I thought I’d post this because I couldn’t find any instructions anywhere that worked.

I had a blank screen on my Acer Aspire 7551. The power LED lit up, but the screen stayed black and no hard disk activity was detectable. I did some research online and soon learned that this was a BIOS problem common to Acer laptops. I found plenty of instructions about creating a Crisis Disk on a bootable USB stick, but none of them worked for me.

I downloaded Crisis Disk and the latest BIOS (1.18 at the time of writing). I replaced BIOS.WPH in the Crisis Disk folder with 1.18 and renamed it to BIOS.WPH. I ran wincris.exe by right-clicking and running as administrator. I got the prompt that the removable disk had been created, so I removed it, put it back in and was dismayed to find it empty.

So, I edited CRISDISK.BAT to the right drive letter (it’s set to A: by default) and ran that as an administrator. It complained about not being able to do a quick format, so it did a long one. Once that was done, I got a prompt that minidos.sys was missing and that was that. I tried changing minidos.sys to MINIDOS.SYS. I tried it on Windows 7 x64, Windows 8 x64 and Windows XP x86. Nothing worked.

But here’s what DID work. I ran wincris.exe as administrator, ejected the disk at the completed prompt and put it back in. It was still empty. But this time I copied and pasted the entire contents of the CRISDISK directory onto the USB stick. I popped it in to the Aspire 7551, held down Fn+Esc and BOOM. The USB stick started flashing! I’d been working at this for hours, so I began to get quite excited! The blue LED on the power button did NOT flash, but the USB carried on blinking away, so I left it for a while and was suddently greeted by the BIOS screen! Yippee!

Hope this will help someone else out there. I’ll host the files myself for the sake of completeness. If this works for you, I’d be delighted if you’d leave me a comment to let me know.

On my 21st birthday my mum bought me a nice Parker fountain pen. I don’t remember what it was or what happened to it. But I do recall that I found it scratchy and never used it much. As an object though, I still really liked it.

I’ve always cared about the pens I use. I favoured Parker ballpoint pens at university and used fine refills, but I also had some with medium. I am the sort of person who would spend fifteen minutes looking for one of those pens to sign a cheque when there are Bic and Staedtler ballpoints all over the house! When my grandfather died and we were going through his things, I found a Parker ballpoint in every suit jacket in his wardrobe. I still use these and have a quite a sentimental attachment to them.

Pen Addict Podcast

I started listening to the Pen Addict podcast around episode 50. I’ve no idea why it took me so long to get to it!

Now, it took me a year of listening to MacBreak Weekly before I bought my first Mac. It took me two episodes of the Pen Addict to get my first fountain pen, a TWSBI Diamond 580 with a fine nib from Cult Pens.

Not long after that, I bought a Pilot Capless decimo in violet on eBay and two bottles of ink from Cult Pens: bilberry and grape. Turns out that I think the ink colour should match the pen!

I have Pilot G2 pens and Zebra Sarasa gel pens. I don’t recall where I heard about them, but I like them. And, of course, it didn’t take many minutes of Pen Addict Podcast before I heard these pens mentioned.

It’s a strange thing. Pens have always been important to me, but I’ve never really gone deep. It’s strange because I have an obsessive nature and tend to go deep on whatever I’m into, sometimes to the exclusion of other things, which is why I’ve learned over the years to avoid things that are likely to capture my attention too fully (TV shows, video games being the obvious things I avoid).

It’s also strange because I don’t actually write that much! In the past couple of weeks, I’ve become a good pen friend with my friend in Luxembourg, whom I miss terribly and don’t keep in touch with nearly enough. Needless to say, she’s really pleased!

Shop

I have a small Post Office in a rural location in Scotland. I’ve been selling stationery since I started here five years ago. Gel pens sell reasonably well, but I’ve never really learned about them other than which ones sell and which ones don’t. So I’ve gone back to episode 1 of the Pen Addict podcast and plan to start stocking more pens and paper, including Moleskine notebooks.

I’ve always loved the staff picks in Waterstone’s book shop, particularly the handwritten reviews displayed on the shelves. So I’ve come up with the idea of handwriting testimonials of the different pens on brown luggage tags in the shop.

Whether this will work or not remains to be seen, but it’s worth a try and it’ll be fun for me to sell something that actually interests me. Experience tells me that things I like don’t sell well and things I don’t like do, but maybe it’ll be different where stationery is concerned!

I don’t suppose there will be too many people writing the insider scoop on Post Office Ltd’s pen supplies on their blogs. I’m here to fill that gap! ‘Finally,’ I hear you all cry. Yes, I’m a whistle-blower and I’m proud! Not quite on the same scale as Russell Crowe in that tobacco movie, but still, it’s a risky business!

I’m subpostmaster in a rural Post Office. I’ve been doing that for just over five years and I’m here to share the pen news I’ve encountered in those five years.

Our masters at Post Office Ltd supply us with pens to use in Post Offices across the land. When I started in 2008, we had the POSP15.

All of the pens have black ink labelled as ‘security ink,’ in other words, it doesn’t fade. This is particularly important for motor vehicle licences, or tax discs are they’re more commonly known. The interesting thing about the POSP15 is that it has a red cap on the end. The urban myth about this is that it stops people from stealing them, because they think the pens have red ink in them. It didn’t work on my Post Office, that’s all I can tell you. These pens wrote well once you got them going, but all too often I’d pick one up and get nothing until I scribbled on a scrap bit of paper to get the ink flowing. It was annoying enough that, when I was cranky, I’d throw them straight in the bin after one failure. Well, I wasn’t paying for them and they got one chance only if I was in that kind of mood.

For some reason, these pens were discontinued and replaced by the truly awful SP15B 091445.

These felt cheap and nasty, probably because that’s precisely what they were. The refill moves around inside the pen, and when you lift the pen off the paper, the nib stays on the paper. Yes, really! It was really annoying. I gave these pens about a week before I switched to a Stabilo Write-4-all, which worked really well for tax discs. I’d see cars around the village with 11-month-old tax discs that I’d issued and they looked like I’d written them up that day. So the SP15Bs went out onto the customer side for customers to steal at their leisure. Which they did.

Turns out the ink in the SP15Bs fades! Ha! So much for their ‘security ink’! Last week we got our replacements: the Truline 20SPEN1. What a super name, eh?

These pens are chunkier and feel like a return to the POSP15. They have a cap that has a nice ‘click’ when posted and they write quite smoothly. But now I’m out the closet as a pen addict, I shall not be using the cheap, Chinese 20SPEN1s. Next time I order from Cult Pens, I plan on adding a few pens, including the Sakura Pigma Micron, which I’m sure will make a perfect pen for writing tax discs. We issue quite a lot of them, so I might as well make the experience as good as it can be, right?!

I’m not loving the Retro51 Tornado. Let’s say I’m liking it. I wrote a Moleskine Postal Note yesterday and the Signo DX 0.38mm was a better fit for that particular paper. I’m not so fond of the tapered barrel of the Retro51 either. It’s a good pen for Post Office business and I do quite a lot of that, so it will definitely get used.

I just got a replacement nib unit for my Pilot Capless Decimo. It came with a medium nib and I just wasn’t using it. Bear in mind that I’m a n00b where fountain pens are concerned and the only way of figuring out what I like in my rural island location is to buy stuff to try.

I got the Decimo new from Japan on eBay and for a very good price, so I didn’t mind quite so much forking out for a replacement nib unit from Cult Pens. Not saying I didn’t mind completely. It certainly wasn’t chump change.

But OMG, as the kids say, what a difference!

Now I’m going to have to figure out use cases for the Capless and TWSBI 580 because it seems that I love them both equally. But one’s retractable and one’s got a screw-off cap, so I’m guessing that the Capless will be my shirt-pocket daily carry and the TWSBI will be used for longer-form, i.e. letter writing. I used to write a lot of letters back in my army days, but haven’t done it for years. It’s nice to be back doing that again and my pen friend is overjoyed to be receiving such personal, hand-written ramblings!

I’ve been writing for pretty much most of the afternoon today and having a blast with my fountain pens. I’ve come up with the perfect reason to use them: learning my lines! It’s helping me a great deal to learn my lines for an upcoming performance, and giving me a sound reason to use my pens!

I’ve been using:

• Pilot Décimo, F
• TWSBI Diamond 580 EF
• Kaweco AL Sport, EF
• Kaweco Ice Sport, BB
• Kaweco Classic Sport, 1.5

By far my favourite pen is still the TWSBI with the Décimo a close second. The TWSBI is favourite because of the nib and the ink it puts down, but the Décimo is favourite because it’s just so darned comfortable.

The Kaweco AL Sport with the EF nib is not as wet as the Décimo or TWSBI, which is not to say that I don’t like it. It’s weird, but they’ve become like children in the sense that you I love them all in different ways! And now I’m carrying five fountain pens to work every day. Madness. But I haven’t enjoyed anything this much ever since I had to quit BMX freestyle.

Yours is my favourite podcast app for iOS. Since the iOS7 update, I have a problem. It is this:

I use bluetooth headphones, namely Plantronics BB903+. I keep then on for most of the day and listen to podcasts all the time. When my wife comes through to the kitchen and I’ve got my hands in the washbasin doing dishes, I tilt my head to hit the pause button on my headphones with my shoulder. Job done. Sometimes I have to stop listening to podcasts, whey I’m at work or eating dinner (I’m not that rude!). I might look at Twitter when I’m at work. With iOS6, it didn’t much matter. I’d put the headphones back on, hit the play button and it would start with the last thing that was playing, i.e. my podcasts playlist. Since iOS7, this no longer happens. When I open Downcast, it is no longer showing me my unplayed playlist, but has gone to a different screen. It got to the pain point today where I bought Instacast and tried underscore David Smith’s new app too. I like neither of them as much as I like Downcast, but if you don’t fix the problem, I’ll have to give up on it and switch to something else.

Could someone please take a look at this?

Thank you Downcast. You used to rock and I hope you can rock once again!

On episode 23 of the Pen Addict podcast Brad and Myke talked about giving pens as gifts. I tweeted about it at the time:

#PenAddict 23: Pens as gifts. The Pilot VP or Decimo for me is the perfect choice. @imyke and @dowdyism http://t.co/HdnCfCkTjL

— Cams Campbell (@camuel) May 28, 2013

Well, not only did my wife get me a fountain pen for our 11th wedding anniversary this week, I also got her one. And d’you know what? It was a disaster.

She got me a Waterman Perspective fountain pen in silver with a steel nib, and I got her a Faber Castell Ambition in brushed steel. 11 years is the steel anniversary, see? Now it all makes sense!

My wife has never really understood my love of pens. I thought that it was just because she didn’t have one of her own and that if I bought her a nice one, she’d grow to appreciate it. WRONG! If I’m honest about it, I suppose I just want her to learn to appreciate one of my hobbies, just as she did with me and the horses, but I don’t think I will ever understand how anyone can be interested in such beasts!

It’s not that great an idea for someone who doesn’t know about pens to buy one for someone who does. I have a list. And of course, I’d love to be surprised by a gift that isn’t on that list, but not if it’s something that doesn’t suit my taste. The Waterman Perspective is just such a pen. So both pens are being returned and a lesson has been learned.

And I shall listen to my wife when she exclaims about my latest shiny new pen: ‘it’s just a pen!’. There’s a message in that exclamation!

Rather than reading Catch 22 or the photography book I paid £20-odd quid for this morning to read on the boat, I thought I’d write something that was inspired by Write for your Life episode 101. Creation’s better for the soul than consumption, right? In that episode, host Iain Broome was talking about how he can’t read when he’s tired and can’t stay awake in bed for longer than three minutes. Rather than talk about how I deal with that (answer: audiobooks!), I’m going to talk about what I’ve referred to as my number one passion since I was 21, playing guitar.

When my daughter was born in 2004, I was already obsessed with guitar. I had by then bought and sold a few high-end guitars, was moderator on a couple of guitar forums (remember them?) and even ran one of my own. How good my day was was determined by how much practice time I had managed to fit in that day. We lived in Luxembourg then and it’s a very family oriented country. Parental rights of employees are very generous and so I found myself doing the modern dad thing, working part time or from home. So I was home and able to play a lot while Freya slept or watched CBeebies or Baby Einstein.

In October 2004 I made my first trip to Atlanta to meet a bunch of online friends IRL and it was utterly fantastic. (2007 jam photos) I went every year for the next five years after that, as well as a two-week trip to Steve Kaufman’s Acoustic Kamp in Tennessee. These were good times. Something that stood out to me in both places was the large number of 50-something dads with high-end guitars who were just getting back into playing after a long hiatus while their kids were growing up. I remember thinking to myself that I would never let that happen to me. I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. I had a kid and was playing more than ever, right? My son was born in 2006 and, same deal – play, travel, buy, sell, chat, moderate. Guitars were everything.

We left Luxembourg and moved to Arran in 2008 to take on a new business and that’s when things began to change. I started experiencing a lot of what Iain talks about in episode 10. I was too tired at the end of the day to play anything and, for the first six months, I don’t think I played for more than half an hour. But the passion began to come back slowly. I recall one evening sitting by the coal fire, getting out the guitar and playing some of my trickiest material. Much to my surprise, my playing was just about as good as ever, undoubtedly caused by the fact that I was hearing my guitar for the first time in months and in such a romantic and calming atmosphere. It never sounded so sweet.

So, problem solved? Well, kind of. My playing went from strength to strength. I got asked into a bluegrass band and had some of the best musical experiences I’d ever had, playing local village halls and opening for bigger acts like Phil Cunningham & Aly Bain and Lunasa. The Atlanta jams had stopped happening since I moved to Arran, which, selfishly, was kind of good for me as there’s no way I’d have been able to go anyway. But good fortune shone my way and the host jam, Little Brother, decided to have another one in the October when I was to turn 40. So, I gigged hard that summer, playing local hotels three nights a week and putting all the earnings into my plane ticket. And what jam it was! It was one of the best experiences of my life, to have made such good friends and get to see them all again in one of my favourite places for my birthday. And my playing then was probably as good as it’s ever been.

After that I was feeling burned out. I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and the meds were making me tired and depressed. I came off the strong pain killers that had been propping me up for so long and the guitar playing started to suffer. When I was asked about the following summer’s playing schedule, I opted out. If I wasn’t in bed for 10 o’clock, the tiredness became overwhelming and gigging though the week would mean getting home at midnight or later.

Last year I had a few fairly high profile gigs and they didn’t go great. Well, in actual fact they were probably fine, but my fear prevented me from enjoying them. Family life was okay because I was now home most evenings and getting to see the kids and I was happiest staying home at nights. I’ve hardly played my guitar at all this year. I’ve felt the passion stirring when I’m out listening to music on my headphones and walking the dogs, but I’ve been getting increasingly bitter about being in middle age and not having created anything. I was listening to Fatboy Slim of all people, loving it and wondering why the hell I’d never created anything like that. I’m a talented musician, but in terms of creativity, I suck. So I began to look more towards my second hobby, photography. Like music, it is also all consuming, at least for me anyway. But it has the advantage of making me feel that I’m creating something.

And now I’m at a crossroads again. I have family and work commitments, as well as a podcast subscription list that gives me no breathing space at all during the day. My reading list is also long, but I’m struggling to get to any of that now. But why the crossroads? Well, my good friend and fellow musician that I played in the bluegrass band with has asked me to join him in a new band. I didn’t think I wanted it, but as soon as he suggested it, I got a little glow in my tummy. This guy is one of the best fiddle players I’ve ever heard and, without rhetoric, this could be the chance of a lifetime for me. I know I can commit, and stick to it. Ask my masonic brethren. My worry is the fear. I’m feeling all right just now, but I’ve felt all right before and had the fear come back. I think what I’ll have to do is get back on top of my life again. Cutting back on the podcasts would help (not yours of course Iain!). If only Myke bloody Hurley would stop putting out so much good content! I think that getting on and staying on top will keep the fear at bay. I know that because it has worked before. And better attendance of AA meetings will help too. I reached eight years last month and still need the meetings to keep the darkness away.

Thinking back to what prompted this post, I think what I’ll have to do is start scheduling things in my life again. I did it before for a few months and it was surprisingly effective. I’ll make a weekly schedule of repeating tasks and take care of things in bite-sized chunks. So, rather than reading none of Catch 22 each day because I want a decent sized chunk of time to enjoy it, I’ll allow myself to tick the box after having read only two pages. Rather than practising a song until it’s perfect, I’ll practice for 10 minutes then check the box. Last time I did this, the 10 minutes often turned into 30 or more, but the fact that 10 minutes allowed me to tick the box made me far more likely to pick it up in the first place. What can I say? I’m a box ticker. I think the advice that Iain put into his Room 101 of ‘just write’ or ‘bums on seats’ in this case can work. Schedule 10 minutes of writing time, be sure to do it at a time of day when you know you’re not going to be sleepy (tea time’s the worst for me) and write for 10 minutes. It might become 30 minutes or more, and it might not.

This is my fifth Christmas as a postmaster. The pay’s not great, but it’s a rewarding job in many ways. December is our busiest time, of course, and we do probably three months’ work in one month. So with the running of the business and the multiple thousands of my own money I’ve invested, it’s nice to get the thanks I deserve for all my hard work – 25 1st class stamps. Well, it could be worse, it could be 2nd class!

Three popular Reality TV Shows with an Online Betting System

Before, placing a bet on a team or an individual player was only done in sports matches. However, today, it would seem that reality TV shows now have a place in the betting industry as well.

Betting on reality TV contests are very much like wagering on sports events. Contestants who are fan favourites have the highest odds but with small payouts, while the “dark horses” will always have the highest pot. Through online bookers, people can now place bets and make money by predicting who will place first by the end of the show. Here are three of the most popular TV shows with an online betting platform:

X-Factor

X-Factor is one of the most popular reality TV shows in the US and UK. As such, it is only rational that a betting system for it was made. This year’s X-Factor, former prison officer Sam Bailey was the fan favourite and the odds were in her favour. In a news report by Betfair‘s Jack Houghton, Luke Friend was her strongest opposition with Nicholas McDonald out of the lead. In the end, it was Sam who won the completion and became the X-Factor 2013 champion.

The Voice

Last year, The Voice UK’s betting market was surprised when Leanne Mitchell bagged the first prize. Not a lot really expected Leanne to win, with the odds against her of only 7/1 during the final leg of the competition. Her toughest competitors during that time were Tyler James and Vince Kidd but due to her unexpected, spectacular performance, she was able to turn the tide and became The Voice’s champion last year.

Eurovision Song Contest

Eurovision is a huge contest in the UK region, being participated by the active member countries of the European Broadcasting Union. It is one of the longest-running shows in the world and one of the most watched non-sporting events. With viewers that range around 600 million internationally, it only makes sense that a betting platform was dedicated to it. This year, Denmark became the favourite of betting fans, followed by Norway, which came through second in the finals.

Ultimately, the online betting business on music programs will keep getting bigger in the future for two reasons. First, it offers an alternative to sports betting where people can not only enjoy TV shows as is but also make a little money from them. In addition, it also does well to the TV programs by advertising them freely online through news articles and betting results.

The Arran Ceilidh Band is coming along very nicely indeed. I switched from standard tuning to DADGAD a month or so ago and it’s made a world of difference to the accompaniment.

We’ve been having two practises a week and we’re pretty much ready to start. We have our own website:

http://arranceilidhband.com/

You can also follow us on Twitter @arranceilidh and find us on Facebook

For bookings, the contact info is all on the Ceilidh Band site.

I’ve got a solo gig this coming Saturday 25 January at the Douglas Hotel in Brodick, my first solo in gig in over a year.

I generally practice through my PA at home when I’ve got a gig, so that I can get used to the differences of playing amplified. I have a D-Tar Wavelength pick-up in my SCGC Vintage Artist and I couple that with a D-Tar MamaBear preamp and I had never really got my tone dialled until after a recording session a month or so ago, when the sound at the recording session was so bad that I got home and was determined to figure it out or give up on it.

I’ve got the pickup set as:

• 16: Neutral – No Input Compensation
• 14: Gypsy Jazz
• Blend – 11 o’clock, so one hour into wet

It’s really the input selection that makes the biggest difference and that’s where I’d been going wrong all these years!

So, now to prepare for the gig. I managed to squeeze into a corner of the living room with the MamaBear by my side, an SM57 mic and the XLR cables going into my passive Soundcraft mixer. I’ve got one XLR running from the mixer, behind the sofa to an AER AcoustiCube60 and I can leave it set up all week without anything really being in the way. Result!

The tone I’m getting is very good indeed! Both fingerstyle and strumming work well, and the vocals sound great. Even my wife has commented on the good playing, which, I explained, is a direct result of having good sound! If it sounds good, I play well; if I’m constantly worrying about the tone, as a normally do, the playing suffers.

I’m going to see what kind of tone I can get with my Model A tonight. It has a PUTW 54 and UST wired in stereo and I’ve always had trouble getting the balance right. I find that there are too many variables with that set up so, although I prefer that guitar, I find myself using the VA for gigs because of the simple, single-source pickup. I’m now reviewing pickups for my next guitar and reckon I’m going to go with a K&K. I’ve never tried one and they get great write-ups.

It’s been an amazing weekend for photography. I’m working through Zack Arias’s Onelight v2.0 videos on lighting and have ordered a lightstand, umbrella, cold shoe adapter and umbrella bracket. These videos are really great and I’m gonna start putting my SB800 flash to use. It’s exciting.

On Saturday morning, I caught a post on G+ with a link to an episode of The Grid entitled The Power of the Unsolicited Critique, where they spoke about photographer Regina Pagles and how she felt crushed by an unsolicited critique of her work. It was an interesting episode of a show I’d never seen before and I really enjoyed it, but the best part of it was that I discovered Regina Pagles photography through it. Her work is amazing, but not only that; she also takes time to share her thought processes and technical data. It’s really something.

Regina Pagles

Regina Pagles

So I was shooting with Hamish on Saturday, grabbing a few shots and figuring out some things with my SB800 flash and getting some pretty decent results, even if I do say so myself!

I was posting some shots from that shoot on Flickr this morning and clicked on Hamish’s tag to get all my images of him, but Flickr now defaults to showing Everyone’s pictures with that tag and I got a page full of Hamish shots where two photographers’ pictures really stood out. And they are amazing! I’ve spent the last half hour looking through their photostreams and it’s made me feel that fluttery feeling inside of disovering art that’s evocative, moving and inpsiring.

Michelle Dupont

Michelle Dupont (mistybliss)

Michelle is doing a 365 of portraits of what I assume is her daughter and I’m inspired to do the same thing when my present 365 reaches its conclusion in July (still can’t believe I’ve managed to keep it going this long!). I shall look at Michelle’s and Paul McGee’s and Regina Pagles’ photostreams for inspiration and hope to grow even more as a photographer!

Paul McGee

Paul McGee

What really stands out for me with Paul’s work is his use of lens flare. I would love to learn how to do this, so I’m really pleased that Paul doesn’t strip out his EXIF data! His street shots in Glasgow are AMAZING!

I finished my one-year photograph project entitled On This Day in History today. The idea came to me when I couldn’t find any way in Lightroom of viewing all pictures taken on the same date but in different years.

Tags

I have a Lightroom catalog going back to 2002, when I got my first digital camera. I rely heavily on Lightroom and have done since it first came out. Amongst all my tags, the most useful ones have been people, places and events, and I’ve used Lightroom to create date folders within year folders. So, how did I do my On This Day tagging? I created a top-level folder into which I put 12 more folders, one for each month of the year. Inside each month folder, I created tags for ddmm, so 10 May would be 1005.

Processing

Now that I had my tagging system set up, I spent some time each day going through my photos for that day’s date in each year, picking out my favourite images for that date and tagging them with the ddmm tag. I processed the pictures with Lightroom mostly, but for the more recent shots taken on my Nikon, sometimes I’d dip into some of the Nik plugins such as Silver Efex or Color Efex. I then gave them a title and wrote a short description and added them to the map in Lightroom, a feature of the software that I’ve really come to enjoy. And finally I set them up for publishing to Flickr with Jeffrey Friedl’s fantastic Export to Flickr plugin.

As I got adept at the process, it was something I really got to look forward to each day and I’d usually have a few days set up in advance. I’d start each day by going straight to the computer and publishing that day’s pictures.

My photos had been sitting on my computer for years, but they had become like the printed photos in shoeboxes, or albums on shelves; rarely did I look at them. So the project was fantastic on an emotional level and now I have a year-long archive of my favourite photos processed, dated, tagged, mapped and, perhaps most importably as all, published. I can now go into my Flickr stream or Lightroom and select pictures all taken on the same date across the years. Since I started the project, I’ve been tagging all my photos with that day’s ddmm tag at the point of import so they’re all done going forward.

AppleTV

I have my AppleTV set up to show my Flickr stream as a screen saver so we have yet another way to enjoy our old pictures and it’s one that the whole family can enjoy. My son (b. 2006) and daughter (b. 2004) both really enjoy seeing pictures of themselves coming up at all ages!

DayOne

Since I was getting so much value out of this project, I also did the same with my journal entries in DayOne. They go back somewhat further than my photos though. My first diary entry is in 1985!

My OTD album is here on Flickr: On This Day in History

When I applied to take on Brodick Post Office is 2007, I had envisaged a job where I would be a fundamental part of the community and would be rewarded for all my hard work for one of the most trusted institutions in the land. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Since the closure program, Post Office Ltd has been trying to ‘persuade’ independent sub postmasters to change to a new model. Bear in mind that many of us independents have invested a huge amount of money into the business. The package they were offering might have suited a few sub post offices, but for me, the offer was insulting. They had not considered my branch’s location AT ALL, and came up with the offer based on numbers in a computer.

The long and short of it was that they were offering me less money for longer hours. Of course they were spinning it seven ways from Sunday, but that’s what it boils down to. Naturally, I said ‘no thank you’. So now they’re attempting death by stealth.

2013 Pay Cut

2014 Pay Cut

I don’t know for how much longer I can hold out. It’s despicable the way we’re being treated for investing our own savings into a British Institution. And don’t even get me started on the antiquated systems, poor products and bad customer service!

Taking on this business when I did, at the age of 36, was one of the worst decisions of my life.

Thankfully I’ve got great staff and some great customers.

DEDPXL Assignments

I discovered Zack Arias of DEDPXL in rather a roundabout way. I was driving to work and saw a friend of mine sitting on a wall in Lamlash with his camera. This is the dude that sold me his D300. I wondered what he was doing and I got the answer when I saw a picture he’d posted to Flickr with the weird tag #DEDPXL.

‘Huh?’ I thought to myself. So I did a bit of digging and soon found my way to Zack’s site where the first assignment video was posted. Always on the lookout for inspiration for my #365, I decided to submit a few pictures for the first assignment. I looked some more into what DEDPXL was all about and pre-ordered the OneLight 2.0 lighting videos. I’ve now been through that course and am the proud owner of a new lightstand and 150cm umbrella and I’m loving it! His teaching methods are exemplary and, for the first time since buying my SB800 around 10 years ago, I have an idea of how to use it! Those videos were incredibly helpful!

Critique

At the end of the first assignment, Zack sat down with his wife Meg and recorded a video critique of the submissions and it was super helpful. It’s incredible to think that a pro with chops like Zack’s would give his time like that at no charge. I was in! Now, I’m not sure what his methods are for choosing which pictures to critique, but none of mine was picked. ‘Fair enough,’ I thought. There are probably thousands of submissions!

Assignment 2

The second assigment was entitled Repetitive Shape: Form / Pattern / Rhythm and I got into it quite early. I submitted a total of six shots, two or three of which I should’ve taken back out the pool because I didn’t really think they were that good, but, stupidly, I left them in. And this time, Zack DID pick one of my shots. Which one? Yep, you guessed it. One of the ones I wish I’d removed.

I watched the long-form video and got a C with some good feedback, but in the short-form video I got a D with the comment that it was ‘kinda boring and sucks’. I felt crushed. I knew the feeling would pass, but I’d had the worst day and had to go and play a gig that night and was kicking myself for not waiting to watch the critique. The long-form critique was actually valuable, and I knew Zack’s comments were on the money, but the shorter critique where I got a D made me sad and angry and all I could think of were the words ‘boring’ and ‘sucks’. Such is human nature I suppose: ten good reviews and one bad one and guess which one you’ll dwell on?

These were my three favourites of my submissions:

Sandbags

I like the sky and the sun flare, but especially the sandbags and the story that they represent. I’m not sure about the stones in the foreground.

Hamilton Terrace

I like the triangles that the roofs make and the way the chimneys go into the triangle of sky. I wasn’t sure about the crop, whether to crop the right-hand edge off and, now that I’m looking at it again, I think I should probably have done that. I remember playing around with the crop before I posted it, so I must’ve chosen not to do that for some reason.

Haymarket Station

I grabbed this one while I was waiting on a train and it’s one of my favourite shots of my #365. I’m not sure how I could’ve made this better, so critique would be useful.

My Lesson

So, what have I learned? Well, firstly, I need to be far more judicious in selecting my submissions. I guess four selects is about right for an assignment, but I have to be sure that they’re keepers. That log truck should never have been in there.

Also, learn to take the criticism. I know it can be a bitter pill to swallow, but I also know that I’m getting incredible value just from the inspiration that I get from the group to get out there and think about my photography. All it’s costing me is time and I would do well to think on that when I consider just how much I’m getting out of it.

Assignment 3

The third assignment, Shadows, has just been set, so it’s time to get back on the horse and think my way into making some great shots that I can be proud of! If I’m proud of them and get a bad grade, well, we’ll see how that goes if it comes to that. But it won’t. Will it?

Back on episode 65 of On Taking Pictures, hosts Bill Wadman and Jeffery Saddoris set a challenge to take ‘an intentional photograph that you feel good about every day’. I took up the challenge and ran with it until it became my project 365. I took my last shot of the project on 24 July, and now that some time has passed, I thought I would put together some thoughts on how it was and what I got from it.

Confidence

The biggest thing I got was probably the most surprising thing, and that is confidence. I’m an introvert by nature, and I’m further along the autistic spectrum than your average bear. For as long as I can remember, I’ve never been able to look people in the eye when engaging with them, but taking pictures has changed that, and it’s amazing! I’ve spent a lot of time over the year processing people’s eyes in photos, and I now find myself making the conscious effort to shift my gaze from mouth to eyes when talking to people, and so I get to see the amazing depth and variety of expression that eyes show about a person.

I’ve also developed the confidence to ask people if it would be okay to take their picture. Not all the time, but certainly more than I used to be able to.

Manual mode

I spent the whole project shooting with my camera in manual mode. I now have a reasonably good foundation of how the trinity of shutter speed, aperture and ISO works and what each of them does not only for exposure, but for a desired look. Before I did the project, I would often forget about ISO!

Interestingly, I never used exposure compensation. It just never occurred to me and, to be honest, I’m still not sure when or why it would be useful when I’ve got the trinity to set my exposure.

And now, having completed the project, I find myself able to get pretty close to the correct exposure before taking my first shot! One of my favourite shots was one that I surprised myself with, because it was the only shot I took that day and I nailed it! I think it was the first and only time of the project that I took only one shot for the whole day and was done.

Flash

I bought a Nikon external flash (SB800) a long time ago, but never really figured out how to use it. I only ever used it in TTL and didn’t like the results, so it pretty much stayed in its case. Then I discovered Zack Arias. It was just before he published the 2.0 of his OneLight lighting videos, so I pre-ordered it to get the discount and watched it twice. It’s one of the most useful tutorials of any kind that I’ve ever seen. Zack’s teaching method is exemplary and it wasn’t long before I was online ordering a light stand and umbrella. I’ve no doubt that I will watch his tutorials again, but I do most definitely need to practice a lot more with the umbrella to figure out placement, flash power, etc. The results I’ve had since learning how to use it properly are night and day.

Selects

Selecting the right image for the shot of the day was one of the most difficult things, but it was something I got better at as time went on. My wife and daughter were very helpful with this!

Processing

It was Lightroom that really got me into photography, which I realise is kind of backward, but its organisation tools really gel with how my mind works. When 1.0 was released, I went through Chris Orwig’s Lynda.com training and I’ve stayed with Lightroom ever since. I’ve installed presets from Trey Ratcliff and Nicolesy and used them a lot to learn Lightroom’s power tools (how about that tone curve?!).

Then there’s Nik. After Google bought them, the price came way down and, after watching Jason Odell’s training for Silver Efex Pro 2.0 , I paid for the suite. Silver Efex is amazing, and once you get your head round the control points, it becomes incredibly powerful. And then there’s Color Efex Pro. There was quite a steep learning curve with that, but the results are outstanding!

As the project progressed, I’d find myself thinking of a Color Efex recipe and having it in mind as I took my shots, and a few times I got some images that were pretty flat unprocessed, but remarkable when my vision became reality. It was one of the most gratifying things about the whole project.

Flickr

I’ve had a pro account for Flickr for a while, but never really used it much. Once I started the project, I became quite a heavy user and got into groups in quite a big way. I started following people whose pictures I liked and that became a huge inspiration. One of the first people I found was Kevin Schmidt; he was kind enough to share some of his LR presets with me and I found his work inspirational.

The JF export to Flickr](http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/flickr) plugin made posting and managing the album so much easier, using a smart album in LR and posting to Flickr and Facebook.

I’d never had a picture explored on Flickr, but that finally happened for me with my shot of a rainbow over Holy Isle. It was a pano – stitched in Photoshop CC, which I finally bought a license for. I was at work and got some emails from Flickr to say that my picture had been made a favourite. Then a few more, and then a whole flood of them! It was exhilarating! To be fair, it was one of my best shots from the whole project, but still, I felt rather proud. And then, bizarrely, another two of my pictures got Explored within a week of the first.

Landscapes and Portraits; seascapes and cargo ships

I never really considered myself a landscape photographer, but it soon became apparent that I was wasting the gorgeous part of the world where I live if I didn’t get some landscapes and seascapes, so I started shooting from the beach near work in Brodick in the mornings and got some of the shots I’m most proud of.

I also started shooting cargo ships as they sat in Brodick Bay, looking up their shipping info and posting them into groups on Flickr, and it’s something that I started to get really interested in. It gave me a great opportunity to use my 70-400mm VR lens and I got some pretty good results.

Time management

Time management was one of the biggest things to deal with. It wasn’t so much the shooting as the selecting and editing, especially at the beginning when I had to learn what the various presets and plugins did. I never let myself get more than four or five days behind, because I knew that if did, it could be the breaking of the project. I would ideally have liked to be spending the year reading photography books and blogs, doing tutorials and learning how to use the tools properly, but, to be honest, I needed the time for getting the pictures edited and posted. That in itself was a fantastic learning opportunity and I got some really nice edits, even if I couldn’t replicate them!

I’ve learned a little bit about a lot of things so I now have a basic general foundation and it’s really down to practice now going forward.

I thought that the winter months would have been harder than the summer, but June and July were the hardest months because I was so busy with playing music and doing things with the family.

Creativity

My first passion is for music. I play acoustic guitar in different bands and do solo gigs too. I’ve travelled the world attending workshops and seminars and I play in a variety of styles. But I’ve never actually created anything musically and that has always frustrated me. I could learn other people’s arrangements of tunes, play their songs and accompany traditional music on fiddles and pipes and whistles, but it never really scratched that itch. In fact, I found it so frustrating that, for a while, I lost my enthusiasm for it.

Taking pictures really scratched that itch for me and I think that that’s why I feel so proud at having got to the end. It’s one of the most creative things I’ve ever done and the results are there for all to see.

Future

It felt weird the first day that I didn’t take a picture after the end of the project, and then I felt pretty flat. I guess I should’ve expected that, because that’s how I used to feel at the end of my last exam at uni as well.

And now that some time has passed, I find myself missing taking pictures, but, at the same time, it’s a bit of a relief because I’m still extremely busy and am not sure how I would have managed to keep it going into August this year.

Thanks

A HUGE thank you to Bill and Jeffery for not only setting the challenge, but for all they do on the show to keep it real. Seriously guys, you’ve pushed me into doing something of which I am extremely proud!

The G+ group has been amazing for support and feedback, and the weekly challenges have given me ideas when the creative soil was fallow.

Thanks to Zack Arias for putting out that lighting tutorial and getting the DEDPXL assignments going. They’ve been great for giving me ideas and thickening my skin a little.

Thanks to Lorraine and Freya for helping with the selects.

Thanks to Kirsty for being a patient model while I moved around my umbrella and climbed up on ladders to get the shot.

See full 365 album on Flickr here: Project 365 on Flickr

Kim Walker SJ in Adirondack/maple

In 2005 I played John Thomas’s Nick Walker at Little Brother’s jam in Georgia. It took all of two minutes before I knew I would have to put my name down on Kim’s list. In November 2013 Kim finally tracked me down to tell me that my slot had come.

In February 2015, I booked flights from Glasgow to Boston via London to go and pick the guitar up, and that has turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. Flying into the USA always makes me excited, I guess because every time I’ve been, it has been to meet friends and play music and, yes, a few times, to pick up a guitar. I took the Amtrak down to Connecticut and it was an amazing journey, filled with excitement as I looked out over snowscapes and coastline, listening to Dark Side of the Moon on my headphones.

Kim picked me up and we drove to his place and, after 10 years of waiting, I got to try my Adi/maple SJ. Being tired after the journey, I didn’t get to appreciate fully just how amazing this guitar was, but I could feel its solid build quality and lightness straight away.

After a great night’s sleep and a fantastic breakfast with Kim and Diana, I brought the guitar up to the living room and played it for a solid two hours. It was amazing. I worked on an arrangement of Auld Lang Syne in DADGAD for new year this year and had been worrying that I’d forget my arrangement, so I put the Walker into DADGAD and had the most amazing time figuring it out and getting it back under my fingers.

John Thomas came round to Kim’s for lunch and we had a great time catching up before heading to John’s for the night. There I got to play that Nick Walker guitar that started the whole thing off once again, as well as John’s own SJ from the same batch of maple as mine, and his 1/3 century.

I’m still feeling the joy of that trip and it brings a wee tear to my eye when I consider what amazing friends I’ve made through a common love of acoustic guitars and music. It reduces us all to our bare souls and then we can join together without the social ball-and-chains of rank and fortune and play music together. It’s the most incredible thing.

Audio sample

Ye Banks & Braes as part of the Arran Ceilidh Band CD.

Photos — Copyright Kim Walker

My Flickr Gallery of the trip