You would think that after ten months of doing this, the eleventh month would be a breeze. It wasn’t.

As winter approaches and the days get shorter, suddenly it is dark by the time I finish work, so I either have to shoot in the dark or race out for half hour during my break. Some adjustment is required.

The darkness…

When you’ve grown accustomed to shooting trees and water for much of the year, not having daylight to rely on poses a few challenges. You have to go looking for light where you can find it –for me that means dealing with the urban world again. Oh, joy.

Daylight this month has been reserved almost solely for weekends and early finishes, but sometimes things worked out.

Forcing yourself to shoot every day does at least make you think on your feet. There were of course days where I pretty much phoned it in and shot whatever was near my desk, but I’m quite pleased with this month’s haul.

What else has been going on…

Windows 11

Oh yes, Windows 11 came out. This is where I really struggle with the technology of today.

I really enjoy building my own PCs. I like to pick out the parts myself, pick out the case and spend time optimising airflow and all that fun stuff, but if you want a system that is supported by the vast majority of software, you have two options –Windows or to buy a Mac. Linux is great, but you very often roll the dice with a vast number of oddly named and invariably clunky applications –GIMP, QTPSGUI and a few others that spring to mind. Darktable is very good though.

However, I drifted away from Linux after too many failed updates that left me scrabbling around in the command line to get the window manager to load again. So, Windows or a Mac then.

Microsoft has been slowly and steadily turning Windows into an advertising platform for a while now. It makes quite a bit of money from Bing and the advertisements that appear on it. With Windows 11 there’s a whole panel of advertising that I find...irksome. You may think it harks back to the fun widgets you’d see on Vista, but no, it’s just ads. You get the feeling that every move you make is being sold to advertisers and it creeps me out.

Bearing in mind a retail Windows license is still anywhere from £100 to £200 depending on whether or not you want drive encryption, having to deal with ads on your desktop as well as app icons for things you haven’t bought from the Microsoft Store, I just can’t pretend that’s ok. So, I spent this month moving my Lightroom catalogue back over to my MacBook. Windows 11 also seems to lock up randomly. I’d give it a miss for now…

After December

I’m still thinking about what to do after this year ends. I’m still toying with the idea of a whole year of black & white, but then I’d also like a year of not having to shoot every day.

As I did this year, chances are I’ll make a spur of the moment decision on 1st January and then see where it takes me. So, on with December then…