The Best Laid Plans

Ever notice how life gets in the way of what you had planned?
I had the best intentions. I try to write something new and interesting every day and most of the time I do find something to write about, but there are those days…no, I don’t believe in writer’s block. Writing like art is a profession and you have to do it when the client wants it not when you are driven by white hot passion.
So why haven’t I written anything for the blog since January

Remember those best intentions, I had’em but life got seriously in the way.
First I had a pal who was having trouble with his computer, seems a program he needed wouldn’t load and there was no real reason. I got asked to take a look at it which I was happy to do and that shot my intentions all to Grand Prairie or a place much like that which is extremely warm and not likely to show up on the Travel Channel.
Computer programs are written by pointy heads who think in binary, that’s ones and zeros. It takes a great eye and a very disciplined mind to write computer programming and that sort of skill does not leave a lot of room for experiencing what life is like in the world of computer users. That’s why it is so hard to get computers to do what you want them to do instead of what they want to do. The guys who write this stuff don’t actually use it so they write it any way they want.
Many years ago about the time we first crawled out of the primordial sea and stood upright the Long Suffering worked in computer land, a place a whole lot like Oz and knew a bunch of pointy heads who could do most anything with computer code.
One of the pointy heads was so good he could write in Hex, (Hexadecimal code), as fast as he could punch keys. He was assigned to write a machine language for the switches and he did so. Now the Cappo de tutti capi thought he’d write it in binary so that just any ole person could get in and read it and fix it and maintain it so as soon as the writing was done the Cappo demoted and reassigned the guy to Outer Mongolia. That lasted until the switch failed and the guys went in with their picks and shovels to fix it and discovered that the underlying code was hex and written so that it fed binary directly to the machine and no one could figured out how it was done.
That’s right, back from Outer Mongolia he came to deal with the broken code and he stayed out of Outer Mongolia for as long as he remained with the company and so far as I know when he left they had to bring in some new pointy head to re-write the code in normal binary cause nobody could ever figure out how the direct write from Hex worked.
These are the guys who write the programs for your computer so no one should ever feel bad that they can’t get the thing to work like it should.
But back to my pal, he had the program, legally licensed and ready to load except the genius who built the new machine decided that it didn’t really need a CD drive. I mean CD’s are obsolete, right? So even with the original disc there was no way to load the beastie.
My pal tried loading it on a USB drive, which should have worked, but it wouldn’t run. He tried two different drives and still couldn’t get it to work so he could either let me have a go or run around in circles screaming “The sky is Falling.”
No the sky isn’t which is how I got involved. (I started the process all over again and had pretty much the same results as my guy.) The program was there, it should have run, but it didn’t. I did notice that the USB drive was not happy with the ports and the OS, so I reasoned with my non-pointy head head, try another USB drive, which I did and it worked.
So here’s one little bit of computer stuff you should know, if it doesn’t work it probably isn’t your fault. Try another device and see if that will fix the problem.
Oh yes, one more thing, with a program you can’t just copy it from one computer to another, the Master Boot Record and the Registry won’t recognize it and it won’t run. It has to be installed. So when you try to copy it, make sure you copy the Install file, also called the Install.exe. If you have that on the USB drive and the drive is recognized by your computer, run it from there. Click on the Install.exe and let it do its thing.
Yeah it would make more sense to just be able to copy it, but that’s not the way pointy headed people think and MicroGreedy would be hysterical about you stealing one of their protected programs.
After all that you’d think I could rest on my laurels, but no, some one wanted pictures of their art taken and prepped for entry at a specified DPI.
Now if you’ve been listening you know what half of the answer is, download and install Faststone Image Viewer. This nifty little hummer will do the resize double quick and takes it IQ of a plum and about twenty seconds.

But of course there are always problems.
How to get the picture in the first place. This would be a lot easier if ya’ll would just stop all that painting and carving and sculpting and take photographs cause they are digital files and that’s what you need so if you are doing photography it makes the whole thing so much easier. But I guess you don’t want to do that cause they don’t allow photographs in Expressions West and if you’ve spent all that time learning how to paint it doesn’t make much sense to switch to photography, so you’ll stick with what you know and need a photograph to send in when something like Expressions West comes along.
There are three major problems lying in wait for taking a picture of existing art work. They are lighting, distortion and color.
Lighting is fairly simple to solve, it takes some, okay it takes a lot and that makes for another problem, glare.

The painting to be photographed needs a bunch of light to let the film if you are still using stone-aged camera equipment or the CCH if you have gone digital to record an image. Best way absolutely, a big window close to an easel so that you can get natural light. Be aware of the shadow if the light is behind you and make sure it doesn’t fall on your picture. No natural light, two at least separate but equal light sources which are easy to move. Set up the easel and put a mirror on it and then place your lights, move back to where you are going to position the camera and take a look. If there is a hot spot your lights are too close and not wide enough.
What you want is to make an X with the light so that the picture is at the exact point where the light crosses the other light. Keep moving the lights around until you get soft side light without a hot spot. It just takes practice and you can do that right
The next problem is distortion. This one is harder. In a perfect world you will have a big easel and can set it six feet or so away from the camera with the painting flat or leaning forward just a hair. Put the camera on a tripod or use your string tripod to get the best, stable platform you can. Don’t get in too close. Use your zoom and shoot from six or more feet away.

What happens if you don’t have an easel? You are going to get some distortion at the edges. This is not a bad thing and it won’t ruin you picture. Crop the picture as close as you can with respect to the prospectus. This will probably solve the problem. If not don’t worry too much, the jury will be looking at the image not the frame or the mat.

The last one is a pain. Printers do not produce the colors you see on the monitor. There is a whole network of programs that the image has to pass through to get printed and try as you might it is not going to look exactly the same as it does on the screen.

Best advice, tune the image on the screen, the jury isn’t going to print the image out and you won’t either unless you want to get a Giclee made. That is why the guys who print Giclees charge by the square centimeter.

Trying to make something for someone else is one of the most thankless jobs you can take on. Don’t do it unless you are committed to doing it right and then take the time to make sure that when you return the computer or the file it is the best your skills can manage.

Oh yeah, and don’t whine about the time it took from your other stuff, you sniveling, whiny, cream-puff.