Rain, Rain, Go Away...
This is a tiny crop of a shot taken from a long way away (probably 800-1000 metres) with a 400mm lens (600mm efl). It was shot through a double glazed window 50 floors up and, since it was already looking pretty grainy & poor quality with a little internal reflection from the window, I decided to keep going & give it that old "in need of restoration" look in post-production with Picasa (Picasa is great especially for a free tool, which makes it even better!).
Saturated Sky
I went for a wonder down the firetrail at the end of Turner Rd last weekend just before sunset to see if I could get a decent shot of the sunset (as you get a great view from that ridge line). However, the clouds just weren't very cooperative. There were hardly any to start with, clouds that is, so the colours from the sunlight refracting through the atmosphere weren't reflected much in the sky. Secondly, what clouds there were were mostly on the horizon, thereby obscuring the setting sun. So what I ended up with were mostly clear skies and a vague horizon.
The only redeeming feature of the shots was a colour gradient from the horizon to directly overhead. So I exploited this as much as I could when I was mucking around with Nikon PictureProject post-production. I was really just playing with the colour saturation to see if anything would make the shot interesting. The end result is a little more interesting than what I saw through the lens, but on the whole not that great. Oh well...
Adobe Lightroom Initial Thoughts
The download was small (about 7MB). Installation was quick and simple (took about 30 seconds stepping through a "next, next, next" wizard). I have to say that my initial thoughts, after playing with the beta for about an hour, are: IT ROCKS!!!
Being a beta, Adobe Lightroom is still a little buggy and not feature complete yet, but the RTM of this product is definitely going on my wishlist. I want, I want, I want!
Adobe Lightroom Beta Available for Windows
After what seems like the wait of the Century, Adobe have released the Beta 3 of Lightroom for Windows. This is especially significant because it has been available, as a beta, for Mac users for ages and it looks damn cool! After seeing what it could do in the tutorial videos on the Adobe website, I signed up immediately to be notified when the Windows version was available. I got my notification email last night...wahoo!!
It fills a big gap in my digital photographic kit, being mainly a workflow tool but also allowing considerable tweaking of the images themselves (mainly the typical curves for hue, saturation, brightness, contrast, shadows, etc.). Not being able to afford Photoshop, my image tweaking is limited to what Nikon PictureProject (the Nikon image tweaking tool they throw in at no extra cost when you buy a D50) allows, which is basically just cropping and some fairly rudimentary brightness/contrast adjustments. However, PictureProject is almost entirely lacking in the workflow side of things. It allows you to categorise your photos in "folders" and "collections" within those folders, which are purely logical structures, not physical on disk. There is no feature to rate photos or any of those other fairly basic workflow elements.
The other tool I use is Pixmatic RawShooter, which has recently been bought by Adobe anyway. RawShooter allows much better control over the image tweaking (shadows, contrast, tint, whitebalance, etc.) and has some basic photo rating (1-3 scale, trash & flagged) but not physical structuring (except what there already is on the filesystem), no cropping (which is really dumb as cropping is one of the most basic, fundamental image manipulation tools) and it only works on RAW files (which means if you're low on disk space and therefore shoot JPG, you cannot use it at all). RawShooter, however, is much nicer than PictureProject on the memory consumption and response times when tweaking & viewing RAW images.
But this blog entry isn't supposed to be about RawShooter & PictureProject, but rather Adobe Lightroom. I can't wait to install it and play (the installer has finished downloading now). I'll be interested to see how much Adobe are going to charge for Lightroom. I'll be really stuffed if I get hooked on it and, when the beta expires at the end of Jan 2007, find out they're selling it for around the same price as Photoshop CS2 (if that happens I think I'll cry, or maybe I'll sell a kidney so I can afford Lightroom & Photoshop; after all, isn't that why God gave me two kidneys?).
Here's a link to the beta, for those of you who are interested:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/
Anyway, I have no more time to waste typing this blog - I have to go play with Lightroom! (There goes my productivity for the day...maybe I should go home "sick".)
To write or not to write...
A friend told me recently, after reading a couple things I had written, that he thought I was a good writer (at least in the particular niche that was the subject of the articles). He said I should send some things I had written to publishers and make some money out of my hobby. I was, and remain, unconvinced. Initially I thought it was a bit of a joke but he later reinforced his opinion by telling me he thought I was wasted as a "cube rat" and pointed me to some courses the Sydney Writing Centre conducts. I often think he is wasted as a salesman and should try his hand at comedy where I think he would be quite successful.
I know most of the rules of grammar and when you can break them; however, I choose not to follow them most of the time. If I did not have other things to do, like work, house maintenance, yelling at the World Cup referees on TV, etc., then I would most likely read myself into a mild stupor. I used to buy and read the classics, like Frankenstein, Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, etc. just because of their reputation and to say that I had read them. However, after a while I decided that I actually enjoyed reading them and started reading them for enjoyment (I originally started on the action genre, reading authors such as Tom Clancy, Patrick Robinson, and Geoffrey Archer, and quickly expanded my repertoire to fantasy as well - Tolkien, Salvatore, Jordan, etc.). What I mean to say is that I am fairly well read and not just modern day, "cheap" authors but top calibre authors as well such as Dostoyevsky, Hemmingway, Shelley, Melville, Dickens and Shakespeare.
My first reaction to subjects I am not intimately familiar with is to get more (written) information on them, which normally takes the form of books, as is evidenced by the bookshelves at home all struggling under the weight of tomes stacked 2 deep and piled on top of others. I should have bought shares in Dymocks and Borders 15 years ago before I started pumping cash into them (are they publicly listed companies? I will have to check that out...); a few floor to ceiling bookshelves would not go astray either. I think that all the books I have read are probably the reason I seem to implicitly know (yes, I know that I just split the infinitive; it was intentional) what is grammatically correct and what is not. The couple small books I have read about good writing style mostly confirmed what I already felt to be good writing style, but they were both excellent brain food nonetheless (How Not To Write, Bill Safire and Writing Good English, a Fairfax publication).
Of course, I do not expect to be able to just start writing and be good at it. I am currently far too impatient to be a good writer and most things I write, which seem to be newsgroup postings, work emails and blog entries, are rushed and full of grammatical abuse. If I were to revise and correct the things I write before sending or publishing them, then they would probably do me much more credit, and I have the perfect literary critic at home since my wife is a University-trained English/History teacher. I cannot deny that the extra cash would be welcomed but, to be honest, I do not know if I could be bothered. Areas that I consider to be my field of expertise, such as database management, I take due time & care on since I pride myself on my technical ability in those areas but writing is at best an outlet for expressing my miscellaneous thoughts and at worst a mistake.
To add to this, I rarely have a plan in mind when I start to write something and do most of the actual writing, or rather typing, either on the train between work & home or late at night in front of the TV; two environments not highly conducive to quality thought. It would appear that the cons in this internal debate, not the least of which is my own laziness, far outweigh the pros. Therefore, for the time being, I think I shall not write, at least not in any kind of professional capacity (I still have my own biased opinions to express on such vitally important subject matter as the sorry state of refereeing at the 2006 FIFA World Cup).
