I’ve been learning a number of hard lessons recently about photography and processing of images. The reasons are varied and boring so I won’t go into them but suffice to say, David has dragged me kicking and screaming into Lightroom as my processing vehicle.

Now you see, I HATE change. I hate technology and I hate learning new things on my PC but he persuaded me (and to be honest, rightly so) that I needed to change my processing methods urgently so I bit the bullet and bought Lightroom. I was doing my processing a bit like a lumbering dinosaur to be frank. He told me what to do in normal language, then told me several times over in words of one syllable and now I am like a sausage factory - the photo comes in, I do as I'm told, then it goes out again! After one massive blunder, I have learned another lesson and hope that my sausage factory approach will serve me well in future. You see I just don't have time to 'play' with it.

Now he was actually right to say that processing in Lightroom is easier than in Photoshop Elements 3, which was where I was doing my raw conversions previously, but it does have its drawbacks. I find the importation and exportation of files is cumbersome and takes so long it’s downright tedious……I must confess (with the attention span of a gnat, as I have) that there has been more than one occasion when I’ve just had to walk away from my PC because of sheer boredom while it chunters away doing 'stuff' on my behalf!

I’ve also done some cack exports and caused myself additional grief because of that – it’s my own fault, I just ‘did what I was told’ by David but didn’t think of the repercussions and ended up getting myself into the brown stuff with someone who I would have preferred not to hack off but by the time I realised what I was doing, I’d done it several times……doh!

Then he told me of someone who’d been accused by a stranger of stealing an image and selling it as his own work. The accused was luckily able to disprove the accusation by producing the original slide that the photo was scanned from. It did make me think that it’s a good idea to make changes to an image before posting it online so you can produce the original file if necessary. So this shot has been duly ‘doctored’ in a way that I’m not letting on about so if necessary (she says with her tongue firmly planted in her cheek) I can produce the original and there I go. (Yes, yes, I know, no idiot would want to knick this now would they?)

However, the lamp is incredibly beautiful, bought for me by someone who knows me almost better than I know myself, my buddy Claz! She carted it all the way home from Egypt in January especially for me. Thanks Claz. Brass, coloured glass, yep – as pretty as a pretty thing it is too.

It’s a lamp to illuminate the story of Lightroom and the photo thieves……does that sound like an Arabian Night? (Boom boom!)

Last year, I was setting fire to stuff - twisted firestarter!