Short days, long shadows, long faces

This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.

This week I was in England for work, and I met a horse. The studio I work for is based in Middlesbrough, and horses tied up by the side of the road are a fairly common sight, but I’ve rarely had the excuse to stop and meet one. Patch here, Patch is their given name in the sense that it’s the one I gave them. They are currently living outdoors near the studio, and when I was walking into work this week, they looked up at me, so I went over and started a little photoshoot. 

I call them Patch

With so much travel and a sick kid, the week was a patchwork, so I feel like this week’s email can be something similar, in honour of my new friend.

Notes on notes.

Daniel Milnor shared a really interesting video this week talking about how he takes notes. It’s funny timing because one of the things I worked on at work this week was a guide for folks on taking notes in meetings. Dan’s notes aren’t for anyone but him, and that means that he can be free to explore ideas, images, thoughts, all within the pages of a notebook. His approach is entertaining, entirely his, and I encourage anyone reading this to do what he says. Start. Get a notebook and pen and make yourself write something every day if you can. I did this toward the end of last year, and it had been amazing because it has helped me think and park ideas to work on or come back to, but mostly because a book is so much more fun than a Word doc. 

Notes!

This year has to be fun; it’s one of the most important metrics I’m measuring life by at the moment. Is this fun? If not, can I make it more fun or find some fun in it?

One of the things I’ve used my notebook for lately is a check-in that I do with myself. You score yourself out of 4 on Work, Love, Play and Health.

An example check in

It’s gleefully taken from Dave Evans’s book Designing Your Life. You should watch his videos. He’s a force of nature, and I love him for it. This check-in exercise is a really good one, and I’ve been doing it semi-regularly since 2018, so I can see the rough highs and lows and what has maybe improved and what hasn’t. 

Wacom-ole

I picked up a Wacom tablet for editing fiddly masks on images and immediately regretted it. Partly because I wanted to edit the foreground in an image with lots of sky and was finding manually masking with a trackpad to be too imprecise, and then discovered the invert button, but it’s more than that. It is going to take some learning, and the software is extraordinarily unreliable on modern Mac OS. I’m assuming that’s because I bought a used one for £24, but the fact that there’s a “restart driver” option in the software doesn’t fill me with confidence. It’s a very different way to use an input device when the surface represents the whole of a screen or two. It can make it quite fiddly, although tinkering with a computer interface using a pen is quite fun, but it may be going back on eBay soon. 

Wacom Intuit Tablet

All this interaction with “software” also got me thinking about subscriptions and how conflicted I am about the topic. This might be a good future newsletter, but paying people consistently seems like a good mindset; it might encourage development that comes about following engagement with an audience/ user base as opposed to being driven by the need to drive an annualised sales cycle that has to hit; otherwise, everyone’s going home unemployed. 

I’m off to think about this for next time; y’all should go watch Dave Evans. We could all do with some Dave in our lives.