It made me forget my other problems

Well I was working on my Aperture book last night and I think I finally mastered white balance. I did this using the video tutorials on the Apple website – given that I did not have a panda to work with – but Apple showed me how to do it with a wedding dress – which worked just as well.

So I tried it – using the Loupe Tool – and what a marvellous thing this is – on some of the very blue photos we took in Finland last year on the Rib Breaking Expedition.

Now I think the snow was in fact very blue but there were some other difficulties. The first was that when I fell off my dog sled I fell on to my Canon 400D and crushed it beyond all recognition. It was no longer a functioning camera.

Another was that Gwenyth had a camera that was made in 1982 and was – to be frank – not worth a pinch of pelican poo. On a good day – in broad daylight – in perfect conditions – it took bad and out of focus photos.

Our back up camera was my Sony Handycam which I did not know how to use – having barely ever used it before – and not expecting to have to use it – and not being in any condition to use it.  So Cate used it – on the video setting – and I think made 92 one second video films of Lapland.

Our photos are certainly good enough for the MOMA but not good enough to be shown anywhere else.

But anyways – while I was pottering around with this – and dead pleased I was with mastering white balance - I thought I should clean out my Aperture Trash.

Now it is a cunning feature of Aperture that when you delete a photo it does not get completely deleted – it just goes into the Aperture trash bin.

This means that if you have made a mistake you can rescue it from there by telling Aperture to put it back.

Well I had 45,000 images in the trash and it had taken me a lot of time and effort to get them there – weeks in fact – because I had had to merge my almost identical iPhoto and Aperture libraries – each of about 35,000 images – and cull the duplicates – and take out the dead and get rid of the dross - and finally I was pretty sure I was ready.

It turned out to be not as easy as I had hoped it would be - and I am not sure why.

I was idly looking at the trash before emptying it and saw the ‘restore’ button and wondered – as you do – how it worked – so I highlighted a photo and clicked ‘restore’ – and nothing happened – so I clicked it again – and nothing happened – so I did what any rational person would do and just clicked it a few more times on the basis that if clicking doesn’t work the first few times you just keep clicking until it does.

Well it didn’t - so I eventually lost interest and then did what I wanted to do which was to empty the Aperture trash.

So I clicked that and nothing happened. But my little coloured wheelie thing appeared which meant that something was happening so I just went about my business.

A little while later I noticed that a window had popped up and it said ‘restoring photos’ – and the counter was up to 15,000 odd.

Holy Shit I thought – that is no good at all – if it restores all the photos from the trash bin I will have to delete them again – that will take weeks.

But I could not stop it.

There is no Ctrl+Alt+Del in Apple and the little coloured wheelie thing was stopping me from doing  a force quit of Aperture.

By this time my ‘restoring photos’ counter was up to 97,000 and I realised that it was going to restore all of my photos for every time I had clicked the mouse button. EVERY time I had clicked the mouse button. Spare me!

I tried turning the iMac off and back on - but it just kept restoring.

So I sat there watching in great horror – like a white mouse trapped in a glass case with python as the counter reached more than 500,000.

Finally after fours hours the little coloured wheelie thing stopped spinning and I could force quit Aperture.

Fearfully I then opened it to see how many photos I had.

23,000. It was an Apple trick to make me forget about all my other silly problems. It worked.

Of course my trash bin is still full – and I am not looking forward to having to deal with that. But it is better than having to delete 477,000 photos.

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.

Perhaps it was supposed to be snow?

La Tour Eiffel from the Pantheon

We covered quite a bit of ground during the recent visit and I saw some things I had never seen before - including the inside of the Pantheon and also the Musée national du Moyen Âge.

I am of course not the world’s most patient visitor to things like this - but I did my best.

It is hard not to notice that inside the Pantheon – which houses hordes of famous French dead people – that there are almost no dead women.

In fact the only one we could find was Madame Curie. Now I am no expert on French history but I am betting that there are a lot of women who should be there in place of some of the arch plonkers who have been entombed as Citizens of the Republic of days gone by. I mean most of them wrote a book or won a battle or became a senator. I am sure they all drank too much and caroused until dawn and fornicated abominably. 

I mean Nicolas will probably end up there. Spare me!

Anyways – I did finally see and at last understand – Foucault’s Pendulum. But I am still not ready for the book. 

Cate noticed – as I did last time – that there are more homeless people and beggars in Paris than in any other city we have visited in Europe. It must also – as I have mentioned previously – be the grubbiest city in Europe and have the most Graffiti artists per square metro. They should spend some tourist dollars on cleaners. 

There is barely a millimeter of Montmartre which is not covered with graffiti and the whole place is a shambles. There is not much you can do about this – Vienna is not much better. It is not as though much of it is artistic. Most of it is just vandalism.

But we were glad to escape from our hotel and I have promised to do better in future. It is not really that difficult and I have promised Cate that next time I will stop taking my stupid pills at least two days before making the booking.

On reflection I think the feathery effect on the wall in the stairwells was supposed to be snow. I still have no explanation for the crazy blood splatters in the elevator.