December 2008 Archives

Perhaps because it's just so warm it really doesn't feel like Christmas... Perhaps because this city has a huge population of children... For whatever the reason, the people of Manhattan Beach take their outside Christmas lights very seriously. Christmas lights seem to grow on anything that stands still.

• I now have all of my photos in Lightroom 2.
• I now have had a fairly decent run at assigning keywords to every photo.
• I deleted almost 7,000 photographs. Most were duplicates or really poorly shot.
• I'm now trying to decide if I should break the large catalogue (28,634 pictures) into smaller catalogues and how--though I love having them in one giant searchable catalogue. The program still seems very responsive, and I haven't noticed any performance hits with this volume of shots.
• Lightroom 2 has performed flawlessly. I'm developing a fairly fast workflow with keyboard shortcuts in the Library module.
• I've tried to stay out of the Develop module at this point as I'm forcing myself to get things organized before tackling photo edits. However, I've done some retouching on less than a dozen photos.
• Again, Lightroom 2 is rock solid. I can't tell you how happy this makes me! My workflow in Aperture would typically have already included several program crashes (just getting the photos out of Aperture crashed the program 3 times!), numerous spinning beach balls, and a good bit of profanity on my part. I haven't had that at all in Lightroom 2!
• I love how easily, beautifully, and seamlessly Lighroom 2 integrates my dual monitor setup. Having the opportunity to see my photos on my Apple 30" Cinema HD Display has been a real eye opener! I've realized I need to slow down my shooting and pay far more attention to tack sharp focus!

The conversion continues!

Loving the Lightroom!

This quotation from a man still in his 40's:

"You know you're getting old when you get Christmas cards from your friends telling about their recent hip replacement. "

Yes, I mentioned earlier that it's time to abandon ship. I'm leaving Aperture for Adobe Lightroom 2. I just began the export process of all picture versions from Aperture. Next, I will export all of the masters. Then I will try to figure out how to best import them into Lightroom 2.

I was actually shocked to see that, since 2002, I've shot 34,781 pictures with my two digital cameras! To the left is one of the first I ever shot back in 2002!

At breakfast, the lady at the table next to me wore a sweatshirt with this message embroidered on it:

Beautiful design with paper by Yulia Brodskaya

Here are a couple early morning (before sunrise) shots of the holiday cheer in the house. Still have to wrap the packages. Ug!

Shot from the living room below

For as many years as the program has been available, I have used Apple's Aperture software to manage and work with my photographs. However, I've read repeatedly that most professional photographers prefer and use Photoshop Lightroom 2, from Adobe. In no way do I consider myself a professional photographer. But I do love my hobby, and at times I am immensely frustrated with Aperture. When the program first appeared, it was all but completely abusive. Having so many bugs, crashes, and quirks Apple should never have released it in version 1 unless they had given it away, and called it a beta test. In a word, it was crap! In its latest version, many improvements were made, but I still find it frustrating to use.

I decided to take the plunge and recently purchased Photoshop Lightroom 2. I then watched Chris Orwig's Photoshop Lightroom 2 Essential Training series on Lynda.com. Eight hours in length, I highly recommend it. Chris is fast paced, to the point, and practical. I learned a huge amount!

Already lovin' the Lightroom! Many of the tools behave more intuitively. The program's layout is logical. The feature set is much richer--I can even ftp directly from Lightroom!

Now, in Apple's defense, had I watched Chris do an essentials training for Aperture, I might have liked it more. And now, having seen the Photoshop Lightroom 2 training, I have a far greater understanding of many of the Aperture tools, which have their counterparts in Lightroom. But Apple has a lot of catching up to do if they want to really woo the professional photographers en masse. And, it's past time for Aperture 3!

So, here are a couple of my first feeble attempts at using Photoshop Lightroom with some recent shots from the beach. OK, so I went a little crazy pushing some limits to see how far i could take some things... At any rate, some of the houses on the strand are nothing short of palatial, as you can see. (God, I love the clarity slider now that I understand how to use it! It makes photos just pop!)

A winter storm was forecast for today, and as I awoke around 4:00am, the sound of water falling from the sky greets the morning. This isn't just a typical short drizzle, the ordinary semi-annual California misting. It's actually really raining! Lovely!

The weather here is so perfect all of the time, I actually miss bad weather! In fact, the forecast for the week: highs of 56º with a low going way down into the mid 40's! I don't know if I can cope. I'll have to close the windows and might even turn on the hear!? The thought is unbearable.

I have blogged from time to time about how much I love the house being open all the time with the fresh ocean air blasting through. Now, as I travel and stay in hotels with the windows all shut up and the AC or heat on, I almost feel like I can't breath! Interesting what we grow to accept as normal.

This past Thursday, December 11th, we had an unusual lunar event: the moon was the closest it gets to the earth, was a full moon, and so was also the brightest moon we see. I went for my typical evening walk by the ocean. It wasn't typical.

During the winter, my evening walks are in the dark as the sun goes down really early. The strand however is well lit and has several who walk and jog it even in the dark, though fewer people are out. This night was different. People were all around the pier in great numbers. A radio station was playing music from its mobile broadcast center. Food was being served. Hundreds of people were wearing fun, multicolored, glowing rings around their necks.

What was going on? They were also wearing black t-shirts with a large footprint on the front. On the back was : Yuletide Fivekay. A sponsored run was held along the water's edge on this the brightest night of the year. Hundreds of people of all ages ran.

Way down the beach i could see a lifeguard buggy parked with its head lights pointing in our direction. At the Manhattan Beach pier, where the race ended, was another lifeguard buggy with its light marking the end of the race. The runners ran along the surf's edge.

But the evening was interesting for other reasons as well: I suppose, because of the special proximity of the moon, the tide was out further than I've ever seen it, almost all the way out to the end of the pier!! And the ocean was indeed in a mood. The waves were crashing up high at the very end of the pier. No surfing tonight! The wind was blowing at a very steady clip, harder than I've seen it yet--lucky runners has a really significant tail wind!

The walk along the highly lit (tis the season you know) strand was spectacular as very few people were any where. It was basically deserted, save down by the pier. Perhaps because of the brisk wind, I walked farther than usual (3.4 miles). I would have gone even further than I did but the parking meter only had an hour on it. I walked much faster than my usual pace (3.0 mph). I actually really walked a good bit faster than that because I lingered around the pier area watching the festive runners and the strange tidal conditions below.

Stormy weather. Gusting wind. Aggravated surf. Bright moon. Really nice walk!

How insensitive that one would even suggest such a thing [spoken with tongue in cheek!].

Let the record show that it was George W. Bush, the rich Texas Republican, who brought socialism to America, so don’t blame it on that African-American Chicago Democrat community organizer who made it into the White House. The government takeover of the banking and automobile industries not only happened on President Bush’s watch, it was also the deregulatory mania of this president’s family, beginning with his father, which took this country into such starkly unfamiliar territory.

[Source: AZspot]

I am grieved to report that Conrad the Kat murdered my old wireless keyboard. Well, since his actions were unintentional, I guess it would more accurately be called manslaughter--keyboardslaughter?

He has decided he loves sitting on my desk while I work at the computer. (Here's a picture of the desk area from a previous post.) This wouldn't be such a problem if he would just sit there. But, no. He requires my attention. He demands to be rubbed. He lies on my desk, invariably onto the keyboard. He rolls over, invariably onto the keyboard. He steps on my computer keyboard so he can hear the strange popping sound that comes out of the speakers when the computer repeats a key several hundred times in a row. He likes to just sit in front of the screen and watch the mouse cursor glide across the screen like a delicious bug. He tries to touch it with his paw. Once he even attempted to bite it. He sticks his nose to my nose as I lean forward pondering the contents on the screen. He tries to step off of the desk and into my lap to crawl up onto my shoulder. While all of this is adorable, it makes getting any work done impossible!

So I've been trying to keep him from jumping on the desk. This upsets him greatly.

Now he sneaks up to the desk corner and waits. When the thinks the time is right, he jumps up onto the corner and tries to run past me to the other side. In doing so yesterday, he knocked over an open 12 oz. Diet Coke which spilled about a third of its remaining contents into my old (the thick white ones) Apple wireless keyboard. I was horrified!

In a frantic, desperate attempt to keep it from shorting out my laptop, I was trying to unplug the keyboard. Duh! It's a wireless device that connects via bluetooth!

When I came to my senses, I tried to get the Diet Coke out from between the keys. I was rather successful at putting a paper towel around a business card and inserting it between the keys and the plastic enclosure to soak up the liquid. Amazingly, the keyboard still worked!

The enclosure is clear. When I looked at the back side, I could a significant (read "huge") amount of the Diet Coke still inside the enclosure. When I would tilt the keyboard, the liquid formed a rather large "puddle" inside. I managed to tilt it over gently to let the coke drip out for some time, but, in the process, I think it breathed its last.

Fortunately an Apple store is just a few blocks away. I bought the new, much sleeker, aluminum wireless keyboard. I don't like the fact that this new keyboard lacks a numeric keypad--hence, the reason I still use a wired keyboard on my main desktop machine. I actually use the numeric keypad a great deal. So I also purchased Interlink's bluetooth keypad that can double as a stand alone calculator. It's an ugly plastic device but seems to function well.

The Interlink bluetooth keypad came in this most unusual black box. It almost feels sticky to the touch--something like a very thin coating of rubberized material. Upon touching it, everyone recoils from the box thinking some gross sticky substance is on it. Upon realizing that the box is made to feel this way, everyone then starts to pet it in adoring amazement. Clever marketing.

Well, poor Conrad! The iBeast hasbeen banished from my office!

Everyone knows how much I love my iPhone. It's an indespensible appendage to me. And the iPhone just keeps getting cooler with an increasing number of awesome apps becoming available at the iTunes Store.

One such cool app is Fitnio. It's simple and powerful. Using the GPS to track you, the device computes how fast and how far you run (in my case, walk) and cycle. Based on your height and weight, it computes your BMI and calories burned. Way cool.

I love to walk and cycle along The Strand as often as I get the chance. Now, I know how far I've walked (avg: 2 miles) and cycled (avg: 9 miles). I walk at a very leisurely pace (avg: 2.4 mph) while soaking in the peacefull yet powerful energy of the ocean. When I bike, also at a leisurely pace, I average 9.5 mph when I have to walk the bike through a congested pedestrian area and 10.4 mph when I get to just ride uninterrupted.

Fitnio is just fun!

I just learned about a new blogging client that run from the iPhone. It's like ecto for the iPhone. All of my blogs are aggregated into the iPhone to make publishing to any of them a snap! So this is my first test post from iBlogger the iPhone app!

I can show you my location while I'm blogging:

I can embed links, like this link to ecto.

I can snap a picture with my iPhone or upload one that's already in my photo collection, like the really cool one at the beginning of this post, an iPhone wallpaper from the awesome vladstudios.

I'm trying to figure out how to categorize my post though I can see how to tag it.

who, while she has never had the chance to visit Maine, loves this state! This is just a taste of the hundreds of pictures I shot in Maine back in October. I'll build a large photo gallery when I have more time.

Enjoy!

This movie is presented through a Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Attribution, Share-Alike License.

For more information about what that means, visit this link at the Creative Commons.