Update – Been Busy with WORK!

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.

Activity Creates Inactivity

Inactivity on the blog front is far from an indication of inactivity.

The time has been filled with completing the tech editing of Martin Evening's next book in the Photoshop for Photographers series, working on the design of a  versatile link plate to improve the mechanical advantage of working with a gimbal head when using shorter focal length telephoto lenses on such heads, meeting and discussing the concept with local precision engineers, and later bringing up the idea with manufacturers and distributors at Focus on Imaging at the NEC in Birmingham.

Then there was discussion with clients on the upgrading of digital equipment, and the implications of and interaction with new software. Carrying out some retouching for clients, and also helping one with tackling their own retouching; this was an interesting and challenging period that began as a discussion, but grew over several days into a full-blown remote training session involving mutual screen-sharing using iChat and my doing some examples on their three-screen setup a couple of hundred miles distant! More recently, I found myself helping someone recommended to me as the person to help in the move from Windows to Mac platform and in the choice of software for video editing. As was pointed out by another photographer, was this the best time, bearing in mind my personal experiences with Apple over the Lion transition, and the direction that company is taking and it's effect on its traditional business users. I am unsure on that particular score, because I do think Apple is failing to appreciate the differences between the controlled ecosystem it enjoys within its consumer products and the pre-existing open and diverse environment with minimal Apple control over its traditional Macintosh using marketplace. It maw want to dominate and control that as witnessed by the Mac App Store, but it is not there yet, and that is very much a place with many well-established third party players, and the end users are very happy with that situation. 'Third-party' is rapidly being expunged from the Apple dictionary.

My main objection to Lion is in its memory-handling, and assumptions being made in this regard, and its clear direction the system software is taking as evinced by Mountain Lion. Almost no thought is being given to its loyal users within the Creative community, as the numbers are insignificant in comparison to the purchasers of the iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone, now rapidly becoming derogatively described as iToys. I number myself as an owner of some of these, but I view them as tools, but I do not mistake them for workhorse Macs.

I have found some time to take photographs, but never in enough numbers to involve a gallery, and whenever the light has improved in the last fortnight, work has kept me tied to the computer or the telephone!