Yup. It’s that time of the year again.
I’m actually just stopping by to brag about some of the christmas presents I got and post few images so I’ll keep it short. The list goes something like this:
- Movie tickets (Yay!)
- Playing cards with photos of rock and pop legends printed on them (Ooh, original!)
- Chocolate (Yummy! I taste rum.)
- A cereal bowl (Now I can invite one more guest to my cereal party!)
- A candle (Invaluable in case of zombies!)
- An apple (Tasty!)
- Joe McNally’s book The Moment it Clicks (At last!)
Before even reading the book I want to point out some interesting things about it by the way. First of all the Finnish version is hard covered and the size of the pages is much smaller compared to the pages of the soft covered English version of the book. Correct me if I’m wrong of course. The title is translated from English into Finnish in quite a silly way too. The Moment it Clicks became The Secrets of Photography (Yawn!).
(Kukaan englannin kieltä vieroksuva haluaisi vaihtaa tämän suomenkielisen Valokuvauksen salaisuudet -kirjan englantilaiseen vastaavaan?)
For my whole life I’ve been a PC user so you may just guess how frustrated I have been at times while at it. Change-over to any other platform has not been an option to me though as formerly I’ve been very into computer games and still am doing minor programming and stuff like that which in my opinion just aren’t very well supported for example on Mac.
In the near future I’ll be travelling a lot so I thought a laptop would be a neat thingie to have. Just imagine how much time would it spare if one had the opportunity of browsing through his or her photos while being on the run. Also when I’m on a serious(ish) assignment after that one striking picture it’s important to me to actually see how the work is coming out. Especially after I’ve experienced some catastrophical photo shoots because the photo looked sharp on the camera’s teeny weeny LCD screen.
I was actually becoming very keen to the David Tejada’s idea of using an external DVD player as a bigger screen as seen in his blog entry here but eventually was turned down by the lack of all right DVD players’ availability. They were always too good or too bad. Having just a portable screen with me would be a bit restricting too I thought but that’s another story.
So this year my christmas present came very early to me and oh boy how excited I was. It was the Apple MacBook 13″ 2.4GHz with 2 GB memory and 160 GB hard drive and the reason I was in such a hurry with it was its irresistible price. Less than 900€ – what a bargain! So obviously they were sold out in just a couple of days.
My first impression on MacBook was totally positive. It’s light, powerful and has a bright, clear screen which is just perfect for my needs. Portability is a must for me and I have a bigger screen at home if needed so the 13″ (33 cm) screen size is just fine. The computer starts up and is ready to use in a blink of an eye compared to anything else in the price range and it stays alive quite a while too as the battery should last at least for 4 hours.
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard succeeded to impress me with its simpliness and lightweight which leaves more resources to the programs I’m using and less confusion to me. Using Lightroom is absolutely painless as what goes to the performance. Pointing the cursor using the trackpad only is of course clumsy and takes patience if you’re in the need of accuracy but I’m ok with that as far as I don’t have to carry a mouse with me.
Have been trying out shooting in tethered mode too, straight into Lightroom by having folder watching function enabled. I had some serious problems using Canon’s CameraWindow with Mac software as it just gave me an error: “Cannot detect camera.” So if you confront this same issue make sure you upgrade into EOS Utilities which is downloadable from Canon’s website. That worked for me and now I’m able to burst away with my camera and watch how my work of art simply pops up onto the vivid screen of this beauty. It can’t get much more simple than this!
So yeah… So far I’m loving it!
(Yes, I code my websites manually… ; )
Hi ya all!
As you have probably already recognised I’m working on my main website where this blog is contained also. (If you haven’t seen the work under construction yet feel free to follow this link: JULIUSPHOTO) Previously I didn’t have much more than just this blog and before even that I was coping with just some pretty links to random galleries and bit of silly biography. (I actually made a post about that update back in the beginning of this blog.) Now I have been really revisioning the whole design of my web page and have put a lot of stress on making it functional, easy browsable and most importantly: enjoyable to view! No more small thumbnail-sized imagery or long waiting for images to be downloaded as image galleries are now scrollable.
Oh, and by the way, I would really like to know how you people like it viewing those galleries in that way actually! Feel free to post your rating of this system by leaving a comment in this post. The image galleries are located here. Thanks in advance!
So where was I …?
Did I already mention there will be 900 pixels wide and 600 pixels high pictures in my future portfolio! That’s a huge improvement over previous situation when one had to squint his or her eyes to see anything, I can tell you that! And may I also highlight that every picture published in my portfolio will be totally reprocessed exclusively for that matter.
And to make my point even clearer I’ll show you one photo from my upcoming portfolio and its stages of post processing. The first picture is straight out of the camera and quite a lackluster as you can see, but it has real hidden potential. The second one is what the photo looks like after I have given it a Lightroom treatment and in the last image I have polished the photo in Photoshop and it’s ready to go!
(By clicking the images you may open them in separate windows for easier comparison.)
So obviously there is something worthful to wait coming and I promise you I’ll be gradually updating the new content online as soon as its finished (as I have done so far too) so keeping an eye on my website may be a good idea. 
Thanks for reading and take care!
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