Rant – Customer Service Crunch
You’d think that in the current economic climate companies would be trying to hang on to their customers by, if nothing else, providing the service that people have paid for. Actually, now more than ever, I’d expect companies to be going that extra mile to retain existing customers and attract new ones. Unfortunately not so.
In a post last year, I explained how JPG’s poor customer service resulted in me not renewing my subscription. Instead I took out a 12 month subscription to LFI, mainly for the photography features rather than the Leica articles. Now though, LFI have gone the same way… The last two copies of LFI haven’t arrived but, worse than the JPG episode, I’ve had absolutely no response from LFI to enquiry emails. This is the real issue for me… At least JPG acknowledged their service was poor, even if they didn’t do anything about it.
There is a cancellation clause with LFI, which I’m about to invoke – if I can get them to answer the email that is…
OK. Rant over.
Now, I’ve got a perfect use for the money I’ll be saving. More on that to follow…
Photo Project Starter for 10
Well, it’s time to get this show on the road…
Since my last post, I have been researching project based photography and I will be writing about various aspects of this topic in the weeks to come. New material is also in the pipeline and I’ll be revealing more about that too. In the meantime here is a starter project for 10, a tester really for the software I am evaluating for publishing the projects as slideshows.
The subject is the 142 year old West Pier in Brighton, a cosmopolitan city on England’s south coast. The images come from my archives, some of which I’ve posted before. These shots were originally taken on an overcast day with flat lighting. Many, especially those of the pier in the sea, looked black and white when captured. For consistency, I converted all of the images to black and white.
The slideshow is short and sweet, 8 slides with captions telling a brief history of the pier. It plays automatically, to start just click anywhere on the title slide below. In future, I will experiment with various options to display buttons for the viewer to advance or pause the slideshow and reveal captions manually etc.
Edit: Watch version 2 of the slideshow with audio added here.
Back to the Future II
Well here I am again, posting after another break… After reflecting on 2008, for photography and the blog in the year to come I am turning the clocks back to when I started the site in January 2006. Then, I planned to concentrate on project based photography but, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into, it came to nothing.
Project based photography is something I have retained an interest in, but that’s not why I’m going in this direction. By making project based photography my underlying theme, certainly for 2009, I will be able to produce new material on a regular basis. A project with realistic time-scales is something I can still work on when I can’t shoot for whatever reason, as projects and subjects will need to be researched and individual shoots prepared for. Also, the very nature of the project will still require me to take pictures regularly.
So here is the plan (this isn’t about New Year Resolutions):
- Identify and complete three projects in 2009, each comprising ten images minimum
- Publish each project as a slideshow on the site
- Write a minimum of two posts per week on subjects such as the progress of projects, experiences and learning, along with the occasional non-project related photo shoot and images
Oh yes, the site has a new look (I know, yet again), which was a fate a compli. The author of the Wordpress template and child theme I switched to in September last year, Justin Tadlock, announced that these will no longer be supported. Therefore, in order to future proof the site (and as I will never be skilled in coding), I have moved to one of Justin’s latest templates and child themes. There will be tweaks and minor changes to the site layout over the coming months as Justin releases updates, but no more complete redesigns.
How to speed up your PC with Lightroom installed
The Adobe downloader, which loads automatically when the PC boots, dramatically affects the start up speed of Windows PCs. I thought Norton Antivirus was bad at eating up the RAM but Lightroom goes to a whole new level. How do I know this? Because I disabled the downloader and the difference is startling.
I noticed that my laptop was taking an age to start up, a very noticeable deterioration had occurred. As Lightroom 2.1 was the last program installed, it became the main suspect, and in particular the photo downloader. I went in search of an option to disable the Adobe downloader in the Lightroom Preferences only to find no such thing… However, a search around the net identified the offending part of Lightroom to be an executable file named apdproxy, along with three solutions:
- Go into Start Up under the System Configuration Utility and uncheck apdproxy – this upset my PC big time so I undid this change.
- Edit the registry – no go territory for me…
- Rename the file – sounds simple, and it was.
The apdproxy file is located at C:/Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop Lightroom *.*. I just renamed it to apdproxy.disabled and this stopped the Adobe photo downloader from starting when the PC boots.
Give it a try, you will notice the difference (I sound like a washing power commercial).
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