Morning neurons, incl. photography, music, sports and work

I'll glad Kooper woke me up early.  I took another Saturday as the weekend day for a hangover, leaving me clear headed this morning (not a fan of hangover Sundays).  Lots of neurons firing this morning, especially after our long walk.  Beautiful morning out there kids.

Photography - I've been tackling photo organization and editing methods and choices for some time.  I paid a visit to Thomas at 44wide on Friday and his simple advice for photographers (of my ilk) - just shoot in raw and use Lightroom.  So I'm seeing if Lightroom (version 4 beta now available at no cost), fits my needs.  But it gets complicated quick, as my wife is a little more stubborn than me and wants to stay with Photoshop Elements and doesn't want to bother with raw image processing, so I may have a setup that looks something like:

• "art" photography (raw images) processed, organized and shared with Lightroom
• occasionally dropping into Photoshop (Elements) for edit tools that I'm a fan of, but are missing from Lightroom, e.g. high pass filter.
• Casual family shots, JPGs from non-DSLR cameras, iPhone shots etc processed, organized and shared with Photoshop Elements
• exporting some art photos from Lightroom to Elements (need to do some research on how to do this properly - with the goal to avoid multiple copies of images, but ok for raws to be in Lightroom and JPGs to be in Elements)
• Note that there's a nice Picasa (Google+) plug-in for Lightroom that could help with sharing those family shots or broadening my sharing to Google+.

Music - still trying to create a formula that defines the PJMixer music taste(s).  I've always said certain music fits best with certain times of the days or energy levels.  Simple examples are downbeat electronica late at night, mellow folk-rock in the mornings and dance music when you need to be energized (ultimate pre-game).  But a element that keeps playing with my musical neurons is the sound of horns - love 'em in electronica (Thievery Corporation) right through rock (Rolling Stones) and those big doses in soul and of course jazz.  Now adding an accented female vocal element starts to shape the PJMixer formula.  Then the variances for mood and time come into play, heavy bass and groove rhythms (man I can never spell that word) for urban music and later pm time slots; acoustic instrumentation for more organic sounds for daylight hours.  I need to spend more time in the lab, but the formula is coming along nicely.  Playlist for the dog walk this morning included Bon Iver and Noah and the Whale.

Work - I was a quite a week, resigning on Monday and trying to handle logistics of wrapping up 7 years with my old company and transitioning into the new company, starting with a quick trip to California for some training starting Valentine's Day (sorry darling).  I'll now be working from home, which is a first for me, but looking forward to a change.  I'm excited about the move, new challenges and some great opportunity.  More later on other channels (Linkedin).

Sports - great sports day planned.  Manchester United play Chelsea in just about 15 minutes.  If you haven't noticed, Fox have started showing EPL games live on Sundays - great bonus for footy fans who can't afford Sportsnet World / Setanta.  I'm cheering for Man U (a rare occasion) as Arsenal try to bump Chelsea out of the top 4 for a Champions League spot.  After that, I've got a 3pm ultimate game with a new masters team, which works out perfectly to get home for Super Bowl sunday festivities - chili, beer plus.

Thanks Kooper.

Photo organization and editing on OSX

In response to a friend's Facebook question - can anyone share experiences with Picasa, iPhoto, Aperture, or Other on OSX ? I jotted down the following notes and thought I'd post it hear for those that may be interested.


I have over 50K photo files (JPGs and raw - I shoot in both and try to keep one or the other, but often keep original and edited versions) to manage, so I've tried a few different photo software products on different platforms.

I started off many years ago with Picasa on my PC.  I still think it's a very good product and I recommend it to many people for organization and basic editing needs.  I use it on occasion to post to my Google web albums and it seems to run fine on my Mac computers (Macbook and iMac).  I only use iPhoto occasionally to get albums onto my iPhone.

But I've been using Photoshop Elements now for quite a few years.  Loved it (v6) running on my PC until my library got too big and the PC too slow.  So I moved to an iMac just last year with Photoshop Elements (v9).  But the experience has been less than perfect and has exposed some bugs and different functionality on OSX.  I'm sticking with it and have noticed that one really stupid bug (date changing) has been fixed. Note that I use PS for my raw processing/edits too.

As I wasn't 100% happy with Elements, I tried Aperture and Lightroom.  Lightroom had all the organizing features I was looking for, but you still needed PS Elements or PS CS for edits so the price would be too high.  I played around with Aperture for a little while - it seemed to have everything to needed but all the editing functions were completely different to what I've been learning in PS for many years.  So I dropped it.

Good news is that you can try all these products out with full featured eval versions.  I'm sticking with PS Elements on my iMac, my workflow works well for me and it's not having any consistent problems with my 50k+ library, and the thing I like the most is that PS is still the my common product in the market so you see lots of tips in the mags (although sometimes the features mentioned are only in PS CS).

Coincidence - Nagra pops in in Alcaltraz

Watching the Golden Globes on Sunday night, my wife confuses Slumdog's Freida Pinto with the actress from Bend it like Beckham, Parminder Nagra.  Unlike, Pinto who I'd seen recently in Rise of the the Planet of the Apes, I hadn't heard nor seen Nagra in a long time.

I decided to give the new Alcatraz series a try last night (very good I might add) and who is one of the stars - Ms. Nagra.  I had thought there was a second coincidence, but I was mixing up Sam Neill with Derek Jacobi who I'd seen in The Gathering Storm on Sunday.  Almost a double.

Also posted in my Only Coincidence ? blog.