Rain and rhubarb

Well, off in the morning to Adelaide and lunch with the Queensland cousins whom I have not seen for a couple of years. They are travelling but the itinerary doesn't take in our end of the Yorke Peninsula which is off the beaten track. Both a curse and one of its pleasure.

This has been another wet week, but at least not the devastating floods, mud slides, and mayhem being experienced around the globe from huge rainfalls: Pakistan, China - and in tonight's news Thailand too. Forest fires in Russia. Makes us look tame. Long may it be so.

I began this week building a portfolio of my own photographs uploaded to the website Fotolia.com
That's where users go (individuals, businesses, agencies, magazines etc) and pay a small fee to have royalty-free one-off use of images for their own purposes. You and I can do so as well. And suppliers of the images - I am now one of the suppliers, a tiny tiny minnow among big fish - receive a modest fraction of fees paid to Fotolia.com when a user chooses a photo created by that photographer, who of course must have full authorship and rights to the image. Any image is also likely to be available for outright sale.

Other art, and video, can  also be viewed and accessed at the website, which has many international versions but not yet an Australian one. I "digitally signed" an exclusive agreement to say that I will sell or supply only to Fotolia. Of course, it is up to me which images I submit to them. I'd like to upload, say, 360 over the next 12 months. That's around the number of my own work currently in digital format. Another thousand in older formats, 35mm slide and neg, if and when I ever get around to digitising 'em.

 My little Nikon Coolpix camera seems to be borderline for its digital adequacy, pixelwise, and roughly one submission in four gets knocked back on technical grounds. Or maybe it's just me. The one above got the chop. I took the pic of fruit, veg (that's the rhubarb on the right) nuts and mushroom on the kitchen table two weeks ago and have now consumed everything edible, not the table or the bottles. I planted the top of the pineapple in the garden where the poor thing is shivering in our winter. But it was that or the compost bin.