Weekend with the Wightmans

Every so often (more often than not, it seems), Carolyn has plans for the weekend. Usually these plans involve me, but occasionally they do not. Last weekend was one such occasion, as she went scrapbooking for a weekend with her sister and my half-sister. I generally look forward to these times, as I tend to be very productive around the house; however, I also tend to be poor at Self-Nourishment Management (cereal anyone?). Thankfully the Wightmans like me well enough to keep me alive over such weekends, and this weekend was the same: scalloped potatoes on Friday, steak on Saturday, and Marble Slab ice cream on Sunday. I couldn't ask for better friends. :)

Not wanting to waste the glorious weather, me and the Wightman clan went to the dog park on Sunday. The shining sun plastered a smile on everyone's face. Thanks to Ryan, Joy, Navilyn and Niko for the great afternoon. Click here to view some pictures I posted on flickr.

Flashback: Monument Valley

Way back in May of 2005 I went to Chandler, AZ on a business trip. My good friend Ryan had already been working there for several months, but hadn't ventured out further than the local burger joint. Armed with our cameras, tripods, and a fierce determination we took a road trip to fabulous Utah - specifically the mythic Monument Valley.

Click below to view some of the photos from that trip, reprocessed (now that I sorta know what I'm doing).

Flashback: Ottawa

I suppose it's that time of year again where I feel motivated to hone my photographic skills. Take a look at the photos I've processed from our trip to Ottawa in 2005. We went to the Tulip Festival and then fed the rabbits at the Big Apple on the way home. Many of these photos had already been posted to flickr already; in fact, these were the first photos I ever posted to flickr. I have touched them up and replaced the existing photos. You can tell which ones have been re-processed by my watermark in the lower corner of the photo. Unfortunately most of these early photos are only in Jpeg format so they are difficult to touch up.


Ottawa Tulip Festival


Feeding the rabbits at the Big Apple in Colborne, Ontario

Quote of the day

Actually, this is a quote from 3 days ago but I hadn't gotten around to posting it.

You think commas are sort of like parmesan cheese that you sprinkle on your words

- Paul Budra, English professor at Simon Fraser University

This remark was a response to the sentiment that kids these days have poor written communication skills. See the whole article here: http://news.therecord.com/article/665810

I'd have to agree that it seems that kids are getting dumber every year. I suppose this means I've become an old man.

Another brand new year

This year my resolution is to try and keep my resolution from last year.

NOTE: this post is probably very boring for non-photographers

That being said, I've given up on trying to organize my photos in exactly the structure I originally wanted to. I had originally written a program to gather up my giant pile of photos, weed out the duplicates, and move around the remaining photos into a sensible folder structure (like year\month\day). (It also did other things, like add metadata for copyright, etc.) The original program was meant for a one-time use to clean out the attic, so to speak.

The program I use to view and fix up my photos, Lightroom, also imports into somewhat sensible folder structures, but unfortunately not the structure I liked. So I spent most of last year avoiding importing my photos because of this incongruence. When I was forced to import photos, I would (mis)use my program to do what I wanted, then re-import into Lightroom. This was quite a hassle, and on top of it, I couldn't use this technique for Carolyn because she has a Mac and my program was written for Windows. So I generally didn't touch my photos much.

I've decided to stop being so particular (Carolyn has a different word for it), and just let Lightroom import the way it wants. I've converted all my existing photos into the new structure, and I will do the same for Carolyn.

Furthermore, I finally gave up on building my own back-up server and just bought a NAS, so I can schedule daily backups of our photos (instead of manually backing up to external hard drives). It's all about stream-lining the process so that you don't even know it's there. Hopefully these changes will make the developing part of photography more enjoyable again.

PS For those of you who are interested in my folder structure hangup, this what I wanted:

< year >/< month# >-< month >/< day# >

where month is the name of the month, month# and day# are the ordinal values (like 01 for January).

For example, a given folder would look like:

2007/03-March/17

The months are sorted in the correct order, but you can still see the name for quick access. (Maybe it's just me, but my brain is slightly faster at recognizing 'March' as opposed to '03').

Unfortunately, Lightroom only provides something like the following:

< year >/< month# >/< day# >

or

< year >/< month >/< day# >

The former of which doesn't show the name, and the latter of which isn't nicely sorted. And for some reason, Lightroom does not allow customization of the folder structure, even though they provide customization of file names. I don't think that this would be very difficult to provide, but I expect they just don't have time.

This is what I eventually chose to use in Lightroom:

< year >/< year >-< month# >/< year >-< month# >-< day# >

It's not pretty, but it's organized.

An end to the Intrigue

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with my beloved 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue. The doctors..er.. mechanics say she needed some major operations just to make it through the winter, and her prospects in the spring didn't look to promising. So Carolyn and I took her for one final drive last night (but, not too far because we didn't want to have to walk home).

Somehow the car lasted 12 years, and almost 300,000km. We visited a lot of places together, including a 15,000km trip around the USA. In the blistering heat of New Mexico is where the temperature gauge stopped working. Here you can see the Check Engine light, faithfully assuring me that my engine was still located under the hood, ready to be checked.

Here is the Intrigue after the last drive. My father used to say "she looks a lot better than she drives". Very true.








The next morning she got strapped to the back of a trunk and taken to a better place. I can imagine her now... parked up there with the big guy himself (Henry Ford), looking down in jealousy at our awesome Toyota Matrix. So long Intrigue, it was fun.