How fast this time files, when you’re having fun!

I just noticed that my “venting” blog site has not been updated since last June. It certainly doesn’t mean that I had no gripes, frustrations in my life; plenty of them, and many times came from very unexpected sources. One might think, that working on taxes is a stressful, but believe me it ain’t (to paraphrase a character from one of my favorite movies). Sometimes life gets very innovative in throwing you few surprised that leave you surprised, mad, disappointed….

But, back to my original reason to write this entry:

I    LOVE    P H O T O G R A P H Y!

Two months or so ago, I finally decided to bite a bullet, and splurge on Adobe’s Lightroom 3 (nice 45% discount didn’t hurt either in the decision process); till now, I was just a  pure Photoshop-with-Adobe-Bridge guy. What a difference!

First of all, new functionality (concepts) of the Lightroom world. All of the “imports”, “exports”, “virtual copies”…. head is spinning just from the number of new options. Thank God for the vast excellent  resources that the world of Internet provides. Only available time and … will itself can be the limiting factor. As I started looking at the world of presets (and believe me, they are everywhere), I do get a better picture on what is required in the world of today’s world of photography.  

Of course, no new software would make any sense, without … new pictures. I did try to take few. Some during my daily walks, others as I visited my favorite Bay Area spots, but most of them during number of church events in my church.

Lots of fun, but also a lot of work.  This is were I was hoping new Lightroom would come handy, and was not mistaken.  I can see, that in time my workflow / process of dealing with hundreds of pictures will get shorter (i.e. better).    Last weekend I took a ride to a beach in Half Moon Bay to take some snapshots of the sunset. As a photographer,  I still don’t have much experience with this particular time of day  (was not ready for a way too long waiting time in a freezing  California weather!), but I got to talk to some other very nice fellow photographers  from the area.

The trip was not a total waste then. I also took few pictures which couple came out quite all right. Here is a first one of a dog guarding a ball in the water; so funny.

Now something the ocean decided to rejected, and it landed on the beach:

… and finally, a test of an extreme cropping.   Love my 7d with all its 21 million of pixels.

The upgrade itself didn’t take that much time, and off I went into the new administrative interface. Different to be sure, but I do agree with the authors – much quicker and easier to use. I took some chances with this one, but it looks that there are no show stoppers that would make me consider a rollback. So far, I am happy camper.

As I was forgetting the story of the crooked investment advisor from New York» , I looked into few WordPress plug-ins. I decided to give them a “go”.

First, I opted for a optimization. New plug-in I used moves all the javascript code to the end of the page. It is a suggested technique for allowing the main static content to display as soon as possible. This gives the perception of the page to load faster. So far, it seems to do its job.

Second on the list, were two add-ins to provide footnotes and “sliders”. I notice one blog site to use them, and …. I liked it enough to give it a spin.  Will see, which one is going to stay, and which one is going to go((I don’t think that adding so many plug-ins is going to be “healthy” for the overall performance of the site.))

Tomorrow … oops… today is a celebration of “Wigilia”"  in my Church, so I better finish.  Tomorrow, I will upgrade my second blog for my children. I still need to figure out how to split the content into multiple distinctive sections without going to multiple installations of WordPress.  Oh well…

BTW, I was so amazed to find so many people contributing to many wonderful projects. I am currently trying to find a portal software that could help our priest to (as he describes) move into the 21st century. If you know of any (free that is) please let me know.