Blog entries from September, 2020

Today is the sixteenth of September, not a particularly significant day, except that six months ago the sixteenth was a Monday, the first day of working from home.

Sure there are some benefits like not having to commute, but I miss the commute as it gave a clear separation between work and non-work time. I also miss the lunchtime conversations with people on other teams or even seeing changes around the CBD due to construction or other works.

Is it ironic that we had only moved into our shiny new office only a few weeks before it all changed?

At the start of 2019 we had to move out of our previous office, and became mostly remote workers. We got a couple of rooms at a managed office space and each team was assigned a day to come in, the other days they would work from home. However there were a few of us (myself included) that opted to come into the temporary office every day.

In my case I knew that I would find it difficult to focus on work when I was at home, unless I was able to create a separate office for work, but I don’t have the space, furniture or equipment for that. It was better for me to tolerate the cramped shared office, with the benefit of still being in contact with people not on my team.

In February our new space was complete enough for us to move in and despite areas like the kitchen and meeting rooms still being set up, we started to make it our own, and then the world changed.

While I would love to have a work office that is distinct from my home office I have gone for a compromise of being able to switch over to a work environment. I’m still sitting on the same chair at the same desk in front of the same monitors, keyboard and mouse, but when I am working that is all driven from my work laptop. Come 4pm I switch the monitor inputs (KVM built into one of them and audio over HDMI is handy) back to my own computer, put the work laptop away and I am no longer in work mode.

So far this has been good enough™ but I am yearning for the day when we can be in an office again, but who knows when that will be…

For the past year or so I haven’t been getting out with my camera as much as I had liked, so earlier in the year I decided to make and effort to get out, but then the world changed…

At the camera club we have managed to keep most of our meetings going (now over Zoom) as well as our monthly competitions (digital only, no prints) and I typically find a suitable image from the past to submit as my entries.

However the set subject for September was “Film noir” and I knew that I didn’t have any existing photos that would fit. So I turned to LEGO:

I got the idea for the scene by looking at images online and then looking through the LEGO that I had available. The first obstacle was getting the road base plates from my parents, and then I spent around two hours playing with the position of the figure, the car and the lighting. The final scene is solely lit by the torch hanging above and getting that right took the most time.

This was the final result:

I would have loved to add some smoke/fog or rain, but I didn’t have anything to do that practically as I’m not a fan of adding that in post.

In the competition this image received a Merit which I was quite pleased with, especially when you consider the other images it was up against.