Back to work tomorrow

My four weeks off has come to an end.

It's a bit depressing really. I know for a fact I'll spend the first couple of hours cleaning the crap out of my e-mail inbox, that's assuming I can even log on. Usually when I get back from leave there's something wrong with my computer and I have to ring up IT support to get it fixed.

Then it'll be back to the same boring old shit that I was doing before I went on leave.

There'll be the usual questions like, "how was your holiday?"

To which I'll give the standard reply, "not long enough".

Then they'll say something like, "Shit! You had four weeks off. How much time do you want?"

Wait till I tell them I've got an RDO on Thursday, and next week I'm taking three days off. We're going to the Robbie Williams concert on the Wednesday night, so we thought we'd take some time off spend a couple of nights in the city, within walking distance of the concert.

It's Donna's birthday on the Tuesday too, so we'll be eating out a bit. She really likes the food at the Pancake Manor, so that's probably where we'll go for dinner. I haven't been to Yum Cha Lau for a long time so we might have lunch there.

---------

I've been getting a bit creative this weekend.

I submitted some photos to Shutterstock the other day. They're a photo library that sells stock photos online. They pay you twenty-five US cents every time someone downloads one of your photos. That doesn't sound like much, but it all adds up and it's better than leaving them sitting on my hard-drive where no-one else can see them.

There are other libraries that pay more, but they tend to be more for full on professionals. While I think I can take professional quality photos, I don't have a business name behind me.

Anyway, Shutterstock require an initial ten images so that they can evaluate your work. If you don't get at least seven out of ten acceptances you have to go back and try again in thirty days. So I've been taking more photos to fill in the gaps if I don't get enough acceptances. Plus, if I do get enough, I'll have some more images to upload straight away.

It's amazing how a photo that you think looks really good turns out to be really bad when you blow it up for a closer look, which is what Shutterstock will do when they evaluate the images. Just finding ten images that I thought were both technically good, and saleable was a lot harder than I though.