.. mid July with our batteries fully charged :) Although we will have very limited internet access, do continue to send us messages or email and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Have a great summer and see you guys soon!

Recently I had a virus in my computer. If you have thousands of photos sitting on your hard disk, it can be quite a scary experience. Luckily, all my photos are double backed up externally on two hard drives.

If you are unfortunate enough to get a virus in your system, there are 3 very highly effective programs that should clean out your system and they are all completely free.

1. Spybot - Search & Destroy

2. Malwarebytes

3. Spyware Doctor

Install these programs on your computer and make sure they are updated. If you ever get a virus, reboot your PC and keep pressing F8. Then select boot up in Safe Mode. Once you're in, start running each of these programs one after another.

These should clean up most viruses in your computer.

We didn't specifically go out to take these photos for the photo competition. Instead we rummaged around in our hard disk and found some images that were suitable for the competition.

This was taken at Parc Bertrand, Geneva during the annual Hot Air Balloon festival. We could ride in one of the balloons for free but it was tied down. Well better than nothing.

This is a night shot of the Batiment des Forces-Motrices, Geneva. It used to be a factory back in 1886 but since 1997 it is an opera house open to the public for festive, promotional or cultural events.

This was not taken in Japan but at the World Health Organization (WHO) Japanese garden. The color of the leaves turn bright red every autumn.

This is another shot of Geneva's many parks right in the heart of the city.

A night shot taken near Geneva's airport just after dusk.

And finally, another night shot of Geneva taken from the roof of an apartment building. Incidentally, this photo won a prize.

What is the difference between MiniTT1 and FlexTT5? The MiniTT1 is a transmitter and it sits on top of your camera. The FlexTT5 is a transceiver (transmit + receive). This is where you place your flash. Also it can do what the MiniTT1 does as well as remotely trigger your camera.

They have many cool features but the best is of course wireless E-TTL (you can automatically control the intensity of the flash from your camera) and High Speed Sync (allows you to have super fast shutter speeds, way beyond your x-sync speed, to make daytime appear like nighttime.)

There are two versions to choose from - US or Europe. The difference is the radio frequency it uses to communicate with each other.

For Canon users, there have been some problems with interference between the Canon flashes (some models only) and the FlexTT5 which significantly reduces the working distance between your camera and flash. Apparently, the Europe version is less impacted. But PocketWizard has a special soft shielding sock which you can place over your Canon flashes to reduce the interference.

You can get a set of these from ebay (mightyphoto) for USD475. Note: CE = European Version. Alternatively, you can buy them from toppreise.ch for CHF516 (USD452) which is amazingly cheaper.

So in this trip, we decided to do something totally different. Since it was autumn, we created a series of autumn leaves around the parisien streets.

We even had time to throw in a couple of family shots.

After the session, we immediately reviewed the images and selected the keepers. We then took time to post process each image until we were happy with the results. We managed to deliver more than 35 selected images by Sunday :)