johnwoodcockillustration

Had a stressy few days as a week ago last Friday discovered lots of nasty pixellated lines appearing all over my monitor, which became gradually worse at times, whilst other times clearing and functioning normally. As I depend 100% on my mac, which is admittedly 7 years old and well overdue for replacement, this turned into a few days stress fest, resolved by taking it to the Genius Bar in the Norwich Apple Centre, where it was diagnosed with terminal video card degenerative disease ( and not a faulty monitor, as it was a 50/50 tossup between the two components.) I ordered a new iMac from John Lewis ( same price as everywhere else but a 2 year warranty)and picked it up the next day, and not very enthusiastically started transferring all my old files and getting everything set up. It’s amazing how different a new mac looks, I’ve been unable to upgrade mine beyond OS 10.4.11 due to it being so old, and it’s great to have everything working so well and fast. Did I say everything? Err, not quite. I’d been planning to run my old software until I could afford to upgrade that too, only to find nothing would run on the new  Mac. The biggest disaster was having no access to Adobe Illustrator, which I use for 99% of my work, but rather than lay out nearly £600 on a new copy I discovered that Adobe now provide software on subscription so for £17.50 or so a month I was able to download Illustrator CS6 and enjoy the luxury of the latest software and no more having to ask clients to save files down to an earlier version, in fact today a client had to ask me to do the same for them, as they only had CS5. After a few days I’m starting to feel more at home with the new mac, and finally managed to produce a few new images for my stock portfolio, nothing too exciting but just something to allow me to feel I’m back in control. Here’s the portfolio….

http://www.istockphoto.com/search/portfolio/911920/?facets=%7B%2225%22%3A%226%22%7D#600b398

Here are the images…