Windows Fanboy….

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Guthlac

I have been a fully paid up member of the Apple walled garden for nearly 12 years now. Before then I was a Windows fanboy. Perhaps the most ludicrous thing I did was drive forty miles to buy a copy of Windows 95 on the night it was released – god I’m getting old. Yes those were the days: knocking up small programs in Visual Basic to met my needs; slamming in new hardware into the inevitable Dell I owned at the time just to make things go a little faster – they rarely did. It was a crazy time and the thought of using a Mac left me feeling bemused. What would I do that when windows can do everything a Mac could do and was so much cheaper?

These memories came flooding back the other day when I saw that Windows 11 was being announced to muted fanfare, certainly compared to the whoop fest that is an Apple event. Then the down side of running Windows became apparent too. We who live in the walled garden are used to getting upgrades for free and that they will work on older iMacs for a number of years. We don’t have to worry if it is capable of running this driver or that software or whether it has a TPM2.0 chip. As I understand things few Windows users even know what a TPM2.0 chip is and so they will have to suddenly dive into the system specs of their machine to find out. I don’t miss that at all.

The last thing I want to do nowadays is working out whether I have a TPM2.0 – I just need to know which year my machine was made and usually Apple support their machines for at least 6 years usually a few years longer afterwards with security updates even if they can’t run the latest version of the Mac OS. Am I an Apple Fanboy now? Yes and No. Yes I have an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and iMac and yes I do watch the latest Apple Event. But no as I still see Apple for what it is – an unbelievably rich tech company that comes across very very smug. Do I regret my Damascene conversion? Not a bit of it. I enjoy my life in the garden – the flowers and beautiful and the scent of manure is just the slightest hint smug. And just to ram the point home I thought I would use some images from our recent trip to Hidcote Manor. Too obvious? Don’t care.

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Already Brushing off the Dust…

Posted on June 28, 2021 by Guthlac

So after several weeks I’ve got my digital brushes and pallet out and made a painting. It is great using a different side of what is left of my addled brain.

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Lost in Rabbit Holes…

Posted on June 25, 2021 by Guthlac

Over the past couple of weeks or so I have been disappearing down many rabbits holes in pursuit, not of a rabbit with an appointment to keep but rather trying to find out historical facts: Facts that date back to the 11th century and before.

It has become exhausting and so I am taking a breather and trying to exercise other parts of my brain.

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Sausages and Grapes….

Posted on June 21, 2021 by Guthlac

So will the Northern Ireland situation escalate out of control?  Will the streets be alive with the fires of red hot Ulstermen?  Or will the whole thing collapse into where it should always have been – petty bickering and political fudge?  My guess is very much the latter because in truth that is where it is in the best interest of everyone concerned:  Britain, the European Union (EU) and the Republic of Ireland will want it to be resolved and there is still plenty of wiggle room for all sides to claim some sort of victory.

Already many of the supermarket chains in Northern Ireland are adapting to the new situation and sourcing their produce within the island or Ireland and whilst this sending the fringe unionists mad it would seem that most or their fellow countrymen are shrugging their collective shoulders and getting on with life.

Perhaps the bigger problem for the EU to address will be the probable Britain Australia trade deal.   The worry for the EU will not be the farming deal (Quick tip – anything that has a 15 year lead time isn’t worth the paper it is written on as so many things can happen in 15 years so holding nations to a treaty signed 15 years previous is pointless.). No the real thing that should have the EU worrying is the likelihood that Australian wine will be able to be consumed within Britain without any tariffs .  Britain is the largest wine importer in the world and currently France and Italy have 63% of the import trade by value (£) and the Australians have only 13%. How long will that last once tariffs are removed between Australia and Britain and suddenly Australian wine is significantly cheaper?   Should this come about expect some very unhappy wine growers in France starting to kick up a fuss – just when President Macron is trying to get reelected.   Suddenly sausages seem so last year.

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France has Sunflowers….

Posted on June 8, 2021 by Guthlac

With the Tour de France only a few weeks away I thought this images was almost appropriate. Ok so the cyclists were hardly from the Tour de France (One day perhaps?) and the yellow flowers were buttercups rather than sunflowers but you get the idea.

I don’t think I’ve seen such a fantastic display of buttercups, as I write this I’m not entirely sure that is what the flowers are buttercups (although according to Wiki there are over 500 separate species so they probably are.)

One of the many false claims made about photography is that the camera never lies. This is true but photographers do and modern digital technology is a co conspirator in many such falsehoods. The poppy bed where I have captured the red poppies over the past few days would like to pretend that it is in the middle of the countryside and I have helped this misrepresentation.

In fact the bed is next to one of the main roads into the city of Leicester. Such is life.

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Erratum….

Posted on June 7, 2021 by Guthlac

In my previous post I claimed that I was hand holding a 600 mm lenses and it was crazy that I could do that. Well it turns out things just got a whole more crazy as I had set the sensor to APS-c or super 35 depending on your tastes. This means that the effective length of the lens was now c960 mm! I don’t think crazy covers that!

As to why the camera had been set onto to the APS-c setting I haven’t really got any idea other than human error! Not much of an excuse I know but I that is the truth.

Does this setting help? As with most things it is not that clear cut so I guess the answer is yes and no depending on what you are trying to achieve.

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Is it Me ?….

Posted on June 5, 2021 by Guthlac

I have to say I would make a really really bad wildlife photographer. I just don’t have application to really a go of it. I found this out a while ago and since then I haven’t really bothered. Of course time moves on and I find myself stuck in the house and garden for most of this year (Let’s be honest there are worse places to lockdown in so not too many tears!) which has meant my attention has been drawn back to the wildlife around me. Now if I had the application I would rig up a hide and set out to capture all the fauna as it passes through. Great plan – just not me.

Instead my approach has been to plonk down on one of the benches, have a cup of tea and see what happens. Once the tea has been drunk or my bum is numb I go in doors and get on with something else. Simple and no real hasle.

Which is why it has taken me so long to capture some half descent images of my resident Wren. He’s been buzzing around me over the past few days and I’ve never quite got the shot. Today he finally obliged and here are some of the results. He wasn’t the only bird to take a shine to this tree either.

There is nothing like a clear blue sky to enable the focusing system on the camera work at its most efficient – let alone the IBIS on the camera and the OSS on the lens – sharpe images from a 600mm handheld is frankly ridiculous!

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Strange Old Day….

Posted on June 3, 2021 by Guthlac

Most of the day I’ve been trying to capture the resident Wren singing and failing spectacularly! I know this sounds paranoid but I could swear they little bugger is doing it on purpose…in fact I write this I can hear him outside singing his heart out. One day Perhaps…One day!

I was watching YouTube video the other day where the presenter was discussing whether it was time for DSLR wildlife photographers to move to mirrorless cameras. It had a slightly surreal feel to it because it was an American discussing the best way forward in the same manor that I have seen other Americans discussing which is the best assault rifle to buy. I know I am being wholly unfair to the YouTuber because, to me, his advice was making a lot of sense but I felt he was downplaying the importance of good kit when trying to make wildlife photographs.

Most, if not all, of the photographs of birds in my garden this year where captured with a 200mm – 600m zoom on a Sony A7R mk 3. Great kit but the more you use it the more you realise that the camera has some drawbacks for this type of work, which can be shot around but drawbacks nonetheless. Would I be able to capture better photographs? Yes and no but there is always an arms race with wildlife gear which I don’t really like and this was one of the reasons why I stopped making these types of photographs several years ago. Fortunately I am older and wiser (?) now and accept what I can capture with the gear I’ve got. Still, all the gear in the world won’t get that blasted Wren just to land in the position I want when I’m there!

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There Goes the Neighbourhood….

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Guthlac

Perhaps they’re a happy family – it’s just that they’re so loud! Or perhaps they’re a right pain in the neck with the kids tuning on the adults. Either way you know it when a family of Starlings descend on your bird feeder.

Other birds are elbowed out of the way and they just have to look on as each member of the Starling family battle for dominance: Its loud and not very pretty but I guess that is just the way that Starlings do things.

However, the real noisy neighbour sits mostly hidden in the trees yet its song cuts through the cacophony that the Starlings kick up. As one the the smallest birds in the British garden the Wren proves that small packages can still pack a punch.

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Something Strange in the Neighbourhood….

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Guthlac

So there I was sitting in the garden on this glorious first day of summer waiting to see what birds might come along when I looked up and noticed something strange – a jet aircraft on a very unusual flight path. Normally, the planes that fly over head either are on a NW/SE heading or E/W heading. The military planes we get are usually USAF out of Mildenhall or Lakenheath – these are are either C17s or F18s. The RAF come from the south out of Brize Norton and are either transport planes or refueling aircraft. This one was different it was out of the SW and very high up – there was no noise at it flew over. What could it be? So there was nothing for it but to take a few shots and low and behold it was a U2. Now these fly out of Fairford which is the direction it was coming from. Goodness only knows where it was going and what its mission was but it was fascinating to see it silently fly by.

Other than that our resident field mouse is getting very cocky and hardly bothers that I am there whilst it raids the ground feeder….Sublime to the Ridiculous – you decide which is which.

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