I got a new PC this week. It’s not brand new – it’s my son’s old PC – but it’s still vastly more powerful than my old machine. It has the luxury of a solid-state drive being installed meaning it boots up fast and the applications I use are similarly speedy to get going. I swapped out the secondary storage drive for a larger capacity model, so I now have a lot of room to add more pictures too.

It’s not all smooth sailing though. I have my files backed up via a cloud service and it’s taken days to download all the files back onto the new machine. I’ve also had headaches getting Lightroom to play nicely with the catalog I exported from the old machine and, while I have my scanning software installed, as well as Negative Lab Pro, I’m having problems getting Epson Scan to work. A lot of people don’t seem to like Epson Scan very much, but I’ve always found it very effective when scanning B&W medium and large format negatives, so I would like to get it working if possible. I can fall back on Vuescan (which I use for scanning colour negatives and slide film anyway) and do the inversions in Negative Lab Pro, which I’ve tried and had good results, but it means getting used to a different workflow. I’m not sure if I can scan multiple negatives in a batch with Vuescan either (although I haven’t looked into it properly yet).

Anyway, hopefully the storm-clouds of getting everything configured to my needs will soon thin and I can enjoy the benefits of a faster PC.

A rare foray into digital pictures for the blog today, with the shot below coming from my Ricoh GR III. These sorts of clouds are very rare hereabouts, so I had to grab a picture when I saw them. I thought we might be in for a huge storm, but they just drifted by without much fuss in the end.

Ricoh GR III

Taken on 7 November 2023