Image Scanning for Web Site

I have just finished scanning the last of the first batch of New Zealand pictures from the October/November trip last year. I have also completed the Hong Kong and Sydney images too. Now I just have to edit them all and send them over to be added to the site. Editing takes two ore three times as long as scanning so it will take a while to complete. I also found 14 images of Denmark (mostly Copenhagen) that were scanned but not edited and these have been added to the queue along with 9 images of the Kinderdijk windmills in Holland. I thought I had already done the Danish ones but on checking I was mistaken and they are not on the web. Looks like I will be even busier. Watch this space.

Sunny Peak District

After a rather damp weekend today has turned into a sunny, crisp winter day with blue sky and white fluffy clouds. We could have done with this Saturday afternoon when we walked in the rain over to the Goyt Valley and down into Whaley Bridge and the Shepherds Arms (just the 8 real ales on hand pump). The Jennings Snecklifter was in fine form.

Looks like today is a computer day. I have lots of scanning of my recent film negatives to do. Probably Hong Kong first.

I also updated the web site over the weekend to make the new lower priced and larger Silver Print range available and expanded the descriptions to try and make the changes obvious. Hope it worked!

New Computer

I finally had to admit defeat. The new PC that Tim from Whaley Bridge, had built for me was fast but still had the same faults that had caused me to buy a new pc in the first case - programs crashing and hanging for no good reason. Tim tried very hard but it appeared to be the configuration that I needed to run caused the problems. Lots of Adobe programs, as well as Microsoft Outlook and Excel, gave problems with the Windows 7 machine. They took it back 2 or 3 times to try and fix but each time it was no better. In frustration I asked Tim to take it back - permanently, which he did. I don't think it is anything Tim did that caused the problems since they were the same ones I had on the old pc and they spent hours changing hardware and reloading software all to no avail. Looks more like Microsoft and Adobe incompatibilities. That left me with my old problem-ridden pc for the last 3 weeks. I decided to approach the problem from the other side and went for a chat with Andy, the resident computer man at Bob Rigby Photographic, my closest and best pro photographic dealer just 5 miles away in Bollington. After an hour or two I was convinced I should switch to Mac computers from Windows. Just the £1400 later I'm busy trying to set it up. Jolly clear screen. Will continue to run the ailing pc for my Microsoft Office programs for the time being, although I could run on the Mac if need be.

Fortunately, Tim set up a network drive for me, a raid system for auto backups, and that means I can access the same files and images from the 2 computers. I just have Lightroom 3 image editing software to use at the moment. I had bought the Photoshop CS5 upgrade for the new windows pc but am now working my way through the Adobe system for swapping from one platform to another. Hope they sort it for me soon as I rely so much on Photoshop.

I loaded Vuescan to run my Nikon 9000 film scanner and will try running that soon. This was the software that I had to use on the new pc as Nikon no longer support new software, like Windows 7, or Mac for that matter.

Fingers crossed I'm back in action. In the meantime there are 14 new images on the web site of Hamburg and Stockholm, scanned about a month ago on the new pc.

Scanning Day

Today I scanned 50-odd images for Lake Light, my new book on the Lake District. Tomorrow should see the last scans completed (about 30 left to do). Then I need to crop and tweak them before dropping them on the web site. Once we have them all the job of selecting the final ones for the book can begin. We need about 90 images, depending on page layouts, and will have about 150 images to choose from. The new Lakes images should start to appear on my web site from next week. I will drop a few on this blog before then though.

Having some problems with my new Blackberry, which I received a week ago. I am unable to type text in new blog entries. It lets me type in the title and web link but nothing else. A lot of my blog entries are done on my Blackberry while travelling around so this is a serious problem for me. Will see what Vodafone say tomorrow.
Dave Butcher