Adobe +50%

Lightroom

Yes, a 50% price rise!

The crooks at Adobe are at it again.



50% price hike.

The rest of the letter goes on in tedious detail about how Adobe is the greatest public benefactor since Social Security and generally claiming sainthood. It’s so puke worthy I am not publishing it here.

When I was using my Mac Pro I had ‘lifetime’ ownership Lightroom for a single purchase. When security enhancements – which Apple refused to apply to that fabulous machine (shock news!) – ceased to be available I had no option but to upgrade to a modern Mac Mini M4. Naturally, Adobe saw to it that my Lightroom ‘owned’ application ceased working at the same time, forcing me to sign up to their $9.99 monthly subscription.

I passed on Photoshop, buying a lifetime ownership of Affinity – and that looks like it’s about to adopt a subscription model soon as well. Affinity does most things Photoshop can, though there’s a bit of a learning curve involved.

I write ‘forcing me’ as I have yet to find an application which competently combines LR’s excellent processing and cataloging features, but now I will get serious about doing some research of alternatives.

Meanwhile I have signed up for one year with the crooks at Adobe at the existing $10 monthly rate, and earnestly hope this is the last time I ever pay them:



Old Time Farm Days

Photographs

When life was slower.

My local community stages Old Time Farm Days annually, the goal being to show how farms were run a century ago. It’s a lot of fun, especially for kids.



Five generations of Army.


Revolutionary War soldier. Those muzzle loading muskets
may have been slow and wildly inaccurate, but they
still managed to do a number on the Redcoats.


John Deere.


Old time tractor.


Barn.


Horse harnesses. Even at full aperture the 35mm f/2
Canon LTM lens delivers fine resolution.


98 year old cream separator.


The hand cranked separator in action. The centrifuge
spins at 4,000 rpm flinging the heavier cream
to one side, the skim milk to the bottom.


Children watching the separator in action, all rapt attention.


Corn husker. Simple, effective and fast.


Blacksmith working cast iron.

All snapped on the Leica M10 with the 35mm f/2 Canon LTM (all but the first image) and the 90mm f/2.8 Tele-Elmarit.

Artcise NB36 ball head

Cameras

A remarkable value.

When I documented Carmel’s gorgeous Christmas windows with the monster Nikon D3x body and the exceptional resolving power of the 35mm f/1.4 Sigma Art lens in 2014 I uses a Sirui ball and socket head on my ancient but sturdy Linhof tripod. On completion of that project I sold the Sirui as I do not do landscape photography and in the studio strobes permit the camera to be hand held rather than mounted on a clunky tripod.

Recently I have again developed a hankering for some more night time photography and needed a competent ball and socket head to mount on my old Bogen/Manfrotto 3016 monopod. While old it has only three sections, meaning just two levers to undo and tighten, and is made of light alloy. Even 1/15 second exposures with the monopod are sharp for the device removes any possibility of vertical motion, the bugbear of sharp images. The 3016 is readily found on eBay for $30 or so and is recommended without reservations. If the locking levers loosen with age they are easily adjusted and a monopod is a great deal easier to use than a tripod. It’s also a handy weapon when on the wrong side of the tracks ….

My tool of choice for nighttime street snaps is the Leica M10. Not a fast to use camera by modern standards, no AF or IBIS, but it’s a small package, inconspicuous and comes with fast lenses, my street favorites being Canon’s 35/2 and 50/1.4 offerings.

The Artcise NB36 ball head comes with two Arca Swiss QR plates to attach to the base of your camera(s). The female socket is 3/8″ so a small adapter is required if your tripod or monopod uses a 1/4″ size screw.

The head has no fewer than three spirit levels if that’s your thing, two in the top plate and one in the knob which fastens the QR plate. Good luck seeing these at night.

But the real appeal of the Artcise head is the price, which is under $20! It’s a remarkable value for a device which is nicely made, all operations are smooth and the weight capacity is a claimed hefty 33lbs. Not as much as the Sirui’s but hardly a limitation with modern 35mm and digital cameras. None of the three knobs can be fully unscrewed/removed/lost, a nice piece of engineering design. And at $18.70 it’s a keeper as the resale value is precisely zero.

Highly recommended, and some nighttime pictures from the Leica M10 should be available soon.



As delivered. The Arca plate has anti-slip rubber on the side which abuts the camera’s baseplate.


Attached to the M10. Because of Leica’s slavish devotion to a dated removable baseplate, the Arca Swiss style plate must be removed to swap the battery or storage card. The plate may clear the battery door on the M11 if mounted transversely – I don’t know. not having an M11 (I wish!)


Mounted on the Bogen/Manfrotto 3016 monopod.

The Savoring books

Book reviews, Cooking

Gorgeous and tasty.

For an index of all my book reviews click here.



My small collection.

Take a magnum opus like Julia Child’s ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ and you have every recipe imaginable from that land of culinary genius. Yet the books are as boring and as poorly presented as it gets. There are no photographs, a handful of poorly rendered pencil sketches passes for illustration, the fonts are dated and ugly and, well, the whole thing smacks of a well prepared meal thrown on a paper plate in higgledy piggledy fashion.

And that is very much not the case with these wonderful books from Williams-Sonoma, mostly published in the first five years of the millennium and now sadly out of print. I got mine from Abe Books, lightly used, for pennies on the dollar. Each boasts not one but two photographers – one for the locales, the other for the food and the photography is, without exception, gorgeous. And these are not just cookery books, for each recipe comes with historical detail explaining provenance and subtleties. Highly recommended not just for cooks aspiring to emulate the best in Western European cuisine but for lovers of great photography everywhere.