An Explanation for Last Several Days

          I have a serious apology and explanation to give for the recent lack of activity on this blog. I have been suffering from being unable to resolve a series of what would normally have been minor problems, but which completely undermined my ability to write the narratives that describe my various sorties with a camera.
          Fortunately, my son-in-law, Tim has been a model of patience and helpfulness as he did his very best to resolve remotely, the issues I have been experiencing with what in the past had become second nature to me; the preparation of images taken during my sorties with a camera. The problems began when we suffered a power outage; and it occurred whilst I was processing a day's worth of pictures to prepare them as a Lightroom gallery. The total loss of Electricity could not have occurred at a worse time as I was close to finishing the work of selecting, cropping and balancing the exposures and colour for some three hundred pictures! As I was actually working on an entire folder from the day's shooting, there was nothing other than the originals saved, and I was close to seven eighths the way through, and in mid operation, so I faced starting back at the beginning! I cannot explain just how much effort those hours of diligent work represented.
          I cannot remember how long I had to wait for power to be restored; time during which my memory of how I had cropped, or adjusted the colour, or brought detail into the shadows, or restored tone in burnt-out clouds. The isolation of the last year had already taken its toll on my short term memory, but the necessity to restore what I had already achieved thus far in my editing, and try to decide which of three exposures I had chosen first time around, really sapped my normal confidence and judgment, and the waiting to learn just how much was recoverable, also really ate into my fragile self confidence. When the moment came and power was restored, was when I learned the full extent of what damage had been wrought. Because my setup consists of numerous interlinked hard drives, and the closedown was not tidy, so I had a lot more problems beyond Lightroom to first assess, then do my restoration. All this sapped my already fragile memory, making restoration and resurgence of confidence, a slow process.
          Just how much my ability to function was illustrated today, when I set to, to putting a fairly simple 2-page gallery this afternoon, I needed Tim to resolve why I have been unable to save this gallery's completion to disc – task which under more normal circumstances would have taken a total of a couple of hours at most, had completely eluded my ability to save it correctly; further damaging my ability to cope. Tim with infinite patience had to guide me over the phone, the steps I had to take.