Crash Course Muso are enjoying their 2nd Birthday and celebrating by offering their well-known online guitar course at a never-before-seen crazy low price. The jammed-packed guitar course regularly sells for $97.00 which is cracking value, but for a very limited time, you can grab the course for only $29. Yup, that's not a misprint, for about the price of one single lesson, you can grab an entire guitar education for just $29. http://crashcoursemuso.com

Don't miss this rare opportunity to grab the UK's #1 Online Guitar Course whilst they celebrate their 2nd Birthday. Perfect for Christmas presents too.

The boys are Rocktastically pumped to hear our gritty guitar riffs knocked out to some sexy Daisy and Duke boys action.

Ladies & Gentlemen – Boned have entered the building \m/

Hey folks it Challenge time again and for me that mean two things;

1: Create a music video for The Challenge

2: Go through the Challenge to keep up-to-date with all the cool marketing tactics.

For those of you who don't know, The Challenge is a module based training program, designed for busy people to work through at their own pace, which will show you step-by-step how you can make your first $1 online. All the training is 100% free and absolutely nothing is held back, plus there are no hidden catches whatsoever.

I've personally learned truck-loads from The Challenge over the years and if you're serious about starting a business online, I whole-heartedly recommend you check out The Challenge, as you will benefit greatly from the free training provided by the excellent Challenge team. I'm proud to be associated with the Challenge and hope that my small contribution helps to put a smile on your face, as that's exactly what this music video is intended for. A special thank you goes out to my supportive, talented family for all their help throughout, thank you Eva, Oscar and Katrina, love you all to bits.

Ed Dale's cool persuasion tactics forced me into making this years Challenge song, somewhat a little different, fun and enjoyable all the same.

All ego-supporting comments are most welcome.

A Police spokesman confirmed that a 27-year-old woman had died in Camden and that the cause of death was as yet unexplained. I would suspect some kind of drink or drub abuse was the cause of death, given her time in rehab. I personally have little sympathy for anyone who dies from drug abuse, but it’s very sad she has died and her music will be missed the world over – R.I.P Amy.

The sad loss of Amy Winehouse has robbed us of a young, gifted vocalist. As a home-grown singer, she was with without question the outstanding vocalist of her generation. Without Amy, there would have been no Adele, no Duffy and no Lady Gaga. Amy Winehouse was a true British great.

Surrounded by a mass of sickly, manufactured chart pop, Amy stood a long way out from the crowd and her voice was the real deal. Her rawness and emotional honesty harked back to an era when the best singers were more believable. For a white girl raised in the North London suburbs, she had the sweet, soul vocal of Aretha Franklin or Etta James.

Her death has raised hugely varying emotions, with some sad to see her gone and others glad to see her gone, whatever your opinion of Amy, her music will most definitely live on.

‘That was a pretty good day, why couldn’t I get that day, over & over & over?‘ Here’s a grainy pic of me meeting Harvey Goldsmith backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. What a great down-to-earth chap he is and it was a real pleasure to talk to one of the most important and influential people in the entertainment industry.

Harvey Goldsmith has organised and produced more events than I’ve had hot dinners, with his most recognised being Live Aid in 1985 with Sir Bob Geldof. In October 2006 he was honoured with the 15th Music Industry Trust’s Award (MITS), one of the highest accolades to be awarded in the music industry, in recognition of his contribution to the music industry.

Rocksmith’s new game is like Guitar Hero but uses a real guitar rather than a plastic one. Might be time to Learn To Play The Guitar. There is even talk of Ubisoft negotiating with Gibson and others to bundle the game with a $200 guitar – cool. Anyway, enjoy the 1 minute video and smile for the rest of the day

This is one of my favourite photographs of Eva taken by my wife summertime of last year and this is

the HDR version. Move your mouse over the image to see the colour original.

With this next image I played around with the colour vibrance and saturation. As with any photography, its all subjective and what I like you may not, but there are plenty of controls to get your desired effect, so I suggest you play around until something catches your eye.

Once again, the image below is the HDR effected one and you
can move your mouse over the image to see the original.

I'm going to be spending more time over the next few months trying to get that classic black and white look that just oozes character. You know the kind, when you get totally lost in an old photo that just takes you back in time. Sure the composition plays a huge part, but perhaps combining this cool HDR Toning tool with a bucket-load of B&W pics might just give me what I'm looking for.

What say ye? Drop your comments below and leave me a link to any HDR images you've been playing around with, I'd love to see them.

I set up my camera (Canon 60D) using the stock 18-55mm lens on my sturdy Vinten tripod in the garage doorway and aimed it at the sky. All very technical here and very thorough. I set all the camera's controls to manual and took a few test shots to see how they looked. Everything appeared to look okay, so I set my intervalometer to take a snap every 5 seconds with 6 second intervals between shots.

With the sun about to cross the path of my camera, I checked back in on the camera every 30 to 60 mins or so to make sure I was still capturing decent looking images. I made a few adjustments along the way to improve colour and contrast, but pretty much left it alone every hour or so. The camera captured about 90 to 100 mins before the battery had to be charged and I only have one for this camera, so I had to get a little creative when putting all the images together to try and make it appear seemless. I decided to speed up a previous part of the time lapse and this covered quite nicely.

See if you can spot the strange single-frame red streak of light the zipped across the screen – freaky!

I decided to use the Vimeo video embed as the playback quality is far better than youtube or facebook.

I've had my eye on a wide-angle lens for some time now and have been flipping the coin between two lenses, the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 and the Canon EFS 10-22mm USM f3.5-4.5. I opted for the Canon in the end as although the Tokina's lure was the wider 2.8 aperture, I mainly shoot in the studio with lots of available light, so the Canon slightly wider focal range was my most favoured choice. See it here on Canon's website – Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM

With that said, my first shots I took were outside and I've only had the chance to play around with it a couple of times and wanted to share these pics from the garden. I have a portrait photo shoot planned in the studio this week, so I'll post some shots from that later in the week.

I've cropped these down to 640 x 270 as I like the look and they fit my blog nicely.

The next shot below really shows the super-wide 10mm in action as my oval patio table now looks completely round.

I'll put up a comparison between my two new lenses (Canon 10-22mm and the Canon 70-300mm) against the stock 18-55mm lens as this is something I was looking for when researching what lenses to buy next and I think some may find it useful, more on that real soon.