Journals, Notebooks and Pens

In my teenage years I occasional kept a diary and loved to use an cheap plastic fountain pen.  My handwriting has never been good so I had to write very slow and carefully to get anything down.   I am by nature a poor speller and and grammar is not perfect by any means, as any longterm reader of this blog will know.

Since then my note taking has gone electronic but I still occasionally bought the odd fountain pen until ten years ago I bought a very expensive (well for me) Cross Century, and I found using it for notes occasional at work slowed me down, helped me think and definitely having to concentrate improved my hand writing.

Well last March with our local family stationary shop closing down I treated myself to a nice all metal Waterman Hemisphere fountain pen.  Its a bit more rugged then my Cross and more suitable for work.  At the same time I went switched back from using an electronic diary and journal to a paper one.  Since then I have really gotten bitten by the bug of using nice pens, good quality paper and trying out new inks.  I now find myself ‘borrowing’ Caroline’s Pelikan M800 and have treated myself to a nice TWSBI VAC700R with an italic nib.

So down the rabbit hole of the fountain pen world I find myself sinking, and planning my next purchase.

One lens challenge

Leica M10

 

 

Generally on the D800 I use a zoom, ether 24-70mm or 70-200mm, and when shooting wildlife either a 105mm or 300mm telephoto.

All my other cameras I use primes and since about April I have nearly always had the 50mm Summilux to hand on my Leica M10.  Its been a challenge as it never quite seems the right length but one that I have persevered.  Come April i’ll have been using it for a year and will switch to the 35mm Summicron for a year.

During my last studio session I tried too shoot everything with a 70mm, this is also part of a long term test and deciding what focal length I want as my main go to studio portrait lens.  While a 50 is great for full length shots, the 70 is better for head and shoulders, i’ll also be doing some tests at 85 and 90mm.

While Canon and Nikon tend to go for just 85mm as there portrait lens, Leica have 75mm and 90mm and Hasselblad go for 75mm.

Tree Pruning and Gardening

Leica M10 50mm Summilux

Summer seems a long time a go now, but there is still work to be done in the garden.  When we moved in a number of the boards and feature bushes were badly over grown.  Over the last couple of years we have slowly gotten the eastern boarder under control and so this winter we care concentrating on the western boarder.  It needs to be heavily cut and about every second overgrown bush taken out.

Eventually the bottom corner opposite out hens will be the bee corner, where we will have one or two hives to provide us with fresh honey.

First week back at work

Thats the first week of 2018 finished but for me its going to be a long week as I am working Friday night and Saturday night on some IT projects.

The month is looking busy and I just hope I can get out and do some photography and not just sit at a computer all the time.

Apple 10.13.2 Installed and so far looking good

OS X – Ten Years Old

Well I have my desktop upgraded to the latest OS.  It was seamless and I had no issues.  My biggest worry my tablet works fine with the new drivers, as I had a lot of photographs to edit I was a little concerned.

We have Caroline’s MacBook Pro to upgrade, but my old laptop is officially stuck on 10.11.6 El Capitan.

MacOS 10.13

The new MacOS desktop OS has been out for a few months now and I have been waiting for my last two drivers to get updated so I can upgrade.  Well Wacom and x-rite finally missed there updates just before Christmas so finally I can upgrade.  I am running some final backups now and will let you know how it goes.

Happy New Year 2018 is upon us

2017 was again a light year for photography.  Some years I have hit as many as 12000 images in a year but I have been slowing down over the last few years, switching to using the Leica M8 and then the Leica M10 has helped.  In 2017 I shot 3295 images similar to 2016 were I shot 3281, significantly less then the machine gunning technique used when shooting with a modern SLR.

Another major impact on the rate of shots is the like of wildlife photography.  You can easily take a few hundred images trying to get the one killer shot.

I hope to do some more wildlife this year as well as more landscape and studio.