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This is now the second long Easter weekend I have enjoyed as an employee being paid! Admittedly I still own part of the business but taking the 5 days off has been great.

So far I have gone riding, played board games with the kids and friends, read the girls stories, played with fire and taken photos and done one family photo-shoot for some clients.

Here is some of the photographic evidence of the weekend so far.

I have had a lot of articles, news and other tech information filling up my browser and its time to de-clutter before Christmas.

Microsoft Excel

INDEX -MATCH - a much better lookup function combination than using VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP. Charley Kyd writes a very good instructive post on using this combination. We use this a lot where the failings of VLOOKUP make it impossible to use.

MSDN announces the new developer roadmap for Excel and VBA. Interesting reading and has lots of useful links.

Power Pivot is an amazing AddIn for Excel 2010. I have written about Power Pivot before. Dick Kusleika has written a simple function to determine whether an Excel Workbook contains power pivot data.

Microsoft Outlook

Conditional formatting and highlighting your emails based on content, subject, sender etc.

Roy MacLean asks some interesting questions about storing data in Outlook. I love Outlook and think it is a very good tool, however there are lots of limitations with using it. Mind you I don't see any other email client out there that can do everything that Outlook can do or even half as well in most cases. Still Roy has some good points.

The high calling photo play titled Get Out In Black and White challenged us to look at things differently.

As I was in the city taking a photo of a statue for someone on Flickr in Dublin who needed a photo from Brisbane, I decided to plop down on the corner of a busy intersection and just shoot in the two directions that were immediately 90 degrees in front of me. I then cut down to the top 27 pictures of people - just average every day people going about their business, mostly unaware of me taking photos (the advantage of a 70-200 zoom lens.

Claire challenged us to do the following:

• Find a place where there is a lot of activity.
• Fade into the scene by finding a comfortable place to sit or stand.
• Identify an object or person you would like to capture.
• Capture your subject in relation to the whole setting.
• Covert to black and white or use the black and white function on your camera. Email me if you do not know how to do this.
• Blog about the experience and tell us how it stretched you. Also tell us about the boredom you feel, or don’t feel, when it comes to taking pictures. If you want to just give a description to an image on Flickr, that is also acceptable.

How did this stretch me? It forced me to evaluate the actual surroundings. usually i just shoot people - because people interest me. today I was challenged to consider the context. I tried to get the same spot for most of the shots, showing the slight uphill climb, the busy corner, the wait for the crossing lights, and to capture the people in that space. I used a very shallow depth of field deliberately as I still wanted the people to be the primary focus point, but there's enough detail in the multitude of images to display the life of the corner as people pass through it.

The High Calling PhotoPlay Invitation this week is titled Spotting Good, picking 5 good photos and why i like them and then inspiring me to do something.

I picked these 5 photos for these reasons:

By Kelly Langner Sauser

I love the depth of field and the colour here - this photo indicates time and patience. Seeing the potential in a shot is one thing, getting it takes time and patience, a photographers best friends sometimes.