I had some visitors in my house this past weekend after the ice storm left most of the capital region without power.  My brother’s friend and dog spent the night.  Once Bear got to know me, I took the opportunity to practice taking some pictures with two dogs playing together. I was trying to capture images where the dogs were either looking exactly at each other, or both were looking directly into the camera.

Here is one of the better images I captured from the set. This was shot with my trusty Canon 24-70 F2.8L with a Canon 580EX II flash.

I will post some additional images in the Logan gallery. PS.  Please ignore the dog hair on the rug, it needs a good vacuuming.

It’s officially been one day since the Ice Storm hit the Northeast.  Over a quarter million homes lost power.  I happened to be one of the lucky few that DID NOT lose power, though street lights 1/2 mile away were dark.  Even today reports are saying it could still be several days before homes get electricity restored.

I ventured to the dog park today to give Logan a little exercise, I brought my camera because I was expecting some good images.  On the drive to the park, it was beautiful seeing the trees lining the road covered in a white blanket.

With reports of done trees all over the place, for some reason I was expecting to just roll right up to the East Greenbush Town Park and their dog park.  As soon as I turned onto the town park road I was met with downed trees covering the road.  I parked the car on the side of the road and walked to the dog park.  I did happen to met two other groups of people heading out of the park on my walk in.

Here are some pictures of the damage to the road and park.

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I was a day later than the official 2.7 release, but today I got around to upgrading to the final version of 2.7.  I must say that coming from RC1 was about a 1 minute upgrade.  I was able to make use of the new automatic upgrade feature in the administration area.  A couple of clicks later and I was on my way.

I was able to use the same one-click update for some plugins I have installed.  If you have looked at some of my picture galleries you are looking at the NextGEN Gallery plugin.  I am excited about several new features in this release, the one you immediately can take advantage of is the cooliris image viewer.

I highly recommend you download this browser plugin.  It creates a 3D wall of images and video that are really fun to browse through.  You can now use this feature on all my picture galleries.

I have been eyeing the release of Wordpress 2.7 for sometime now.  Though the list of new features looked impressive, I wasn’t about to mess around with the beta installs.  Though final 2.7 build is gettin released on December 10th, I had some time today so I figured I would instll RC1.  People seem to indicate its stable, and I have yet to see any issues.

This way when 2.7 final comes out in a few days, I can use the new auto-updater and give that a whirl.  I am also looking forward to the next major release of the Picture Gallery plugin I use, NextGEN Gallery.  The NextGEN verison 1.0 release is being timed with the final release of Wordpress 2.7.  It seems I’ll have a lot to do Wednesday night.