Wednesday, June 14, 2017 at 3:29PM
A friend has emailed to say that she is having trouble with the photographs loading on my blog. She is using Firefox on a PC and I am wondering if anyone else is experiencing similar issues. If you are, would you please drop me an email or leave a comment below and I’ll see what I can do.
Thank you x
Friday, May 26, 2017 at 3:55PM
With “click and collect” a Friday morning shop can be quite interesting. There in the trolley with the weekend fruit and veg, bin liners and washing powder there’s a pack of hoover bags and a new camera.
I last wrote about cameras in February 2015. Regular readers might remember that the new camera almost came a cropper on Boracay beach when we were in the Philippines shortly afterwards, when I dropped it in the sand? Though it’s been mostly ok, there are still times when it crunches as it comes to life (presumably caused by a few grains of sand in the mechanism which opens the lens cover?) and there are still the irritating grains which appear inside the lens from time to time.
Can you see one in the top corner? Whilst it stays there, it’ll be fine, but it might just find its way to somewhere in the middle, when it’s a pain in the neck!
I’ve muttered about the build quality of cameras before, because usually it’s that which propels me into buying a replacement. It’s my own fault really – I don’t “treasure” such things, but throw them into my bag with everything else, cart them around the world without a case and generally use them – and love them – to bits. I’ve taken tens of thousands of photographs with this one and don’t really feel it owes me anything, but recently, the battery cover has begun to spring open of its own accord.
Then, when we were in St Petersburg, I was trying to review a couple of photos, using the round dial to navigate through them when that too came loose and wouldn’t work properly. Though neither was mission-critical, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was looking for a replacement.
And then my textile friends began chatting about cameras and I researched the current equivalent of this one. You’ll guess what happened next.
The new one, another Sony Cybershot is slightly smaller than the one it’s replacing, but is packed with the same features and a few new ones.
This one has a pop-up viewfinder, for those days when the sun makes it really tricky to see the screen. I have been known to take “blind” pictures, just guessing how they’ll work out, so although I probably won’t use the viewfinder that often, it’s good to have the choice.
It also has a tilt-out screen which will also go some way to resolving those issues too. Might be good when we do the old self timer shots as well?
It has inbuilt wifi which seems a more useful feature than I’ve found it to be so far – or maybe I’ve just not taken the time to really explore how best to utilise it? It’s so easy to connect be cable or remove the SD card, the wifi option hasn’t sold itself to me yet, particularly since I haven’t worked out a means of sending straight to Dropbox (as I can do on my phone, for example).
But yesterday, I was out taking a few photographs with my old camera, which as you can see, is still working beautifully.
I’d looked out over the valley, wondering what that blot on the landscape was – surely someone wasn’t starting to build there?
Huh. Using the super 30x zoom, I could see that someone has been fly tipping. Just what makes people do such things?
So I thought I’d take another look this afternoon and took this photograph with my new camera. Of course, the light is different today, but even so, I think the detail is sharper?
Still can’t see any fingerprints though
Anyway, having turned off the artificial “click” sound on the new one, there was just one last custom fitting required: The little bear charm on the wrist strap
Thursday, May 4, 2017 at 2:31PM
With one exception, perhaps, because printers are the devil’s work!
Do you remember this? I’d made a knock-off of a Moleskine Message following a few days in Stockholm and yesterday, whilst mulling over how to capture a few memories from St Petersburg, I decided to do something similar.
Except I’d forgotten how I’d done it and my blog post was a little sketchy on the detail.
I looked closely at those cut edges and knew they hadn’t been cut by hand but using my Silhouette, for sure. If that was the case, that cut file must be on my computer somewhere then, but it was proving elusive. Where might I have saved that file? Not in my ‘Silhouette Cut Files” folder, sadly.
I resorted to the search programs and files facility, but was unsure what to search for. After a few no files of that name were found reports, I hit gold! There it was, <moleskine envelope book.studio> in my photo folder for May 2013. In no time at all, I’d cut out the cover and six pages. Love my Silhouette!
My next step was to create a few photo collages in Picasa. At this stage, I didn’t know how many, but simply found a few themes to work on and ended up with nine. I opened them in Photoshop and resized them all so they’d fit in the book.
It was about now I realised that printing them wasn’t going to be easy. I took another close look at the Stockholm book and knew I’d printed directly onto the pages and not simply glued in photo collage pages. Hmm. Now, how did I do that?
I created a file in Photoshop with the size of the double-page spread and placed a piece of double sided tape at one end. I set up a print file with the collage sheet in the right place, lightly adhered the cut page on the sheet of paper and fed the whole thing through the printer.
The first one worked fine. The second one didn’t. Never mind. Try again.
I managed to print three or four pages, doing my best to work out where each collage page would fit in the finished book (not easy!) sometimes needing to turn a page to get it in the right orientation.
And then I tried to print on the reverse of an already-printed sheet. The double sided tape pulled away part of the print. Better do that one again.
And then the printer began to add a stripe all on its own. It does things like that from time to time, just to annoy me, I think.
I decided it was time for tea and switched everything off and thought I’d had enough for one day.
I’m not quite sure how I achieved the next step and can only think it was the inspiration fairy who visited me in my sleep! When I went downstairs to my studio the following morning, the obvious answer to my challenge was staring me in the face.
Print and cut using my Silhouette!
In no time at all, I’d imported each page of photographs into the cut file I’d already designed and sent it to our pesky printer which purred and printed the pages perfectly. After printing, I fed the sheet of card through the Silhouette for cutting and, amazing machine that it is, achieved a perfectly accurate result.
I love it when everything comes together like that, when the seamless process works perfectly and I can get a great workflow going.
But it was time for the intermediate technology. A sharp pencil and ruler was the best way to measure and mark the centre fold of the little book. I clipped all the pages together and, before folding, I switched on my sewing machine and took a deep breath.
I threaded my machine with heavy thread, fitted a jeans needle and lowered the speed. Slowly, carefully, my lovely machine stitched a beautifully sewn spine. I wanted the needle to pierce the paper from the right side in, which meant I was working “blind”.
I hardly dare turn it over and look at where the line of stitching had worked out on the other side. (At this stage, I hadn’t quite noticed that I’d sewn the pages into the book cover the wrong way round!)
Look! (I couldn’t quite believe it how neat that sewing turned out)
I carefully scored the foldlines to complete the assembly of the book but as I did, I realised my mistake. Would it matter? I opened and closed it, flicked through and showed it to my hero, who agreed with me.
It mattered. It just didn’t “work” with the flap going the wrong way.
So I treated that one as a practice effort and started over again. I’d saved all the files and it took no time at all to print and cut them all out once more.
I stitched the spine more confidently, for after all, I’d had practice! When it came to that part though, I double checked it was the right way up, needless to say.
The book was soon finished and ready to have all the bits of ephemera stuck inside.
Yes, of course the Turkish Map Fold features!
Second time around went so much more quickly. Not only had I worked out the process, I’d managed to avoid the pitfalls too.
I thought I’d better write a few more details down in my blog this time as well, just so that when I next want to make a little book, I have something to refer to! After all, I’ve got to keep all those machines working. I even feel a little warmer about the printer, which worked perfectly with the Silhouette software, leaving me to wonder if it’s the Adobe Photoshop software which presents the problem.
But I’ll leave that one to my Hero. I know my limits
craft, fun, journals, photos, travelling Saturday, February 11, 2017 at 11:48AM
By the computer in our music room, there’s a basket of stuff. Not just any old stuff, you understand, but treasured stuff.
Memories.
You know how much I treasure those.
This morning, I finished transferring all the photographs from our most recent adventure to a USB stick, tied it to a few bits and pieces (our suite card from the cruise, an hotel key card, the top from a bottle of Nicaraguan beer and a bag of Guatemalan worry dolls) and took it upstairs to the basket, where I balanced it carefully on the top.
As I did, I thought of the cartoon I shared in the previous blog post, of the last hippo joining a small and already overcrowded boat, because as I picked the basket up, a couple of things fell off the carefully balanced arrangement.
So I tipped out the whole basketful and as I replaced it all, I took another look though. There are little rings and bundles of all kinds of stuff. Some, like this one, are crammed full of tickets and cards, happy memories of lovely days in Ireland in this case.
Some simply have a label and a few ribbons.
This one doesn’t even have a label, but I know immediately where it came from. The tell tale signs of a Japanese trip are there on the single common feature of every one of those bundles. A USB stick of photos. A little stick that fits neatly into the PC right beside it to provide a couple of hours entertainment in the form of a slide show. If I’m home alone, or at a loose end, it’s fun to pull a random ribbon from the basket, plug it in and to be transported to some fun times again. It’s a rather more passive way of enjoying the stories than looking through journals and it’s a much more efficient way of storing all those photographs than the boxes (and boxes) of prints we keep meaning to go through and sort out.
It used to be that a 2mB stick would suffice. Then, I began to find that I needed a bit more capacity and began to buy 8mB sticks for the purpose. This time, I could only squeeze everything onto a 16mB stick by omitting a few things here and there. I think I’d better buy 32mB sticks next time.
And a bigger basket.
Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 10:14PM
to post a photograph of that magnificent sky the other evening, I failed to notice the other detail in the sky.
Because up there, just in the shot is another little feature. Well, not so little actually, because today I discovered it’s Mars.
Ooooo.
I don’t think I’ve ever linked to The Sun before, but on this occasion, it seems an apt reference to make.
