The weather in the UK this week has been HOT, really hot. I have lived all over the world, in hot countries too. But the heat this week, combined with the lack of air conditioning has made me quite sleepy and lethargic. Adding to that my school was hit by lots of bubble closures and mass isolations. It should have meant I was out of work for the week and free to shoot film. In the end I was one of the few people who was not “pinged” and was asked to cover some of the other staff. So for the week I was the receptionist and caretaker. Boy it was tiring, a full week of quite manual work.

By the time I got home at the end of the day, I was not in the mood to write any posts or test any cameras. So I won’t be posting any new reviews for a couple of weeks. I do have quite a few new to me cameras to play with and it is the summer holidays. I have two camping trips booked and will hopefully be able to complete, new lockdowns undetermined. I also have a few days out planned. I might need another holiday after it all.

On another note, I am sometimes offered cameras to keep or play with. But last month I received an email offering me a lamp. A really expensive lamp. A bit random. At first I thought the email must be a scam and ignored it. Then I thought, what if it wasn’t? So I decided to open it and clicked on the link. I used a spare tablet that I could dump if it got infected, but it turned out the link was genuine. I had an email conversation with the representative and she said, yes I could have a sample lamp if I wrote about it on my blog. So that is what I am doing now. I made it very clear that I could not see any way that I could justify a lamp being over $200. In my head I can hear Billy Connolly shouting, “£15,000 for a fucking carpet!!!” The same thing happened to me, $200 for a lamp, are you crazy.

…and then it arrived…and it by far the nicest lamp I have ever owned. I love it. It is not something I would ever have bought for myself, but I genuinely love it. Look how pretty it is.

It is also massive and the base is very heavy, it could crush your toes.

There are two light modes, tablet and book. The book mode has more of a blue/white light and the tablet mode is more yellow, or that is what it seems to my eyes. There is a dial to adjust the brightness, but that only seems to work in the regular mode which is more of a white colour.

I was asked to say how it would help with my workflow. So far I have used it in a few ways. Firstly, the flood lighting made taking photos of the cameras I am testing really easy. The results have a very even coverage with little shine.

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These were taken in each mode and you can see the set up in the third photo. I simply put it on top of my bed’s head board and used my phone.

The flooding light and clear colour also helped when I was trying to fix some cameras. It made seeing the parts much easier.

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I did manage to fix the T90, so that review will pop up some time in the future.

As this lamp is a reading lamp, I thought I should try reading with it. Of course that meant looking at a photo book. The one I am looking at right now is “Life.Love.Beauty” by Keegan Allen. Here are two example pages lit by the light.

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