Back to school and blundering through Lightroom

Today it was back to teaching my grade two and four year old in home schooling. For the grade two we have switched from the government correspondence course to following the Cambridge syllabus. So far, so good. I face a challenge though with the four year old, as he is really not enjoying Jolly Phonics. I think I need to make it more hands-on, as he likes making things, so maybe need to make snake S shapes and the like. Am going to meet up with a friend who has a nursery school on Monday to borrow her nursery school syllabus book and brainstorm on the Jolly Phonics conundrum.

After teaching I went to a friend's as she has the photo editing program Lightroom on her mac and she said we could try work our way through it together. I had watched a couple of youtube tutorials. One seemed fairly straightforward but a second one became very technical very quickly and I was left feeling even more intimidated. I'm afraid we didn't get very far today, as when we started off trying to upload a photo to edit from my SD card Lightroom seemed to have uploaded my entire 32 gigs of photos onto my friend's laptop and it started saying it had run out of memory space and the hard drive was full. As we both don't really know Lightroom we didn't know where it had stored the photos and where to go to delete them - we searched in all the main folders and programs on the laptop. Am now trying to google where it might be. Oh dear!

This tutorial left me feeling fairly confident.

This left me feeling overwhelmed.

I did learn though that I can practice basic photo editing using Picasa and a friend in Switzerland has also suggested an open source software called Darktable that I might try out. Watching the tutorials though you realise, a) you needed a good photo to start off with (although a few that looked too dark were amazingly rectified) and b) you can go extreme and totally change what was originally there. I have til now been happy with what I capture as it is but guess it's a new skill I should try learn and it is a bit like art and painting a picture with a bit of science and computer geekness thrown in.

My other little bit of research is that I have been asked to collect sphagnum moss samples and post them to Switzerland to see if they contain testate amoeba. I need to find out if I'm allowed to send moss in the post and also check with the people doing the study if I have to keep the moss fresh. In addition, will need to think of places in Zim to go off sampling. I might ask someone at the UZ for some help.