Mountain Lion problems and Dry Flowers

Back at work after the summer holidays and everything back in the same routine except that we have moved office from Europoort into the centre of Rotterdam.  To be honest I was not looking forward to the move, but actually it is really great, my travel time is about an hour less each day, and I don't face a major traffic jam every afternoon trying to get home.

The new office has a minimalist style -  everything completely in white, walls, desks, everything.
Its already nicknamed the apple store.

It has an surprisingly calming effect on everyone who works there - next Saturday is the open day for families plus a boat trip on the river Maas in the City and Port of Rotterdam.

After the holiday I updated my mac computer to the new Mountain Lion operating system - what a complete disaster - far from the usual Apple promise that "it just works" - I cannot keep one of our computers on the wireless network for more than about 15 minutes, this seems to be a widespread problem but no-one yet has discovered how to fix it - in the end I gave up and bought a wire and went back to the old way of just plugging it into the network.  At least now the computer stays connected but it does not really feel like progress.

On the next stage of my photo course - last week making photographs using depth of field effects (in and out of focus)  Technically not difficult but they introduce the idea of trying to pre-visualise what you wanted the picture to look like when it was finished.

This really makes you think about the photograph in a different way entirely

This is the full colour version
















But I think I prefer this black and white version

















This weeks exercise involved taking many photographs of a piece of grey card. Sounds a bit dull but really helps to understand what the camera is doing. All modern cameras start from the point that if you mixed together all the colours in your photographs then you would end up with a particular grey colour - in fact it adjust all the settings in your camera to ensure this is true.

So what you may think - just point and shoot - probably true but the next stage takes you into the so called zone system - originally invented by one of the greatest photographers of all time -
Ansel Adams - take a look at his photos here    www.anseladams.org

and here he is with his not so compact camera !