High Key Flower Friday

Well hello everyone, apologies for my absence. A few things occurred in quick-ish succession - I had some computer issues (Thanks Microsoft !) which - whilst resulting in no loss of data (backups people, I can't recommend them enough !) - actually required significant downtime to rebuild working systems.

Given that I rely on these machines to make money - everything else has had to be a priority before photography.

On top of that - I've had to move eldest child out of University Halls / Home into her own (shared) flat for the remainder of her course - so that's taken a bit of logistical planning. And I've had to go to court to give evidence - at the very scenic Snaresbrook Crown Court (no cameras allowed unfortunately !) I also had a "technology free" weekend in the Forest of Dean - which, whilst completely photogenic in Autumn, was good to be "offline". [as well as being a necessity - mobile phone connection was non-existant !]

The computer downtime has given me pause - I'm a big fan / supporter of Open Source Software (I used to be a UNIX/Linux SysAdmin) - and Microsoft has let me down (again !) - so I've gone back to using Linux ( in this case Ubuntu 18.04 ), DarkTable, RawTherapee and GIMP for doing photographic things and The Sleuth Kit and Autopsy for doing work related things - I'm not 100% sure how to manage the need for writing documents currently - I'm thinking to use LibreOffice currently, but to finalise formatting in "real" Word on my Mac or in Office 365 online. There is a consideration to make use of LaTeX though to "auto-generate" as much as possible in reports, as there is a reasonable amount of cutting and pasting from tool outputs to documents, but I think that this may take some effort that I don't really have enough time for currently - ironically, because it will probably save me loads of time in the long run !

Anyway, that brings you all up to date with me :-)

This is a "new" camera being tested out - it's a Nikon 1 J2 - which in a lot of ways is a retrograde step being a 1" sensor 10MP, rather archaic bit of kit ...

However ...

It has been converted to see only UV light, so the opposite end of the spectrum from the IR camera that I have. I have yet to really work out what the implications of this are - and in fact, because Amazon managed to loose one lens adapter in transit, this is the first outing that it's had. I don't really know what to make of it yet to be honest - but keep watching this space ...