Photos through December in Vancouver and Victoria.
I installed Picasa for OS X tonight to give it a whirl. It is a thing of beauty – when it comes to photo management, I have not used anything quite as good as Picasa. I also have iPhoto which is really good. Picasa interacts with iPhoto in a non-destructive way, preserving iPhoto’s library, and duplicating photos which I want to edit in Picasa. Great – I like it when applications understand the environment they’re in rather than battle it. The more discerning pixel peepers will note that Picasa over-compressed these photos at “85” quality setting. I am not certain what 85 means on their scale, but this artifacts the way “45” quality would in Photoshop.
Lately I have been posting one photo at a time while acknowledging that I am building up quite the collection of photos in the cue. For a couple months I have been trying to post photos without the aid of Photoshop. Sometimes I just have to use it, other times I try to get by with just the basic tools to resize and re-optimize. I have some tricks and techniques I use in Photoshop but I am not terribly attached to them if I can find something else that does those tricks just as well. Nothing is as good as Photoshop at exporting jpeg’s though. It used to be that Fireworks was really good at it, but Fireworks is so far away from my photo management that it’s not even an option. At some point I will be installing Adobe Creative Suite on the new macbook, it just hasn’t made sense yet. When I really want to go to a town on a photo, I go to ye olde G4 and fire up the shop there. It takes forever, but when I am working on a single photo, it isn’t such a big deal. The reason I have not done many of these massive photo posts lately is because I like to make one photo stand up on its own – for it to be its own story, that kind of thing. Clumping a bunch of photos together feels only vaguely like a theme to be here – there is so much to say about each one, but it tends to get lost in the shuffle on this scale.
In any case, hope you enjoy the photos. I think the last of the snow melted a while ago in downtown Victoria. No idea what it’s like elsewhere.
re: what it’s like elsewhere..
…
‘mud’.
Thank you concrete!
nice photos Davin. I’m interested to hear what you think of Picasa. re: photoshop and iphoto, I’ve been using Aperture 2 lately, trying to get a handle on what its features are and overall usability. It’s a toss up for me between Aperture and Lightroom – I’ve changed minds twice so far – absolutely convinced about LR, then a day later, totally committed to Aperture. And that’s after I’ve tried the trial versions!
I think Aperture works better on a mac-intuitive basis, seems to have reasonable workflow and has great ease-of-use and support (50 video tutorials!), but I’m pretty sure that a greater proportion of the photography world revolves around Adobe software. You notice it in the available plug-ins, support, etc.
What are your thoughts around post-processing software?
And…. re: CS4 – Davin, you’re a student – not sure if you’ve considered the academic versions of Adobe’s creative suite – you can get the whole CS4 suite for $600. Or you can get Photoshop CS4 for like $300. Or you can get Lightroom for $99 (all prices USD).
Hi Davin,
Fantastic photos. I know what you mean about wanting to have one photo stand on its own! But yet it’s so easy to have a backlog because of that. Usually I just end up doing big photo posts because I just can’t pick one! 🙂
That first photo is absolutely wonderful. The cold metal framing the vibrantly lit city with moody tones… wow!
Nice! My favorites are the bench with the snow, the time lapse parking lot shot (you can see the headlights over top of the white snow, great!) and icicles.
Incredible photos as always Davin, thanks!
Wonderful photos, as ever, Davin!
snow_2008_31 (the first shot) and snow_2008_22 (blue/snow/lights/terminal/docking) rock my socks!
I’m trying to better myself as a photographer by putting in the work (settings, composition, light, etc) up front taking the shot, rather than “fixing it in post.” I never set out to Photoshop something, but I can be lazy in the field.
I can’t always avoid PS post-prod, but it’s being used less and less, which is good, IMO.
But yeah, I’ll always use it for cropping, shrinking and optimizing.
Does Picasa store thumbnails of offline volumes, such as CDs not currently in your ‘puter? Or just those photos which are on your HD?
p.s. – I think it’s “queue.” =)
Funny, this is a really good post to show the value of pp – snow and overcast are bitches for your camera’s white balance to compute. Everything washes out, or greys, or blues. Magentas Gone Wild!
Those are some sweet photos, thanks for sharing them!
I always keep up with your postings, and I think this post was great because of a number of photos. All great expressive photos 🙂
my favorites are # 5, 9, 14, and i especially love #2.
very nice! makes me miss canadian winters. we aren’t getting any snow here in china.