March 2010 Wallpaper

Shockingly enough, February has only twenty-eight days. Which makes this a few days late. But here it is. Just almost in time for March. Vatican Stairs is this month's wallpaper. Grab the MacBook Pro friendly size above. Need something grander? Right click and save as on the links below.

Cinema Display March Wallpaper 4:3 Aspect March Wallpaper

Enjoy!

The Lady in the Culvert

Had to run out and shoot some quick and dirty (not that kind of dirty) video for a client yesterday and stumbled across this. A nice little reminder to go off the beaten path more often.

Aperture 3: And then there was significantly less rejoicing.

Turns out I jumped the gun. Still no RAW support for the GF1. Bummer. Don't get me wrong, there's a bunch of updates and some interesting technology in the update. Ultimately well worth the upgrade cost. But just the one thing I'm really jonesing for. So here's the learning Lightroom I guess.

Aperture 3: And there was much rejoicing.

I've got a pile of design work in front of me, but I'm downloading the trial now. Finally some support for the M43 format. Apple - Aperture - Pro performance with iPhoto simplicity..

Chase Jarvis Blog: Mike Relm Slays It

A note about Mike Relm from Chase Jarvis wandered across my RSS feed this morning: Chase Jarvis Blog: Mike Relm Slays It. Jarvis is right. It's a solid piece of filmmaking and even more impressive if you think about the story he tells in under four minutes without a word of dialog.

About two years ago someone forwarded that clip of Relm scratching video from Office Space. Two great tastes that go great together.

New Year's Eve 2009 and Adventures with Lightroom

January 2009 has really charged out of the gate. At least on the design front. I haven't shot too much this month. Partially because I've been getting my head wrapped around Lightroom and the Lumix GFI.

A few words about the later first: It's a fantastic little camera. It's easily my new everyday carry camera with the 20mm lens on it. This is the closest thing to an heir apparent to my M6 which has been gathering dust for the last year and half. Actually, writing about how long it's been since I've shot film could be another post entirely.

Where was I?

Right. Fantastic camera. My current workflow is Aperture. And that's where digital rangefinder nirvana begins to crumble. The GF1 isn't supported by Aperture. Apple seems to have let Aperture fall by the wayside in the grand scheme of RAW support. That's  a bummer. Shoot JPEG you say? If you have a camera that shots RAW there's only a handful os situations that makes shoot JPEG. I shoot RAW almost exclusively. Enter the Lightroom 3 Beta. I thought I'd have a good jump on the learning curve with my experience in Adobe's Creative Suite.

Not so much.

I think some of it is that Aperture had really shaped my view of what to expect out of a photo management application. Apple consistently nails user interface. Aperture is no exception—it really is, at least in my opinion and experience, the better photo management application. This isn't a shortcoming on Adobe's part. It was a conscious decision by Adobe to publish a photo manipulation package for photographers. Comparing them becomes an exercise in apples and broccoli because of this fundamental difference.

But where Adobe appears to be pulling ahead is that they keep rolling out support for new cameras. I have a hard time imaging a technology that's moving faster than digital photography right now. Keeping up with it all is a big deal. If Apple wants to continue touting Aperture as a solution for professional photographers they need to pick up the pace. Personally, I don't need a lightroom. I want to get the shot as close to perfect in camera. Maybe bump the contrast. Maybe push the saturation a tick. That's usually it. But I need RAW support.

I'll eventually adapt to Lightroom's workflow. It obviously works for thousands of people. And for now, I'm not planning on shooting hired work with the GF1. Not yet. So in that regard there's some separation between church and state—rather personal and work. Maybe that's a good thing.

These shots are some of the first I've taken with the GF1 taken over New Year's Eve up in the North Carolina mountains.

February 2010 Wallpaper

Get your February wallpaper right here. This shot is from the Gary set. And new this month is a format that should work for those of you on PCs or otherwise working on the 4:3 aspect ratio. Enjoy.

MacBook friendly size above. Just right click on the above and download. Or grab the larger, 16:10 desktop friendly size if you've got more real estate. And finally the new and improved? No. That's not it. The 4:3 is right here.

January 2010 Wallpaper

So inspired by David duChemin's "wallpaper as calendar plan" I'm going to crank out one every month this year. I'm sure it'll be a mix of old and new. Hopefully more new than old. See, the plan is to use this in a complicated series of carrots and sticks to make sure I pick up the camera a bit more this year. To get things going we're going to jump back into an image from the last post actually. As soon as I composed this shot, I knew it was a candidate for wallpaper.

Grab a MacBook Pro friendly size (1140 x 900) by clicking on the image here. Or download the Apple Cinema display friendly size (1920 x 1200) for your less mobile computing needs.

During the lost week—between Christmas and New Year's—I'll be wrapping my head around Lightroom, only allowing myself to shoot with a prime lens and drinking Knob Creek by the fire with friends and family. Before we go, I've got an avalanche of product shots to get working through.

Brentwood Luminarias

For forty years our neighborhood, Brentwood, has displayed luminarias on Christmas Eve. For the entire time we've lived here, the Brentwood Exchange Club has taken on the task of raising the money, securing donations and the logistics of that morning. Brentwood is not a small neighborhood so this is no trivial matter. This year though they announced that atrophying membership meant they'd be unable to pull it off this year. With word of that, the neighborhood association (led by Sean Kosofsky) pulled together to keep the tradition going. In what has to be a record amount of time (less then two months) everything came together this morning and all the bags, sand and candles are in place.

These are photos from this morning's assembly and distribution.