The Flockton Flyer

gwr-tank-engine, originally uploaded by http://andrewskelton.net.

It’s funny how a brief conversation can change the shape of your day; I haven’t won the lottery, been offered I can’t refuse or anything else – I simply had a conversation about camera’s with a friend who has a new digital camera and I’m now feeling much more relaxed about the impending course. I’m not saying I explained things perfectly, far from it, I tried to explain everything at once and suspect I hindered more than I helped – it highlighted the fact that I need to take my time, and only deal with one discussion point at a time. A few diagrams will help as well, save me talking all the time as well.

I recently blogged about the photo book I produced as a Christmas present for my Dad featuring photos taken on a trip to Kenya last year. I sent out a tweet (which also updates Facebook) with the link and a number of friends commented how much they liked it – I was a little puzzled how someone I didn’t know and who wasn’t following me had re-tweeted my tweet (chirp, chirp), not that I was complaining. It turns out the lady in question is the Marketing Manager for the company who I used to produce the book, and her tweet was rapidly followed by a tweet from the company’s office twitter account, and they’re now following me on there as well. Very gratifying, recognition seems to be heading my way – let’s hope I have the sense to grab it by the lapels when it gets close.

I downloaded the latest beta of Adobe’s Lightroom photo processing software; when I used to take RAW images on my old 5D I used Rawshooter Pro to convert the photos to JPG. It’s interface was quirky to say the least but it was the fastest as well as sophisticated program I could find at the time. As has been the case over the last ten years, the company who produced Rawshooter was absorbed into one of the big players, in this case Adobe, and soon after it disappeared to be replaced by Lightroom. Adobe handled the whole buy out of Pixantec who produced Rawshooter very professionally and Pro users were treated to a free license of Lightroom and for a while I used this as my preferred photo developer. I haven’t taken RAW images for a number of years now, the images I get off camera are spot on – plus I don’t want to spend all day staring at a computer. Seeing news of the Beta (early release, to allow more people to find issues with the software) I decided to see what it could do and so have returned to the digital processing world.

Yesterday’s blog almost didn’t happen – despite it being finished before 7pm. I had to go out last night and taking my android tablet with me, I wrote the blog whilst waiting for an appointment which over ran by at least an hour. I thought uploading the text to my blog would be straight forward however having transferred the document to my Google Cloud ready to make corrections (the tablet kept auto-correcting Photoshop to Photocopy!), suddenly our Internet connection decided to play up. I don’t remember the last time we had issues with our broadband connection but I was still not impressed with it’s timing. After a number of attempts to connect to various wireless service, I finally manage to connect with a laptop and transfer the post over to my blog. I didn’t even worry too much about grammatical and spelling corrections, I was just pleased to have manage to post the entry. Turns out I received an email from BT this morning to say that they had been upgrading my connection, though I couldn’t quite determine how it had been upgraded as it’s not supposed to be any faster! I’m going out again tonight so am uploading this whilst I still have a connection.. once bitten…**

* Not the same railway, but the same type of engine as here.
**Once Bitten, Twice Shy – has a whole new connotation when it comes to wildlife photography!

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