Post Rugby . . .

After a trip to darkest Surrey in the brightest February conditions to see Hannah's team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, I have watched Ireland's Rugby Union team scrape through against Italy and a dogged, deserved win for Wales against an imploding England - what an afternoon! I also managed to structure the day to my advantage and it seems everyone elses advantage as they went shopping and I was able to watch the rugby - worked out fine!

Following on from yesterday's post - I seem to have ironed out the harddrive issues and so far - everything is working and behaving as expected. A timely arrival from China will make Sunday's shoot easier as two Flash Shoe Umbrella thingies turned up yesterday and they do exactly what they are supposed to . . . I can now shoot with a variety of white shoot through or reflective umbrellas, a small or large softbox and the usual omnibounce domes. Wonderful to shoot wirelessly with the various SBs and the Pocket Wizards - no cables and even less clutter. The only issue about tomorrow's shoot is that it is Sauff of da Wiver and I will need the passport stamped! Still waiting for the Pocket Wizard Caddies and some custom cables from Cinncinatti, US of A - I'll have to be patient for these. As usual the American Photo Stores and online outlets trounce any of the UK stores for these interesting bits an pieces. There is a gap in the market somewhere . . .

A good clean out

Spent half of the morning selecting two wedding's worth of images for two Wedding Books and the latter half trying to copy them to the startup disk, which was throwing up errors and not completing! I initially thought this was a harddisk issue and thankfully the contents were backups - so to actually work on the disk was not a problem. I tried reformatting the disk several times with no positive result. I tried rebuilding the file structure through Disk Warrior - still no joy. So what does a frustrated Mac user do? Call Toby! He suggested that the case rather than the disk might be the problem and I have had LaCie drives "die" only to find it was the enclosures jumpers that had failed and that the actual drive was fine . . . With this all in mind I decided to pull the BIG Mac out of its dusty corner and test things. When I ran the suspect harddrive on its own all seemed fine but when joined back into the various daisychanied drives the problem reappeared.

It seemed logical to pull the whole lot out and rejig the cabling at least and see what that would do. As well as the above new issue, the main Firewire port on the rear of the BIG Mac seems dead - hence five drives, an iPod and an iSight camera were all plugged into each other - possibly too much going on? I needed extra Firewire ports and suddenly remembered that the old G4 was running a Firewire AGP board I received bundled with the Nikon Scanner bought years ago. Would it work with the G5? Only one way to find out! A quick but of internal surgery to remove the board and equally quick to install in the G5 and I was ready to test and unbelievably all works!!! With that success I enjoyed dusting out the BIG Mac's corner and tidying the spaghetti cables - what a mess! All back in and tidy and all seems happy. Now I have to reselect all the images that I had done this morning as all the data is copied back - all back to zero!

Dessert anyone???

As the winds blow and we are threatened with more wet, snowy weather - half of us hope for four inches of the white stuff and the other 50% hope for sunshine . . .  Not sure which half I inhabit but I know that better weather would suit me better than a snow fall. Tomorrow, Friday sees the usual school run first thing and then back to the screen to continue wedding book layouts for eager couples. A wonderful symmetry "forces" me to be screen bound through the worst of the weather even though a big part of me wants to be out in the weather trying to shoot.

     This weekend will be busy with Hannah's Lacrosse match away in deepest, darkest Surrey in the morning and a commercial shoot on Sunday afternoon in South London - I will need my passport stamped! Who said weekends were restful - everyone should spend a period self-employed - just like National Service and not a wedding in sight!

     For Sunday's shoot, I will, again use multiple off camera small flashes - a mix of 2 x SB-800s, 2 x SB-26s and an SB-28, with a mixture of SU, in Flash syncs and Pocket Wizards. I have always hated cables and I am steadily riding my setups of these with various wireless setups. These seem to work brilliantly with the main Elinchrom kit staying at home.

     All for now - back with the latest soon.

Now the meat and potatoes . . .

Many of you may know Scott Kelby - President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals? Scott has made his considerable fortune out of writing as he speaks . . . something that is either endearingly American and successful or a total pain! I just about subscribe to the former as I have watched the guy present as well as following many of his online utterances. You can see where this is going and I make no apology as I try to write some thoughts that will be of some relevance and interest over the next few days, weeks and even years! I will try to write as I speak that will hopefully, keep things light and fluffy! 

     I have dodged the blog arena for too long - thinking too literally - that my life isn't really that interesting but following a wonderful lunch with two extraordinary individuals - things have changed and moved on - a sort of epiphany and veil being lifted from the eyes. This can be a wonderful marketing tool if used to your advantage to further other online endeavours as well as being a vehicle to note down those potentially embarassing inner most thoughts!!! You will be relieved to know that if I can stay away from the PowerBook late at night after a few too many glasses of white - you will be spared! Anyway, as some of you will know I have a history of "note taking". In my earlier, pre "interweb" days, I kept a long and detailed series of Black Books outlining many wonderful years as an assistant with Ed Pritchard. These live on a shelf gathering dust for Hannah to discover in the future along with a number of Nikon diaries and yellow notebooks - lots of doodles, notes, polaroids and black and white prints to illustrate daily events. That was so much more labour intensive than this! Anyway I'm rambling already . . .

     With this blog, I hope to continue the Black Book formula as the digital revolution continues and we all try and keep up. Posts may be brief, concise and infrequent after the initial novelty - we will see. I know of at least one blog where the photographer has managed to post a "new" image every day for the last 2 years - wonderful but in the dark winter months I have never seen so many versions of the kitchen light, the backyard or a laughing cat! I won't promise anything so restricting but hope to post thoughts, developments and anecdotes from an ordinary life - let the flood gates open!

Here goes . . .

And another thing . . . just a few comments on life, photography and the world in general!