While I'm sure this is an admirable subject and may well produce a classic shot I'm afraid its not a subject that I feel happy about shooting so will be ducking out of this one.

Apologies,

Glyn

Where given the choice I always opt for Royal mail or Parcelforce.

Our normal postie is fantastic and will leave things in an agreed safe place. If for any reason anything can't be left then the sorting office is only a couple of miles away and the Parcel force depot only a mile away.

Although we are close to the City Link depot in Guildford they want us to collect items from Basingstoke and DHL wanted me to collect one item from Reading, 20 or so miles away

We seem to be in a difficult place to find for non Royal Mail carriers although this now seems to have improved, probably with the use of GPS. City link were the worst offenders leaving cards in a house several roads away so you often didn't even know it was out there. We had similar problems with Argos home delivery last year who left a present for my wife on someone else's doorstep which took ages to sort out.

I'm getting old & grumpy and have become very unforgiving so will go out of my way to avoid previously unreliable couriers even if it means paying a little more from a different supplier. Argos are still way out of favour

Glyn

Nothing really cleaver. The light bulb is blu-tacked to a bit of white card in which I had punched a couple of holes for a pair of wires that I soldered directly to the bulb contacts. I would love to say that I then used a dimmer but as I didn't have one of these it has three more various wattage bulbs, all found in the garage great store of junk, in series. I did start out with a 40W bulb but I managed to bang it and the filament broke and the only other clear bulbs I could find were 100W

There were various bits of insulating tape to make it all safe and it was protected by an RCD.

The only post processing was to straiten it up. I did contemplate having a go at tweaking the white balance but decided to leave it with its warmish glow.

Like a lot of my set-piece photos it took two attempts. One to discover the problems and a second to get the result. I certainly learnt how difficult it is to illuminate reflective surfaces and had forgotten how warm these bulbs get .

Glyn

Ok, I've just tried mine on a 30s exposure and it does not seem to make any noise while the mirror is up.

However is yours otherwise working fine?

Glyn

I think you are probably hearing the shake reduction system in action. If so then I don't think there is anything to worry about. To prove it one way or the other try turning the SR off (from the info screen) and see if it is then quite.

Glyn

Unusually we are getting a lot of early submissions. I guess this is to make sure you get in first with any particular item (or for Hefty items ).

I think this is great and should introduce some pre-judgement peer group review which, I believe, was one of the original objectives of this competition.

However I'm sure this is going to be a very difficult competition to judge

Glyn

Light Bulb

[IMG]http://i172.photobucket.com/albums/w20/GlynM/Misc/IMGP3799-c1-small.jpg[/IMG]

I thought I would put up a design icon that is probably in its final days.

K-7 with the Samsung equivalent of the 100mm DFA macro.
F18, 2.5 seconds & ISO 100

Taken on 07/02/2010

Glyn

Wow - Hefty's Trip 35 looks like a very nice early one. I was contemplating photographing mine and although it must be a lot newer ( 1978 ) it looks a lot more battered. I guess some more thought is needed

Glyn

The problem was not with the mouse but with the default settings on the Mac. The mouse arrived a few days before the Mac and I tried it on my windows netbook where it worked fine.

The Mac defaulted to assigning the primary button to both the left & right mouse buttons. I now believe that this is some historical attribute as some previous Apple mice only had one button. As a new-to-Mac user I spent the first day believing that MacOs only used a single mouse button. Now having setup the Mac to assign the RH button to the secondary button it all works fine.

Thanks though for you advice.

Glyn

Thanks, I did manage to work it out but it took a long search on Google

The other big problem I have is sharing printers (a Canon ip4300). I did not realise that to get to a shared windows printer I needed to use the Gutenprint driver. Even then while it would work for text documents printing a photo caused chaos. It only printed the 1st 1MB's worth and then stopped. After a while the printer timed out did a page eject and then it all started again. The job had vanished from the Mac printer queue but it was still in the PC queue where it kept reappearing when I deleted it. I had to cancel spooling on the PC to get it to stop.

Going the other way, having the shared printer on the Mac and printing from a PC, seems to work fine but I still need to get to the A3 printer on another PC.

In general the Mac seems to be US orientated. While I can set the editing dictionary to British English the stand-alone dictionary application only has a US dictionary. The Weather widget in the dashboard does not seem to know about UK places but I did find an alternative from the BBC.

While I have an Apple mouse it took a while to work out that I needed to configure it for the right click button. I had a go with Safari but I'm afraid I've gone back to Firefox simply because of the add-ons like adblock & Exif reader.

However I'm sort of getting there. Open office & Photoshop Elements seem to work fine.

Glyn