Angry sea.
Spotted on the way down to Carmel last week.
This is the lighthouse keeper’s hut at Pigeon Point, on the Pacific. Selective masking in Lightroom did the trick.
Aperture is dead in the water.
Having started serious volume digital photo processing with Apple’s Aperture and finally made the switch to Lightroom almost two years ago, the following data recently released by Adobe hardly surprise me:
Clearly, I’m not the only one making the move, especially if you take into account the large increase in Mac sales in the past few quarters. Forget the upper table – Aperture does not run on Windows so it’s not a fair comparison. The lower table is.
When did you last hear of a meaningful update to Aperture or see any advertising for the product?
Those still using Aperture should be getting worried and would do well to consult my earlier piece on abandoning that major stress source for Mac performance. Aperture is another orphan application which couldn’t handle the heat in the kitchen. It’s future is …. well, what future? Have you noticed how Aperture does not even support Panasonic G1/GH1/GF1 RAW file import – maybe the most signifiant camera design to hot the market in the past year? That makes me think it’s a dying application, starved of capital as Apple concentrates on making …. cell phones.
It bears repeating – the user interface in Lightroom is not only logical and linear, it actually makes photo processing fun. That’s not something I thought I would ever write. And you don’t lose track of originals or accidentally erase them, either.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam eggs and spam.
Putting aside the Monthy Python quote, above, readers using an RSS feed (such as Google Reader, NetNewsWire, Vienna, etc.) will have noticed that yesterday’s postings had summaries inundated with spam. This spam appears to advertise stimulants which readers here have no need of, this blog offering a natural high.
This is what it looks like:
Mercifully, my RSS feed only contains a brief extract of the posting so the schmuck who did this doesn’t get his click-through link to show up. I reposted the piece under a different name but no joy. The same spam in the summary field showed up.
Some very smart people are on to this and I found the fix on Anwyn’s Blog which I recommend if your blog is similarly afflicted.
Suffice it to say that the problem is fixed and the revised posting of yesterday’s piece now looks like this in the RSS reader:
Unfortunately, there’s no way of deleting individual articles from the RSS history but at least newer pieces are now shown without spam, viz:
Realtor talk
Seldom has a subset of the population charged as much or added as little value as the US realtor (translation: real estate broker or shill). A ‘profession’ which charges 5-6% of the selling price for showing you where the bathroom is. It is some testimony to the power of this corrupt lobby that it has survived in a world of internet databases.
Here’s an example of what is known in California as a ‘fixer with an ocean view’ – likely $1mm:
Spotted on Highway one (yes, with an ocean view!) the other day.
Recent snaps focus on abstraction.
I don’t know how these things happen, but now and then my photography hits an abstract streak, much as it did during my recent sojourn in Carmel-by-the-Sea, that prettiest of California’s seaside towns. Maybe it’s just a reaction to all that hard striving retail shopping all around.
Self portrait – I’m shielding my eyes from the bright sun ….
Stairs
Carmel pines
Snapping away
The bride
Fake landscape
Painted painting
All snapped on the G1, mostly in Carmel’s alleyways which, the local guide book informs me, has no fewer than 42 such passageways!