It must have been obvious to any regular visitor to this blog that there has been little activity here, but I have been far from quiet; truth be told I have been busier than for a long while. Sadly, this has meant many normally highly important activities have had to be curtailed. Also irritatingly over the last ten days I have been plagued with intermittent connection to Broadband, coupled with numerous visits from Openreach engineers as they struggle to find the cause which broke my concentration at critical times and caused work to come to a crawl.
On the retouching job for a fellow photographer I was working on, one composite image that after some forty odd layers was flattened three more times before adding between ten and twenty further layers to those threw up an interesting dialogue box when saving.
A way through the first stage when saving to TIFF, I received an alert that read: "… some TIFF Readers may not be able to handle files that exceed 2GB, would you like to continue or save to another format?" – the last time I had worked on files that large was a few years back whilst creating a montage that can be seen covering the entire length of the corridor at the charity Refuge, where the ten overlapping images I was working upon, all individually exceeded 7GB, the largest being 8.67GB! Oh, and they were only black-and-white – this job was in full colour at 16-bit.
No sooner had I completed the second part of that job than I was packing for a trip to the coast in Sussex for a spell setting up another photographer to help with his Lightroom catalogues and associated images and setting up his Time Capsule.
Just before finishing the big retouch, I learned of the LaCie Fuel with its 2TB of wireless disc to expand on the memory available to my iPad. On my return it had arrived but I had to collect it from the courier's depot. I had hoped it might be really simple to work, but I am still hard at it trying to get my head around it, but it promises to be an excellent way to have a large body of work to show clients on the iPad.
I just wish LaCie had put as much effort into taking the user through the various steps to set it up as they obviously spent on their promotional videos and the packaging. The packaging is a work of art, and is exceedingly well produced, but it's the box it comes in for heaven's sake, I would rather they provided a soft case for it to travel in! The box is destined to decorate more lofts than be used to house the device. The Product packaging itself is exquisite but there again I would like a user replaceable battery; there's just no pleasing me.