Think this is a very sad person who clearly needs to GET OVER THE SAUSAGE!!! - perhaps her grandparents just like their dog a whole lot better than her!!! (and yes I did use trolleys when I had kids at shopping centres, but I bought one of those little seat covers that I used first in the seat section, and once my kids could walk, they did not sit in a trolley at all - I refused to let them sit in the whole trolley