Rib update

Our Courtyard 15 November

You haven’t asked about my ribs for a while so I thought I would give you a status report – because it is nearly a year since I broke five of the little blighters in Lapland – by falling off a dog sled onto my Canon 400D camera. 

Well they are much, much better – but not completely mended. I still get some pain and discomfort and they are uncomfortable at night when I roll over in bed – not that this is easy to do anyway when you have cats perched on top of you.

The reason I was reminded of my ribs was that on my last day in Paris I got a doozey of a cold - the worst part of which is a gasping, rasping, hacking, wheezing cough – which when performed in public makes people move away very quickly indeed.

This still gives my ribs a twinge – but had I had it last January would have finished me off completely. For the benefit of those who have never broken five ribs - I have described some of the ramifications here.

But I am sure it will be better soon. Molly got me some cold tablets in Paris and I am taking these assiduously.  Not that I think cold tables do much, but I do like to avoid – as much as possible – the leakage that attends these types of events – and cold tables tend to mitigate these. 

So there is not much one can do when one is in a complete fug so last night I turned to learning how to use Aperture which is the Apple equivalent of Photoshop.

Now I will never be any good as a photographer – have no pretensions or expectations to be - and in fact take all my photos on the automatic setting so as to avoid the fiddling.  

Such adjustments as I do make I do with the Aperture software and I like playing around with special effects. You will have noticed that I like saturated colours.

But I have barely scratched the surface and have never even opened the book – which I bought a year ago – until recently – when I loaded the software and photo library – which one needs to do the lessons.

It was then that I discovered that part of the library - the ‘San Diego Zoo’ was missing. This is unfortunate because the first few lessons about white balance and exposure need the pandas and Saki monkeys and bears and other critters in the zoo.

Well – they would not give me a book and CD without a critical photo library would they? So it must be there somewhere. I will just have to find it.

Well I examined that CD within an inch of its life and I could not find the San Diego Zoo file. I did find and downloaded a lot of other photos that were not downloaded in the initial foray.

I also – somehow – managed to hide my main Aperture Library. Yes this was the library I just spent weeks building and culling from 35,000 images to 23,000 images and putting into projects, folders and albums.

This caused a temporary (but wild and heart thumping) panic until I discovered that I had moved it to another folder.

So I am never going to be much good at correcting the white balance on pandas – but we are through the zoo stage and I think I have everything else I need.