Almost Free?
Having placed my order for a new 2009 Mac Pro, I have set myself (and my wife) a goal of making it pay for itself in 12 months.
For someone who has 40 hours a week to work on such a thing, that doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. But I have a full time job and a 10 month old son, so the most I will be able to give to such a project is at best a couple of hours a day! But I have a few angles to attack this on.
Adobe Lightoom is the premium Digital Darkroom for photographers. It combines a multitude of library features and combines them with some very powerful editing and processing tools in the package. Having got my first DSLR camera almost one month ago, I became quickly aware of how much I needed something to keep track of all my pictures, and something that I could use to process them, especially when shooting in RAW format. I looked at many options, Picasa2 from google, Expression Media from Microsoft, Windows Live Gallery which is part of their Live packages, CaptureNX which is Nikon’s own software, GIMP combined with ufraw, and so on.
But I found every package lacked something. Here is a very very quick overview of the four better packages I tried and my ratings on the things that were important to me.
Well my best christmas present this year was the Nikon D40 DSLR camera. I have been wanting to get into proper photography for years and this really is the ideal camera for such a situation. It has all the advanced functionality that higher models have, yet is comparitively small and light, plus has a lot of helpers for beginners. I HIGHLY recommend it. Check out my flickr stream. What I am having trouble with is software.
Following a link from the APOD widget for http://google.com/ig I stumbled upon this fantastic shortlist of picture of the year. There are some stunning entries, my favourite three of which are:
The Seven Dusty Sisters
Which sums up perfectly why I dream of one day being able to cruise through the stars and simply gawp at my surroundings!
Death Valley
For proof that in fact I don’t need to cruise through the stars to enjoy their beauty, I can see them from here on planet earth! And personal favourite…
Saturn’s Iapetus taken by Cassini
For a demonstration of both the totally (almost) unexplored that exists in our own solar system, combined with marvelling at the staggering quality of some of the technology used to produce this image. The source for all these pictures and more is here
The image looks like an eyeball and explodes over time in this animated gif series. The star, named V838 Monocerotis, has suddenly grown so big that if placed in the center of our solar system it would engulf Jupiter. The full story can be found here
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/light_echo_030326.html
Amazing – what if one of our Sun’s neighbours did this???!!!
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