Adobe Lightroom
I first wrote about using Lightroom on September 7th, 2008 after using it to process photos for DragonCon. Since then I have read Scott Kelby’s book “The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers” and used Lightroom to process all of my images. I am still amazed at how fast I am able to process photos that of a more consistent and higher quality than ever before.
I recently shot a youth basketball game where I took around 300 pictures and using Lightroom culled that down to 97 good shots with meta-data, color correction, noise reduction, rotating and cropping all in under 2 hours.
I no longer use stars or labels to sort through images and rely on “P” for Pick and “X” for Reject to sort through images and delete rejects. Now that I have plenty of hard drive space available with the Drobo I am keeping more images than ever.
Switching to Apple
On January 2nd, 2009 I wrote about My Mac Experience So Far. Three months later and I am still enjoying the iMac. I have found more MacOS applications to replace Windows applications and in most cases am very happy with them.
I reformatted the Bootcamp partition and have set it to be solely used for gaming; I am currently playing Left4Dead a lot. All other windows use is relegated to VMWare and one of 4 virtual machines I have set up for specific purposes.
I have added an HP 22” widescreen monitor in a vertical orientation, which has really boosted my production in web development and photo processing.
Drobo
January 11th, 2009 I shared my Drobo First Impressions with the world. The device is still running great and serving its purpose. I have only had a couple of minor issues with it.
The fan noise while I am sitting at the computer working is not really noticeable to me, but after I turn the computer off the fan in the Drobo continues to run for a very long time. With everything else in the room turned off the Drobo seems really loud. I am glad that the Drobo is not in our bedroom or even close to it.
Another issue is that GarageBand does not read the free space on the Drobo correctly and always thinks the drive is full. As I use GarageBand more, this may become a real issue for me as I try not to put anything on the internal hard drive.
Getting Organized
Then on January 14th, 2009 I wrote about Getting Organized with a Franklin Covey planner. After three months of using the planner almost every day I have to say that it has made a real difference with how organized I feel. Having a date based notebook where I am able to make notes to read in the future and having notes from the past that I can refer to has been a great help.
For the first couple of months I was planning my days one at a time in the morning, but I have been reading the “7 Habits” book and the quotes in the planner and am beginning to look at a week at a time with some real planning on Monday mornings. I still spend 15 minutes each morning planning that day, but because of the 30 minutes I spend on Monday looking at the week the daily planning goes very quickly and usually doesn’t contain any surprises.
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