The Snow Leopard Cometh

After using my lovely Gen1 Macbook for nearly three and a half years with it's default Tiger install, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to the latest incarnation of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. I never upgraded to Leopard because, well, Tiger did everything I want and better the devil you know. Or something. I dunno, Leopard just never really "clicked" with me. However, as soon as I heard about what Apple were doing with Snow Leopard I signed up for notification of release.

Snow Leopard isn't a dramatic upgrade from the point of view of the user interface. It's very much just Leopard with polish. But what polish! Lots and lots of small incremental improvements, including a smoother Dock, better popout windows for folders in the Dock, an overhauled Finder, improved window display in Exposé, better image preview and selection in the picture importer ... Just generally better.

Installation was ... well, very boring. Insert disk, double click installer, click continue a few times ... and wait for half an hour. After an automatic reboot, I was sat at the login window. All done, all working.

As part of the upgrade process I got the latest versions of iLife and iWork bundled in the "Mac Box Set". I was still running iPhoto '06 so upgrading to '09 has provided a nice eye opener. Events and face recognition work brilliantly, and the whole thing feels a lot less clunky, which is odd because I'd never noticed the previous versions clunkiness until I played with the new one!
Not much else to report really. I'm very happy with the upgrade, and it's made my aging laptop quicker, prettier and has already improved productivity thanks to the numerous small improvements to the window manager and built-in tools. Top stuff.

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Another canal walk

The sun has started being a little more present lately, so some mornings are actually quite pleasant. On one such morning I decided to have a wander up the canal.

The clouds made everything look a bit Toy Story, and the low sun gave a lovely light and contrast to everything else.

Of course, it wasn't sunny everywhere. But even in the darker places, such as right underneath Leeds railway station, the sun had a go at peeking in.

Leeds Hyperbeastly

It's been five long months since I posted anything to this blog. Including this post here, I have posted no less than three times in 2014. As you can tell, I am nothing if not prolific.
A lot has changed since the last time I posted anything. I sold all my SLR gear, for a start, and switched to micro four-thirds. I got a lovely, lovely little Olympus OM-D E-M10 and a small selection of lenses including the must-have Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake and the stunning Olympus 45mm f/1.8. Marvellous, and the camera, four lenses and spare batteries and SD cards in a bag that wouldn't fit the SLR and a single lens. Cracking stuff, because it's now small enough to carry all the time. In fact the body and pancake lens is barely bigger than my Fuji X10 compact!
Anyway, the point of this post; I've taken several walks through Leeds while I've worked there over the past few years and I've been finding it more and more difficult to find non-boring subjects. Everything is so dr…

Shooting the Enterprise

I was recently asked if I could help out providing an image for a magazine article about stress management. For reasons as yet undiscovered the requested image would be of the USS Enterprise flying through a storm in space. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time (just a couple of hours), but I did have a very nice model of the Enterprise D I could use to build the image around.

Thinking fast, I rigged up a rather slapdash rig consisting of a black reflector backdrop, an umbrella and stand from which dangled the model by a thread, and a couple of strobes. One light above, diffused, to provide the key light, and another, reflected and lower power, to fill some of the very dark shadows. It ended up all looking something like this:

Using a fast shutter, f/16 and cunning flash positioning I managed to keep the background black and give the model suitably textured lighting so it didn't have that flat, uniform, shadowless appearance of, well, a model. The narrow aperture obviously…

Lazy Robot

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