Muddy Buddy

Yesterday Dustin and I bought used tennis rackets and played until the sun set. We were in tshirts/shorts the whole game. Today, 24 hours later, it’s 1°F outside. Crazy Colorado and your wacky weather.

My baby girl decided to help me do my laundry.

I decided I wanted to get some use out of my tripod, so I took a few nighttime long exposures over the weekend. None of the photos turned out very well, but it was a productive shoot nonetheless.

Since then my camera hasn’t left the top of the tripod, so I decided to take unnecessarily long exposures indoors for no reason. 13 seconds for the above shot.

And Bonnie sat still for 1/8 second for this one.

Still working with Lightroom, and I’m getting a bit more used to it.

iPhone.

The fall colors in Boulder are so nice. Planning on venturing into the mountains this weekend before the weather starts kicking their ass.

Bike maintenance. Apparently when you clean bearings that were coated in gummy-bear consistency grease, they stop squeaking. Good to know.

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I downloaded Lightroom today. I had it a few years ago and didn’t like it then. But today I saw a how-to video on timelapses, and they used Lightroom to do batch edits. It was pretty slick so I figured I’d give it another try.

The interface border-lines on cluttered, but only because it packs a million and half features all onto one screen. There are so many on/off switches, hover states/actions, buttons, icons, pulldowns, sliders, and menus. It’s almost overwhelming.

Its features are mostly split into two main categories: photo organization & storage, and photo editing. Most of the extraneous organization features are lost on me, probably because I’m such a casual photographer and I don’t have massive archives of images that need organizing. I don’t ever need to change metadata, add keywords, color-code, or otherwise categorize my images. In the past, the only similar Bridge feature that I’ve used is the color coding to mark to-do’s and potential come-back-to’s. Though I have no use for the rest, I can definitely see their possible usefulness. Just not for me.

As for the editing, the power is incredible. I’m still learning how to coax the look I’m going for out of the program, but a learning-curve is to be expected. Again, the editing tools border-line on cluttered, and I think that’s due to them all being available at one time in a single really tall sidebar. Each section of editing tools does expand/collapse, but that only makes finding the right tool harder. At this point, I feel like Photoshop Camera Raw’s tabbed interface is much more user-friendly. But maybe I’m missing something in Lightroom. Perhaps in time I’ll find the advantage of its UI.

I only ever hear great things about it, so I’ll keep giving it a chance. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Washington Park