Thingomy.co.uk

Merry Christmas to everyone.

I’m not really sure what the above statement really means anymore, I’m sure you all have your own interpretations; and to anyone that does actually hold it as a significant religious festival, you have my utmost respect.

Anyway, my computer is now back up, thanks to exceedingly fast delivery of a new PSU, I’m not even sure what courier was responsible, but it was ordered on the evening of the 21st of December from OCUK, and it arrived today (24th). I don’t think I even paid for any special delivery options (except for the mysterious £15 “you live on an island, so we’re going to screw you” charge that all these places give).

Anyway, after it’s encounter with an unfortunate lightning strike, a new PSU, and it’s as happy as it ever was. I’m extremely lucky that the old PSU took the shock of the strike, and did it’s job, it could have been a very different story, it was not a cheap machine in the first place.

So useful tip for the day: don’t skrimp on the PSU.

Eye start aff wi gud gear; decent ledders, an’ heal underwear.

I’m lack in the land of the midday moon.

I advanced the boat trip was advanced by a day at the last minute because of the weather forcast, and was quite sensible, the day before I went and the day after I went were both canceled. As it happens I got a pretty good trip.

My computer has been fried by lightning up here, so if anyone is emailing you will get a very slow response. I’m using my mother’s somewhat elderly laptop, it has a duff E key, so typing is intermitently a problem. There are bits on order, with any kind of luck, I should be back up by new yearish.

Don’t even think about texting me, the coverage is patchy up here to the point that they frequently fail to get here: if you don’t get a reply within a day, send another one, keep going until you get somthing back. Oh and there are only 2 rooms in the house that I get any reception at all, so I won’t even have the thing on me.

Other than that, all good here.

This weekend was very interesting, I managed to get a ticket to the London Strobist Seminar myself and a mate went down to see what we could learn.

For those unaware, stobism is the idea of creating studio quality lighting using portable camera strobes; it’s about learning their strengths and weaknesses and working with them.

The results were spectacular, I have a lot of information, I don’t fully know how to use it until I’ve practice a great deal though… If anyone is willing to stand in front of a camera while a I blind them for couple of hours taking pics, I would be really grateful of the practice.

There were some really interesting conversations going on about photographers working for free. It turns out there are a great deal of pitfalls to this, some of which I’ve already fallen into, mainly in 3 camps:
taking work away from professional photographers that are already struggling (this can be debated, and I’m still not sure about it);
becoming known as a free photographer, to the point that no one is willing to pay money for anything you do;
issues to do with self confidence and self worth.

I’m in the process of rethinking my stance on this area of photography (money, copyright, terms and conditions etc) to produce a policy that’s workable and sustainable, it’s all really heavy stuff that I wish wasn’t necessary, but sadly it is.

One thing is quite clear though, it’s much better to work for non-monetary value: goods or even better, favours. So if anyone wants a photographer and is willing to repay me in the form of money or anything else that’s useful to me, I’m interested.

The trains on the way down were a bit of a joke, our train was scheduled for 1700, but due to an overhead lines fault was canceled, we only got to bed at 3am (with a 7am start…). I won’t go into details, but it was not fun, I’m just glad we weren’t the poor buggers that had to stand all the way to London.