After all the years of using a Canon camera I have always used the point and shoot modes. Today I used the screen above on the camera for the first time. I was following the tips in, Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. He gets straight to it and gets you into manual mode. He tells you to select a shady area of the garden (I used a darkish room), pick a subject to shoot. Set your camera to manual mode and stand about 6-8 feet away. Set you aperture to f/5.6 and then set the shutter speed until you get the correct exposure.

This is the bit that threw me. I never knew what that was, and how the camera was going to tell me when I was correct. In fact, it is the top arrow in the middle of the picture above. As you adjust the shutter speed the lower arrow moves back or forth. Once you have the two arrows matched up, that is the correct exposure. How simple is that?

Bryan says, manual mode is simple. I thought that was just a seasoned pro speaking with years of experience, but from this first basic step maybe it is true. I will soon find out as I work through the rest of the book.

I was getting very frustrated that I was shooting jpegs on my new 400d. This was because I didn't understand how to use the manual modes. The 400d doesn't support raw in the point and shoot modes.

I had heard a lot about, Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. I finally got around to opening it today. Within the first 20 pages I had shot in manual mode. I shot indoors in very low light, and without a flash. I got a decent exposure. OK, I had camera shake, but with a tripod it would have been fine. The picture wasn't dark. In the point and shoot mode the flash would have come on.

I found a slightly lighter part of the room and the pictures were perfect. I have much more to read in this book, but I am excited about it already. I feel like I have a chance at being a proper photographer

The ZX Spectrum is 25 years old this week. The Spectrum is the £180 computer that my Mum bought for me as a Christmas present in 1982. I remember her putting the order through and being told it would not arrive until after Christmas. Demand for the small computer was that big. I had set myself up to wait, then, the letter through the letterbox, a parcel was waiting at the Post Office. Could it be? Yes, it was. Mum tried to make me wait, but I couldn't and I had in unboxed in no time.

I had been introduced to computers by my maths teacher, Mr Coleman, and his ZX81, and then the school's brand new Research Machine 380z. The Spectrum was different. It had colour and sound. Nothing great by todays standards, but fantastic in 1982. I was lucky, I had the 48k version. 48k! My MacPro has 5gb of ram.

I learnt Sinclair BASIC. It was a bit of an odd version of BASIC and not as nice as its rival, BBC B, but nice all the same. Their were magazines galore. I subscribed to, Your Computer. Every month you would type in, line by line, the code from the magazine for the program you liked best. Then you would have to save it to good old c15 audio tapes. Crash magazine became the bible of game reviews.

I wrote programs for my O levels on that machine. It was a darts scorer. It would tell you how to finish from a certain score, hold averages, your highest score and check out. I learnt how to work out fractions by writing a program. By the time I had finished, I could do it without the Spectrum. I just ran the program in my head.

The graphics were poor, but because of that the game play had to be great, and their were some great games. Ultimate, with, Jetpac, Atic Atac, Sabre Wulf and Tranz Am made some of the best. I had my first football game written by Ocean. Football Manager was iconic in those days and Daley Thompson's Decathlon smashed the poor little rubber keyboard.

I have been working with computers almost every since, and my fascination for them started back in those days. I am so pleased my Mum bought me a Spectrum. It wasn't cheap then, but I am most grateful to her.

I have been reading, Aperture 1.5 - Professionally Manage Digital Photographs, so I can learn how to use this great application. I thought it might be hard going, but I have to say that this book is really easy to read and a lot of fun. I made a conscious effort to do every part from import to correction. I thought I knew about import, but even in that first chapter I learnt something. I would highly recommend this book if you want to learn Aperture.

My Canon 400d has finally arrived. It came with an 18-55 and a 55-200 lens. It is much smaller than I thought, but luckily it came with a battery grip as well. That makes it a lovely size to hold. I am still finishing my Aperture book, so I haven't downloaded my first pictures yet.

I went to Imperial War Museum at Duxford today and took some pictures of the great planes they have there. Once I have downloaded them and picked some good ones, I will post them in a web gallery. Hope to blog more about the camera soon. I really must learn to use the camera in manual mode so I can shoot in raw. All the photos I took today are jpegs.

I had a machine this week that would quit Final Cut Pro as soon as it opened. I had seen this before and deleting the Final Cut Pro prefs was enough, but this time, no joy. FCP would open, work, but on the next launch it would just fail again, even after removing the preference file.

I really didn't want to have to reinstall it all again, as Final Cut Studio is a massive install. I decided I would clear out what I could and try that. I again removed the preference file. This can be found in ~\Library\Preferences\Final Cut Pro User Data. I then decided to make sure that all the caches and render files were removed. These are found in ~\Documents\Final Cut Pro Documents. In this folder you should find another set of folders that hold, caches, render files for video and audio, along with autosave files. In these folder their will be more folders and these will be named the same as the projects you have saved in the past.

I really should have cleared each of these project folders out in turn to see which one was the problem, but I went for the whole lot in one go and bingo, it all worked again. Projects that have already been rendered will now need rerendering, but at least Final Cut Pro isn't quitting anymore.

Note: ~ means your home directory. This is your logon name folder that appears within the Users folder at the root of your hard drive.

I installed the EFI CUPS update and my Canon NX3000 still prints multiple pages if I try and print more than 1 copy of a job. The Canon Q1 rip works fine, but that was fixed by a new PPD from Canon weeks ago. I tested this with Quark 7.1. I hope to test it again next week with 7.2, but as Quark tell me it is a CUPS issue on Intel machines then I don't hold out much hope.

It might be helpful if EFI actually said what this update installed and how it is fixing this issue.

Every since we got the universal binary version of Quark (v7.01) we have had trouble printing to our EFI/Canon rips. After speaking to Quark it wasn't actually a Quark issue, but a CUPS problem within 10.4. Today, EFI have released a CUPS update. You can download it here.

I haven't had time to try it out. Hopefully tomorrow. Will blog the answer as soon as I have tested it.