As a recent convert to the game of cricket I jumped at the chance to attend a 'Sportsman's Dinner' (through work) at Elland Cricket Club where none other than the Ashes-winning and current England cricket captain Michael Vaughan would be speaking. And what a fun night it was too!

I've never been to this sort of corporate thing before but it was an interesting experience. There were about 150 people there including 14 from my company. Dinner itself was rather nice. There was a raffle, a variation on the game 'Play Your Cards Right' to win a flat-screen TV, the auction of some very impressive sports memorabilia (including a signed, framed Ronaldinho shirt that I was sorely tempted to bid on - which went for £500 in the end and would have looked lovely in my lounge) and the very talented impressionist Kevin Connelly rounded off proceedings. But the bit I was most interested in was of course hearing Michael Vaughan talk.

Former England physio Wayne Morton was the compere for the evening and he's the man who helped Michael Vaughan through his knee injury so knows him well and interviewed him up on stage. Michael was very open and honest (much more so than in a press interview) and didn't dodge any questions he was asked by Wayne or people in the audience. He came across really well and to be honest I could have listened to him all night! As with most elite sportsmen he has a very positive, winning attitude but the way he talked about leadership and how he conducts himself as England captain was a fascinating insight into his mindset. You can see why a team of players would want to follow him.

His enthusiasm and the way he said that he goes out to play for his country wanting to enjoy it - remembering that he was once a kid playing in the nets dreaming of the moment - came across as completely genuine. He's a top bloke worthy of a great deal of respect and despite the fact that he's playing on Friday for England he was happy to sit and sign autographs, have photos taken with messy-haired Scotsmen and stay late into the night.

The press and those reading what gets written often forget that these people are humans just like you and me with feelings and personalities - they just happen to be exceptional at something. In Michael Vaughan's case it's cricket and leadership. Great guy and a model professional.

One of the effects of User Account Control on Windows Vista is that whenever you run a software installer you are asked to confirm if you really want to run it and if you agree, you are either elevated to the mighty powers of an Administrator or you’re asked to enter the credentials of one. The idea behind this is to make sure that you don’t accidentally install something dodgy or some evil software doesn’t manage to install itself without you knowing about it.

It can be quite annoying although it is a useful measure against spyware and malware. However, when launching my installer for John’s Background Switcher I would get this rather scary dialog:

Windows Vista cares a lot more about digital signatures than previous versions of Windows. To obtain a digital certificate to sign your software you have to go through an authorisation process to verifiably identify your company or yourself. If you’re a malware author you’re not likely to get a digital certificate because it costs money, you’d have to identify yourself to an issuing authority and as soon as you’re reported for making malware your certificate would be revoked. So if the installer you run is digitally signed with a valid certificate Windows Vista can be pretty sure it’s not likely to be evil software that’ll take over your computer. In this case it presents a much prettier dialog that’s far less likely to scare any normal user into cancelling. And there’s no orange in sight.

For this reason (and because I thought it would be cool) I decided to stump up a bit of cash and buy my own digital certificate in my name (since I don’t have my own company). After sending a copy of my passport to the issuing authority I can now sign any software I create so that it’s uniquely identified as coming from me. So now when you run my installer you’re shown this:

It’s a far friendlier dialog and I hope that people being presented with it are much less suspicious that my software has some evil, ulterior motive. Also, if someone tampers with my installer, the signature will become invalid and Windows will complain.

It’s a bit of a pain having to pay for a digital certificate to stop Windows from scaring off potential users but I guess that’s thanks to all those dodgy malware authors out there exploiting the formerly trusting nature of Windows. Grrrr.

One of the most annoying aspects of being left-handed is the simple act of writing with a pen. You see, the pen - and more specifically the ball point pen - has a fatal flaw. They were designed by right-handed people. Let me explain with a picture and some arrows:

As you can see from the picture, I’m writing from left to right and I’m left-handed. The problem is that a ball point pen is designed to allow ink to flow out of the nib while it’s being moved across a page. This principle works well if you’re right handed since you spent 99% of your time with the nib facing away from the direction of travel. But write left-handed and most of the time is spent with the nib pushing directly into the paper itself, preventing the free-flow of ink to the page. Write a paragraph or two and the ball point pen will often dry up, you’ll need to scribble a bit and you’ll be able to carry on.

It’s like stroking a cat. If you stroke it from head to tail (and it’s a friendly cat) it will most likely purr and be nice to you since that’s the direction its fur grows. Stroke it from tail to head on the other hand and - unless it’s one of those mad cats that likes it - the moggie will look at you in a particularly unimpressed fashion before hissing at you / biting you / scratching you / walking away and ignoring you for a while / hissing at you then biting you / hissing at you, biting you then scratching you and so on…

Don’t even get me started on fountain pens. I don’t care what you say, it is physically impossible to write with a fountain pen when you’re left-handed unless you adopt some wrist-straining style of holding a pen. But the risk of arthritis in later life makes it a non-option for me. There are myriad other types of pen that have their own particular problems but there is one that turns out - completely by accident - to be the ultimate left-handed pen.

I am talking about the amazing fisher space pen. The incredible technological advances in the modern world are truly remarkable and none more so than the space pen. It was designed so that astronauts - whose pencils had broken and were stranded without a pencil sharpener in space - were still able to write shopping lists in a zero gravity situation. (At least, that’s what I’m assuming the design goals were).

I could explain to you exactly how it works by quoting the instructions but you wouldn’t understand it - I surely don’t - it’s just far too advanced for our human brains! But the bottom line is that the ink cartridge is pressurised so that even if you try writing upside down, or underwater, or… eh… upside down and under water, the ink will still flow. And of course, if you just happen to be left-handed writing from left-to-right (or right-handed writing right-to-left) then you’ll be thrilled to discover that the space pen won’t dry up on you mid-sentence! I bought one on impulse a few years ago and discovered this left-handed miracle and meant to spread the word but I’ve been too busy finishing all those sentences I’d half-written when the ink had dried up.

Even better, you don’t have to be left-handed to own one! Apparently (as you can see in the picture at right - click for the full version) if you dress like the Village People, then you can own one too!

[As an aside, the people who designed this brochure have the best job in the world. Imagine you've been given the brief along the lines of: "We want this flyer to show tough, rugged people that normal Joe's aspire to doing tough, rugged things with their space pens. Oh, and if you can make it a bit camp too then even better!". Must have been a real laugh.]

But on a more serious note (and being left-handed is a serious business), if you’re left handed and you’ve been left frustrated and let-down by pens in the past, then your choice is clear. You can either use a frikin’ pencil or buy a space pen! If you go for the latter (the right choice) then be prepared for other left-handed people demanding to know how you can keep writing paragraph after paragraph without pausing for breath. Just point them at this article and I’m sure they’ll make the right choice too!

This is the ninth in a series of articles discussing some of the photography techniques I’ve learned and employ when I’m out on a shoot.

Black and white photography can be amazingly powerful. Flickr’s Explore is filled with highly-saturated, strongly coloured pictures and these tend to be extremely popular. But it takes a lot more than strong greens and reds to make an interesting picture in my book, which is why I find a good black and white photo much more impressive. To produce a compelling photograph without the aid of colour takes no small amount of skill in my book and is something I try from time to time with varying degrees of success. I just want to stress here that I’m no expert on black and white - I’m just putting down some of my thoughts on the subject!

In the pre-digital days you’d load your camera with black and white film and go looking for shots. You’d have to try and imagine how the scene you’re viewing (in full colour) would come out in black and white, take your shots and hope for the best. Well, a decent photographer would have a better idea of what they were doing but I’m talking about me here! When looking at your prints you’d only be able to see them in black and white and appreciate them for what they were. But in these digital days, there’s little point shooting in black and white.

I always shoot in RAW mode on my camera. If you take a photo in one of the JPEG modes, the camera processes the picture for you and stores it. If, when you get home and look at it on the computer, you want to make some changes (maybe lighten it up a bit) then you’ve already shot yourself in the foot (ahem, pun intended) as some of the detail will have been lost when the camera processed the shot. Shooting in RAW mode however doesn’t give you this problem. The camera won’t process the picture, it will simply store all the information it captures on the sensor and when you get home you can process the picture as you like - perhaps into a JPEG image. This means you can make more changes such as increasing the exposure, changing the white balance and rescuing any photos you screwed up. There’s no notion of shooting in black and white - for your camera to do that it would have to process the image, discarding the colour information and like I said, with RAW you do that yourself.

With digital, I find myself deciding which photos are going to end up being black and white after the effect and in front of my computer. Quite the opposite of the film days. Take the following example:

This shot was taken after sunset in Ilkley last year and I really liked the colour version. I found it hard to go mono with it (mono’s quicker to say than ‘black and white’ so I’ll stick with that moniker if you don’t mind). The trouble is that when I compared the same shot in colour to mono, I ended up concentrating on the lack of colour in the latter. The colour shot works for me because the stepping stones are dark and yet there’s the reflected light in the water giving you something to focus on. But when I stopped thinking about the orange light I realised that the mono version was much better as it concentrated you on the fact that the stepping stones lead you into the darkness. The lack of colour makes you use your imagination more.

One shot rescued by a mono conversion is the following, taken near Whitby:

It was a pretty grey, dull day and the light was flat. When I looked at the shot on my computer I was tempted to delete it but started experimenting with mono conversions (it doesn’t always have to be black and white) and finally came up with this one. The dullness of the scene didn’t matter once I’d gone down the sepia route.

I guess my take-home point about black and white photography in the digital world is to take a colour photo, play around with it and see what you like but try not to let the original prejudice you against going mono. It’s very easy to not bother trying a mono conversion and move onto your next shot but quite often it’s worth lingering a bit longer and giving mono a go. One really handy tool (which is free) is the Virtual Photographer plug-in for Photoshop (although sadly it’s Windows-only). This allows you to try a list of pre-canned conversions quickly to see what you like and then you can fine-tune it all you want. The key - as always with photography - is to experiment.

When converting to mono, there are myriad options other than simply opting to ‘gray-scale’ the image - you can decide how much of each colour to use when you remove the colour. If you want to go for a grainy look you might opt to go mono using predominantly the blue channel (which you can do with the ‘Channel Mixer’ in Photoshop) - looks great on portraits as the skin tends to look much more rough and aged. Alternatively using the red channel will make it look softer. Look at the following examples of using the channel mixer to go mono with different results:

	This is the original colour picture (obviously).
	By choosing the blue channel her skin looks darker and grainier.
	Using the red channel gives her a softer and lighter look, much more sympathetic!

And of course there are countless other ways you can do a mono conversion, which is what makes black and white photography so interesting. You may be theoretically restricted to two colours - black and white - but there are so many shades of gray in between! Heck, you can even mix colour and black and white like this to good effect:

Anyway, that’s some of my random thoughts on black and white photography, I hope you’ll give it a try the next time you’re looking at some of the photos you’ve taken! And if you need some inspiration as to what you can achieve with black and white, have a look at these photos on Flickr taken by ‘dooda‘ - one very talented photographer - they certainly inspire me.

Next: Always Keep Your Eyes Open.

Every morning, just before I head out to work I do a Duck check to make sure our little duck is sitting in her nest and she looks happy. This morning I did exactly that not expecting anything to be different, except it was. For one thing, she wasn't on her nest. And for another, there were a whole bunch of chicks frolicking around my garden!

You can't see them all in the photo but I reckon there are 15-16 of the little darlings and as before they are amazingly cute. I left the gate open for them in case they decide to leave (I've no idea how they'd get out otherwise as with the gate shut a non-flying bird would struggle) but hopefully they've only just hatched and will spend another day in my garden. If they do hang around we'll be able to go in late to work tomorrow and follow them to wherever they go, protecting them from cars / people / cats / meteor strikes. And then we'll spend the next year hoping our duck will come back again!