I wrote a guest article on my friend John Topley’s site about my Life With a Mac (since he was the one who got me in to Macs by writing a guest post on here I thought it best to write about the results on his site). Since it was quite a few paragraphs of me rambling I decided it needed a photograph to add a bit of interest and break up the text. I wanted to somehow involve my Mac and to a lesser extent me (since I’m the owner).

In a flash of inspiration I thought I could take a picture of me using the Mac, looking over the screen which would show off the Apple logo and not show off much of me (since I’m actually not into pictures of me and I’m sure nobody else is). Then I thought that if it the light from the screen illuminated my face, that would be cool like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction – you never get to see what’s inside it but you get to see it glow when John Travolta’s character looks inside it. The shot would hopefully capture the joy I get from using my Mac and hint at the warm glow I get inside from it. I set it up, took the shot and ended up with this:

I think you’ll agree that it’s not quite what I was intending! I quickly realised two things when I opened it in Photoshop. One was that it was only going to work in black and white. And two was that there was no way I could make me look anything other than evil! I look like a scheming super-villain planning something fiendish. I really like it, although not for the reasons I originally intended.

I’ve often said I’d rather be lucky than talented and this is the sort of thing I mean. Had I actually managed to create the exact shot I wanted, I’d have been happy and that would have been that. But instead I got something completely different that I didn’t expect by sheer luck and am delighted by the results – much more so than if I’d got it “right”. Talent is over-rated! 😉