Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max!!!

I have been incredibly busy this week..... spending money! Researching, ordering things on-line etc etc. Today I had a little trip to the Apple Store in Cambridge and purchased the new Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max 256GB in 'Space Grey'. The extremely popular midnight green ones are not available right now and to be honest I had a job to get even get mine – long story! I bought the 'midnight green' leather case, so it doesn't really matter what colour phone you buy! I got 'John' (who was a perfect Apple representative) and their head sales person I think he said, to put on a Belkin Invis Glass Ultra Screen Protector too. I purchased the phone on-line yesterday and picked it up today. John transferred all my stuff over via icloud and it worked better than it normally does. The last time I transferred data over from my iPhone 5 to the 6, I lost all my voice recordings which I was very upset about at the time, as I had a fabulous recording of a Nightingale singing in a bush along the Firs Road at Holme – so I made sure I copied them all off onto my iMac yesterday, but they did copy over today.

Its a HUGE phone and I'm terrified of dropping it, I will have to be extra careful. I had over 5,000 pictures on my iPhone 6 and spent ages copying the whole lot off safely onto my iMac, I kept just over 1,000 on the iPhone 6 to copy over via icloud in the store today. Its something I've been meaning to do for ages anyway. I also did a back up of my iMac yesterday – which scarily I had not done for a very long time! I have three external hard drives: one for back-up's and two identical (very old) Western Digital book types for photos – all purchased at the same time. One of the photos ones would not open yesterday, I discovered – a very good job I have two! Quite worrying, so will need to buy a new external hard drive. John in the Apple store said the best ones were 'SSD' (Solid State Drive) and he recommended a Samsung Portable SSD TS 1TB USB 3.1 External SSD, which is selling on Amazon for £154.90.

I can't wait to try phone-scoping out! Picking up my Swarovski VPA Universal Smartphone Adapter from CleySpy at the weekend! I was very, very tempted by the iPad Pro, as this is half the weight of my MacBook Pro laptop and you can use your 'smart' keyboard with it, but there is one big drawback..... currently you can't use the Adobe Creative Suite (which I pay for monthly) on any of the iPads, but apparently you will be able to by the end of the year. So yes, it would be great to take a light iPad to Fair Isle with me, but not much good if I don't have Photoshop! I was also tipped off by John in the Apple Store that a entire new range of iPads are due out in the next few months, so by that time, the Adobe Creative Suite will be working too – it will be a very popular option for travelling. My laptop weighs 1.37kg and that is without my camera gear and binoculars. I can't take more than 15kg on the plane from Shetland to Fair Isle – you're allowed your binoculars and camera on the plane, but all other luggage can not exceed 15kg – that will be a challenge!

Off to Wex tomorrow, to buy a new and lighter Lowepro camera bag and to discuss my new future camera set-up, which David Tipling has!