Brewing Loose Leaf Tea in the Office

For most of us, the majority of the tea drinking we do is in the office mostly because that is the place where we spend the majority of our waking time during the week. There’s nothing quite like a hot beverage when you’re trying to write up that report or work your way through your emails. Perhaps that’s why coffee shops have become so popular for workers and students who do not have a fixed office space to call their own. But at the same time, the office is where we most often end up taking short cuts for the sake of convenience and ease in our consumption of hot beverages. We don’t often have time to prepare a teapot and clean up afterwards or the inclination to grind and brew our own coffee beans. I’m going to reveal to you a piece of kit that is fairly inexpensive and easy to acquire, yet will transform the way we drink tea at work!

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A New Lease of Life (The Macbook Story)

In our modern technological age, we are finding ourselves logged into our computers, phones and tablets almost from the moment we get up to the moment we go to bed. Various companies capitalise on this to sell us computers that allow us to be connected for longer, with more power to get things done faster, in a bid to improve our productivity and justify the large costs of these products. Coupled to this, we as consumers always want the latest and greatest of everything and as such with every new iPhone or Android device that comes out, we queue for days on end to be one of the first to get our hands on this new tech.

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Getting Started with Photography: Part 4 – The Body

Welcome back to the ongoing series on getting into photography on a limited budget. Today’s post will highlight the important considerations when choosing which body you will use. The body of the camera is what would traditionally contain the film, and would be your primary tool for evaluating and setting the correct shutter speed to ensure properly exposed negatives. The body is also responsible for setting auto focusing points where available and subsequently focusing the lens. Depending on your system, the body would also control the aperture of the lens, if this was not ring controlled directly on the lens.

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Getting Started with Photography: Part 3 – The Exposure Triangle

Before we go too much into the purchasing of equipment, let us take a few moments to actually understand what is involved in taking a photo. Now strictly speaking I should have written this before I wrote the part on purchasing a camera, so I am going to retrospectively put this in as part 3, and update that to part 4. Shh, don’t tell anyone ;). I am going to only briefly explain what the 3 parts of the exposure triangle are so that you have a better understanding of what it is all about.

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Getting Started with Photography: Part 2 – Choosing a System

One of the very first questions asked by potential photographers is “what camera should I buy?” but really it’s not just as simple as which camera to buy but also which camera system do you buy into. Let me explain, an SLR camera requires lenses to function and lenses are specific to their various systems as they tend to have manufacturer specific lens mounts. Not only that, but even within manufacturers there can be several different lens mounts. An example here is the Canon system where the older “FD” mount were almost exclusively manual focus lenses, where as the later “EF” mount lenses were auto focusing and did not work on “FD” mount cameras. To confuse matters further, there are now “EF-S” and “EF-M” lenses for the crop sensor and mirror-less systems which don’t work on non-compatible Canon cameras.

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Getting Started with Photography: Part 1 – Introduction

It’s been an awful long time since I first started my journey into photography, and I’d like to think there’s still a fair amount of time ahead of me still in this hobby. The people that know me often ask what got me started, and indeed where I did end up starting with my journey. Sometimes they’re just curious, and other times they are looking for some direction on where they too can get started.

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