Jason's Place

Well, I’m glad to report that I’m still alive and well, despite the lack of activity on my site.  It’s been over a month since I’ve really had a chance to sit down and write anything, but that’s mostly because I’ve just been so busy with work and play.  So let me explain why, and maybe you’ll understand.

Not long before the 4th of July holiday, I was finally able to get my hands a brand new Canon Digital Rebel Xsi.  For those of you not to familiar with that camera, it’s currently one of the most impressive sub-$1000 DSLR camera’s on the market.  While my current work horse – the Olympus C-8080 – has been a wonderful camera, I yearned for a new SLR ever since I had a chance to play around with a Canon Xti.  With it, I felt like I had my Minolta Maxxum 7000i in my hands again – in regards to speed and power, considering that’s a film camera.  Compared to where I had come from, the fact that I could take a picture in under a second was jaw dropping.  After quite a bit of research into the various features, I had narrowed it down between the Nikon D60 and the Canon Xsi, with the Xsi being my final choice.

So, ever since then I’ve been happily busy snapping away with the camera.  Unfortunately, thanks to the large size of the RAW images, which comes out to approximately 13-15 megabytes a piece, I’m already concerned about my storage situation.  Maybe I’ll have to finally break the terabyte barrier

Mountains Near Meeker, CO

Either way, earlier in July my family and I made the trek back home to Colorado to see our family there.  As you can probably guess, I had a field day up there.  Actually I almost had too much fun, because I came home with 5 DVD’s worth of pictures that I had taken during the trip.  You can imagine how much fun it was to start processing those.  While I genuinely enjoy almost every aspect of photography, one of my least favorite is the organizing.

Before I purchased the camera, I was using Photoshop Elements 5 to organize my pictures and Photoshop Elements 6 (and the Camera Raw plug-in) to process the RAWs.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, I have a love-hate relationship with this product, as I does many of the things that I require however the list of cons (and bugs) seems to grow with each version.  My frustrations with the application reached a peak when I started processing the RAWs from my new camera.  The rate at which I was taking photos had increased to a level not seen since my daughter’s birth (I was much more controlled for my son’s), so tagging was excruciating, and raw processing was slow and limiting.  So, I started playing around with the demo of Lightroom, as a replacement – since I had obviously reached a point where a tool such as this may be a necessity.  As with the the Xsi, I’ve been blown away by how the power of this tool.  From it’s snappy back-end database, to it’s impressive gui layout, and not to mention extremely powerful RAW processing tools.  I could process and organize pictures at a pace that made me feel like I could never go back to Elements for the same task.  I realize that $299 is fairly expensive price tag, but I feel like the time I save in this product will be worth every cent.

Jag and Ace - Processed using Lightroom

Now, some of you may be asking “why not use DigiKam?”.  While digikam has come a very long way in the time that I’ve been acquainted with it, there are still some limitations that exist.  One of my first immediate gripes, and this is with ANY photo organization / manipulation program, is red-eye correction that leaves a red ring around the eye (your right here along with them picasa).  That is major reason I use Photoshop Elements, since children a much more likely to have red-eye, and their implementation doesn’t cause the red ring.  Being a software engineer myself, I cannot even guess how difficult it is to write an algorithm to handle such a task, but I cannot imagine that it would be impossible.  So as long as some of the simple basics are not 100%, it’s not the tool for me.  Not to say that if they keep up the impressive work that they have done, that I won’t eventually switch to Digikam.

Have I rambled enough yet?

Anyways, that all being said, I’ve been quite busy having way to much fun taking pictures of places and my family.  Just last week, my family and I went out to the Harbor in Rockwall, to run some errands, and to take some sunset / night-time pictures.  However, now that I think I’ve gotten a “work-flow” under my belt, I hope to get back to posting more often on here (I say this a lot).  I may even veer a little more towards the photographic as I hone in on my skills.  We’ll see where my will drives me…

Sunset at the Harbor in Rockwall, TX