The Randoms Folder
A little over a year ago I bought a laptop. One of those models with the symbol of a popular fruit with a bite taken out of it on the lid. You know what I'm talking about. My brother Dave, a former computer nerd turned disillusioned webmaster, hates the brand with a passion, while other geeks love them. I heard the graphics were good so without mentioning it to a disapproving Dave, I thought I'd try one for myself. Not a brand new model of course. We'd be well into four figures invested for one of those, but a number of companies are in the business of overhauling oldies and breathing new life into them. I should get a few more years out of mine, and now I've got used to it, I like it. And what's best of all is that it fits neatly into the camera bag. It arrived just in time to join us on last year's spring trip to Fuerteventura, and since then it's accompanied me on every adventure. Ideal for those evenings in the apartment if you're not a pair of late night party animals. And being able to store your raw files online and on a hard drive before the airport metal detectors get the chance to fog your SD cards is like a second and third layer of insurance against losing those hard won images you took under the distant sun.
Apart from taking it on holiday, the Macbook and fries (see what I did there?) are often whisked into action when Clive, or Sophie or Rita are reading the news, and telling me that the world is about to end. It's a lot easier than trying to rest a PC on your lap, that's for sure. At the moment, the relatively small hard drive contains the images from Egypt and Menorca before that. And in addition to those, there's the Randoms Folder. The one where I sometimes drag in a few files from outings with the camera that have never seen the light of day. I have far too many such folders in the archive, most of them from around the Cornish coast of course. Sometimes I'll have a look through a set where I can see there's no subfolder containing edits and wonder why I've never touched them. I don't suppose I'm alone in this, but I'm forever finding shots like this one and scratching my head. Was there something I didn't like about this group? Did I go out again the next day and shoot the mother of all sunsets? Or maybe I was preoccupied with other stuff.
I think it was the latter of these three scenarios that meant an afternoon at Cape Cornwall had slipped down the back of the sofa in October a couple of years ago. Maybe a hint of the first thrown into the mix as well. I've never quite hit it off with the place, probably because I always think I'm going to get a better shot from Porth Nanven on the other side of the Carn Gloose headland to the south. But the overriding factor was that two weeks earlier I'd just returned from a fortnight exploring Iceland, and if you've been there with your camera then you don't need me to tell you what that means. So despite some lovely soft October sunshine and a bristling Atlantic Ocean in front of me, the Cape Cornwall set lay ignored in the electronic dust. But unlike some untouched folders that I've more or less forgotten, I did at least keep reminding myself that there were probably some half decent images to be mined from this outing at the coast.
What had escaped my memory was exactly how good that golden hour was. And not long ago, just before setting off for Sharm el-Sheikh, a place where I suspected I wasn't going to come away from with a massive haul of images, I added a number of raw files to the Randoms Folder. Shots that might occupy a quiet evening hour in the editing suite now and again. A chance to include that trip to Cape Cornwall that had been so pointedly ignored up until now. And even though there are still a glut of exposures to work on from that outing, I'm glad this one has finally been seen the light of day.
The Randoms Folder
A little over a year ago I bought a laptop. One of those models with the symbol of a popular fruit with a bite taken out of it on the lid. You know what I'm talking about. My brother Dave, a former computer nerd turned disillusioned webmaster, hates the brand with a passion, while other geeks love them. I heard the graphics were good so without mentioning it to a disapproving Dave, I thought I'd try one for myself. Not a brand new model of course. We'd be well into four figures invested for one of those, but a number of companies are in the business of overhauling oldies and breathing new life into them. I should get a few more years out of mine, and now I've got used to it, I like it. And what's best of all is that it fits neatly into the camera bag. It arrived just in time to join us on last year's spring trip to Fuerteventura, and since then it's accompanied me on every adventure. Ideal for those evenings in the apartment if you're not a pair of late night party animals. And being able to store your raw files online and on a hard drive before the airport metal detectors get the chance to fog your SD cards is like a second and third layer of insurance against losing those hard won images you took under the distant sun.
Apart from taking it on holiday, the Macbook and fries (see what I did there?) are often whisked into action when Clive, or Sophie or Rita are reading the news, and telling me that the world is about to end. It's a lot easier than trying to rest a PC on your lap, that's for sure. At the moment, the relatively small hard drive contains the images from Egypt and Menorca before that. And in addition to those, there's the Randoms Folder. The one where I sometimes drag in a few files from outings with the camera that have never seen the light of day. I have far too many such folders in the archive, most of them from around the Cornish coast of course. Sometimes I'll have a look through a set where I can see there's no subfolder containing edits and wonder why I've never touched them. I don't suppose I'm alone in this, but I'm forever finding shots like this one and scratching my head. Was there something I didn't like about this group? Did I go out again the next day and shoot the mother of all sunsets? Or maybe I was preoccupied with other stuff.
I think it was the latter of these three scenarios that meant an afternoon at Cape Cornwall had slipped down the back of the sofa in October a couple of years ago. Maybe a hint of the first thrown into the mix as well. I've never quite hit it off with the place, probably because I always think I'm going to get a better shot from Porth Nanven on the other side of the Carn Gloose headland to the south. But the overriding factor was that two weeks earlier I'd just returned from a fortnight exploring Iceland, and if you've been there with your camera then you don't need me to tell you what that means. So despite some lovely soft October sunshine and a bristling Atlantic Ocean in front of me, the Cape Cornwall set lay ignored in the electronic dust. But unlike some untouched folders that I've more or less forgotten, I did at least keep reminding myself that there were probably some half decent images to be mined from this outing at the coast.
What had escaped my memory was exactly how good that golden hour was. And not long ago, just before setting off for Sharm el-Sheikh, a place where I suspected I wasn't going to come away from with a massive haul of images, I added a number of raw files to the Randoms Folder. Shots that might occupy a quiet evening hour in the editing suite now and again. A chance to include that trip to Cape Cornwall that had been so pointedly ignored up until now. And even though there are still a glut of exposures to work on from that outing, I'm glad this one has finally been seen the light of day.