Weekend!
Listening to: Genesis - Foxtrot (1972) - Featuring the classic lineup of Gabriel, Collins, Rutherford, Hackett and Banks, and also the simply stunning Supper's Ready, this is probably one of their finest albums.
A quiet day at work, so time for a bit of blog housekeeping. Elsewhere, some ideas for finding my photography spark again, and an invitation for a boys weekend from an unexpected source.
I decided the other day that I wanted to change the template of the blog around. The old format, though nice, lacked a but of warmth. All cold, hard fonts. Looked a bit like stereo instructions. So instead I fired up one of Robert Birming's templates, added a few things to it and hey presto, a new start. Friday Fresh etc. This one looks a little better, and is pretty much default, aside from changing the background colour to plain white.
I'm an affa fidget when it comes to customising things. One of the reasons I ditched my iPhone for Android - aside from the ridiculous price hike from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone 8 - was the ability to customise your home screen. I now have a nice OneNote Nord-something-or-other-i've-no-idea which looks somewhat mega, thanks to the Niagara launcher.
I mean, I do still change this from time to time, mainly the wallpaper and the fonts (which is pretty much all you can change - Ed.) whenever I get bored of the look 'n feel. I hear you can now customise iPhones as well, but as I'd rather stick a fork in my leg than go back to any Apple product, I'm good for now.
In photography news, I woke up this morning thinking that what my photography really needs is more limits, and more constraints. To quote from a Burnistoun sketch, the great artists innovate within the restrictions laid out for them, so I've decided to switch my Nikon Zf from RAW to JPG, shooting only in black and white, in landscape and in 16:9 format. I've dialed in a sort of Robert Adams/Henry Wessel black and white recipe, so let's see where this takes me.
Just as I was closing off the day at work, my brother rang me to see if I would be interested in going for a long weekend with him somewhere, a sort of brother-bonding thing. I was quite taken aback to be honest. My brother is four years older than me and we've lived largely separate lives. When we lived in Scotland we lived 69 miles from each other, plus he left home when I was 13, so we never really got to grow up together, if you know what I mean. He moved back to The Netherlands not so long ago but even though the physical distance is closer, we still don't see each other that often. And it's not that we don't get along, we do, really, we have a lot of fun, but yeah, we just grew up apart. So, to be asked is quite a thing for me, and I'm really looking forward to it. We just need to pick a location now. Somewhere for me to photograph, and some history for him.
Anyone have any suggestions?