Having more fun with photos using Lightroom 4

Yesterday, my 14 year old daughter JuJu and I spent the entire day at Studio 314 in Midtown St. Louis learning Adobe Lightroom 4. I'd been using Picasa for organizing my photos, and Picasa/Photoshop for processing. Lightroom is an incredible package --it allows you to quickly sort through your photos and also to "develop" them using sophisticated controls that allow for individual tweaks and batch processing. It's a professional tool, and even after a day of studying it and most of a day (today) continuing to study it and use it on my own, I only think I've tapped into 50% of what the program can do. Not that knowing the controls is being proficient at using the program either. I'm sure that I'll be picking up lots of tips and efficiencies over the next six months or so (there are tons of Youtubes and other videos offering instruction in Lightroom). What I've already noticed is that I'm turned some mediocre shots into decent shots and I've turned many decent shots into impressive images. Lightroom offers far more flexibility than the free photo organizing and processing programs out there, such as Picasa and iPhoto. Lightroom 4 is only about $100, so it's well in range of amateur photographers like me. Today I spent a couple hours at the St. Louis Zoo capturing images, so that I could have something interesting to process in Lightroom 4. I'll paste a couple of my photos below, but also offer a gallery (you can get to the gallery by clicking on the title of this post if you don't see it). I invite you to click on the photos below to see them in much better detail. So far, so good. I'm definitely going to incorporate Lightroom into my workflow. [These images were taken a Canon S95 and a Sony HX10V, two modest priced cameras, nothing fancy].

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Glenn Greenwald: Bradley Manning’s gift is a glimpse into America’s soul

Reality seems upside down in many ways, including the manner in which mainstream journalists have treated Wikileaks and Bradley Manning. Glenn Greenwald comments at The Guardian:

The repressive treatment of Bradley Manning is one of the disgraces of Obama's first term, and highlights many of the dynamics shaping his presidency. The president not only defended Manning's treatment but also, as commander-in-chief of the court martial judges, improperly decreed Manning's guilt when he asserted in an interview that he "broke the law". Worse, Manning is charged not only with disclosing classified information, but also the capital offence of "aiding the enemy", for which the death penalty can be imposed (military prosecutors are requesting "only" life in prison). The government's radical theory is that, although Manning had no intent to do so, the leaked information could have helped al-Qaida, a theory that essentially equates any disclosure of classified information – by any whistleblower, or a newspaper – with treason.

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald: Bradley Manning’s gift is a glimpse into America’s soul

Pat Robertson stumbles over a low bar

I do enjoy how it becomes newsworthy when an ignorant public figure finally figures out the obvious. In this recent case reported by CNN, Pat Robertson finally admitted that the earth is a lot older than 6,000 years.

Televangelist Pat Robertson challenged the idea that Earth is 6,000 years old this week, saying the man who many credit with conceiving the idea, former Archbishop of Ireland James Ussher, “wasn’t inspired by the Lord when he said that it all took 6,000 years.” “You go back in time, you've got radiocarbon dating. You got all these things, and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs frozen in time out in the Dakotas,” Robertson said. “They're out there. So, there was a time when these giant reptiles were on the Earth, and it was before the time of the Bible. So, don't try and cover it up and make like everything was 6,000 years. That's not the Bible.”
Update November 30, 2012. Here's more. I wonder how many enslaved minds are going to wake up thanks to Robertson's declaration of the obvious.

Continue ReadingPat Robertson stumbles over a low bar

Starting from the beginning

This past weekend, I was discussing the nature of explanations with some relatives. I argued that to explain anything completely, one would have to explain absolutely everything, given the need for context in a complete explanation and given the inter-connectedness of all that we know. Many explanations falling short of explaining everything work, at least on a local level, because on a local/pragmatic level an explanation is merely a description that makes us feel good. Today, I came across a quote by Carl Sagan that relates to the above:

Continue ReadingStarting from the beginning