Updates to Gallery On the offhand chance you're inside on a summer Sunday, I'd just like to let you know that Tracy and I have made a number of updates to the gallery in the past few hours. About 20 new images have been added, mostly from Paris on Saturday but also a few from New York City on the day I spent there during the layover between Montreal and Paris last weekend. The gallery is doing strange things to my perception of time -- what is recent, and what is the distant past. It's all starting to seem like so long ago, but all of the photos in the gallery are work from 2005. I had only taken a few digital photos before getting my first "camera numeric" in January. For anyone curious, I'm also using a Cannon Rebel XT, with two zoom lenses that range from 18 mm to 300 mm (add 25% for converstion to digital, so it's more like 26mm to 375mm). However, for those looking to make an investment in a modestly priced digital camera, the Fujifilm 5500 (about $300, 4 megapixels) absolutely rocks. I'm not sure it's made anynore, but it's probably still available if you look online (it goes to 10x optical zoom -- very helpful). There is a new one in the series that goes to a 6x optical zoom and shoots at 6 megapixels, also pretty good. One last thing. Of the couple of hundred photos now in the gallery, not one was taken with a flash, and none were taken with studio lighting. They are all "available light" photographs. This may seem challenging but it gets the most creative results. To do this, check your camera's settings for the ISO setting and when you're inside or in low light, set it to 400 or 800 and when you're outside or in bright light, set it as low as it can go, usually 64 or 100. Anyway, enough technicalities. Let the music play. The first shots are from the artist's squat at 59 rue Rivoli, which I first discovered when taken there by a friend in November or so. Since then, it's been a dependable source of adventure and fun. The squat has been closed to the public since April, but Le Suisse, one of the founders of the project, says it's been really nice to be away from people for a while. The squat was open to the public every Saturday and Sunday for five years. A lot of artists were on vacation and there were a number of vacant studio areas when I visited Saturday. The whole photo gallery now take about 20 minutes to watch, and covers Paris, Greece, New York City, upstate New York, Toronto, Montreal and Amsterdam in somewhat random order. e http://planetwaves.info/gallery.php