Vancvillan

To quote The Bunk, better to be lucky than good.

I would feel very hard done by if that'd been at the other end...

It's been a while but...

@Hornso you can probably set up an auto-complete so that everytime you type Tshibola it automatically adds "booked".

Re: 12m for Hogan, I think the saying goes along the lines of "a player is worth whatever some mug will pay for them".

We shot these on a Pentax 645z and either the 28-45mm or the 75mm (the interrogation one). The last shot is pretty wide - 28mm on that camera is around 22m in 35mm terms. That said, you could have shot them on anything - it's a calendar so the print size is pretty small and we weren't cropping that much. That camera does have killer high ISO performance (the night shot is at 1600, which is crazy high for us), but I don't know how much that matters in the grand scheme of things. The fact that it's very waterproof was useful. For post - they are all composites. Interrogation was the most involved - the dogs couldn't be in the room at the same time, and that room didn't have a mirror on the wall (we velcro'd one on, then took the frame of the mirror from a shot of an internal window in another room). The light wasn't there, and we had to shoot each dog twice (one for the room, the other for the reflection) to get that much depth of field, so getting them into roughly the same position for two shots was tough. That last shot was pretty simple - we set up lights then dragged the shutter for the ambient. Shooting the dog took less than three minutes, but he had been practicing wearing the glasses. We used a different plate for the cars going past, but the dog and car are the same shot. The reflection in the glasses is dropped in, otherwise we would have been seen in them. Even the coffee shop is a composite - the dog can't be near a donut without eating it, and the ceiling / sign is way higher than that in reality, so we bought that down a few feet to fit the aspect ratio of the calendar - we really wanted the "Donuts and Coffee" sign in there since that's part of the gag.

Not quite wildlife, but here are the three months we shot as a pro bono for Vancouver's police dog calendar for next year.

Nope.

I'll see your Bertrand Russell and raise you a William of Ockham.

Losing him would be a disaster, both for ability and moral (the fans for sure, probably some of the team). All I want to see now is a new forum member called Kelvin Gearlish with a first post that reads "my hands aren't hairy but I'm told he's staying (wink, wink)".

There's been ten seconds of football in the last ten minutes.

Love these two - great exposure choice and the flatter colour grade is great. Three completely unsolicited thoughts on the others that are just my two cents (and vastly overestimating their worth): 1. Watch your verticals on the cityscapes. The parallax is ok if it's an obvious choice not to correct it, but when there's only a bit of it then it looks like an accident (the Leicester Railway one is just a tiny bit off - not enough to feel like it's intentional though). 2. Go easy on pulling the blues - especially in skies. 3. For the buskers (and similar shots of people), chat to them, ask if you can shoot them, then get all up in their shit. Or at least a lot close with a wider lens. It'd be great to feel like we're a bit more in their space. Again, apologies for the critique you didn't ask for. Dig a lot of the shots, thought I'd chuck my thoughts down on the rest.

A long career of ups and downs with many a story to tell. At this point all that's left is the tell-all autobiography "Gabby Agbonlahor: In Ma Wurdz".

Thoughts are with all the Bruce family. A terrible thing to go through - hopefully being together really helps in some way.

Someone needs to put the brakes on all these puns.

Let's not get too excited. It would be a gouda start.

Terrible crop and quality but you get the idea at least.

1-0 Villa win, 33,142

Milky Bars are on you unsurprisingly.

Wagner is more exciting, Bruce has the experience. Though if experience is so important, wouldn't it be great if we could find a manager who had experience of taking a team that was relegated from the PL and motivating them to finish 2nd behind Newcastle? Because there is one available. Also, where did the monthly optimism thread go?

It's a travesty that I can only like this once.

Unless VT hates Dad jokes, this isn't getting anywhere near the amount of attention it deserves.

I'm sure it's been mentioned already but we already had someone who burst onto the scene circa 2006, doing great things, exciting the crowd, full of passion and an ankle tattoo. The early promise of a bright future was followed by an understandable (or at least explainable) fall off to mediocrity on the stats front (less money because of divorce / recession, less goals because of being on the wing) before diving into the depths of depravity and becoming a symbol of everything that has gone wrong with Villa over the last few years. There's no real point to this post other than to say that Gabby is the Quantum Leap identity of Randy Lerner and I claim my five pounds.

I'm fine with this. As long as he's prepared to go the extra Mile for us.