I took my shingle on the road again today, and displayed my wares at Child of God school. I had really high hopes for this show. It was only their first spring show, but they had 50+ vendors signed up, and had a great track record with their fall shows.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.

I’d guess there were a hundred or so customers that came by — very slow traffic. I did make enough sales to cover my costs, but still…. I had much higher expectations. I’ll give ‘em a shot in the fall and see what that show is like.

I did sell another 18×24 of Crystal. That thing continues to amaze me with its appeal. The fun part was the transaction. I don’t have a way to take credit cards at the shows, and the lady that bought it — the pastor’s wife — asked if I took PayPal, and we began to figure out how to meet, pay, etc. Then … eureka! I realized that I had my broadband wireless card with me. I fired it up, she logged into PayPal, and sent me the funds on the spot. That was cool!

The folks at the office took me out for drinks and pool tonight — what a fun time! Quite a few folks showed up and made sure the night went well. I can tell I need a good bit of practice playing pool — my shooting was atrocious!

Of course, there were some photos taken, which’ll appear here shortly.

Monday I start my new gig — I’m sure it’ll make for quite a change!

Just before the deadline for the $100 discount, I picked up Adobe Photoshop Lightroom over this last weekend. Lightroom is poised as a workflow management tool for photographers, and from what I’ve read and seen, it seems like a tool I wanna use.

Until last night, that is. (But that was only temporary — more on that later.)

I’ve imported my 60,000 image library into a single Lightroom library. The goal of my work is to be able to carry my library of small images and keywords with me on my MacBook wherever I go. This’ll allow me to find something that I’ve shot, whether or not the actual photo archive is with me or not. So, the week was spent importing away.

So, last night, I docked my MacBook up to all its external goodness (USB, Firewire, network and power), fired up Lightroom… and it said my folders were there, but didn’t know the counts, and then it chunked the heck out of the external RAID. And it chunked. And it chunked. Finally it stopped, and seemed to know the count of photos again. However, everytime I did just about anything to manage the library, I got the spinning Frisbee of death, sluggish behavior, and no kind of performance like I’ve read I should have with my hardware.

After some research, it appeared that I needed to import with an option set to have standard sized previews created along the way. I’ve been kinda going through Scott Kelby‘s new book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightoom Book for Digital Photographers, trying to pick up tips as I use that book as the guide for getting me up to speed on this new tool. I trust Scott’s work so much, and have several of his books — he’s really a Prince of Photoshop (or maybe a Duke or King) and a good Christian soul… all good things to me. Kelby’s text indicated that importing with the standard sized previews turned on would be painfully slow:

“…turn on Render Standard-Sized Previews checkbox and go grab a cup of coffee. Or two. And a sandwich. Maybe catch a movie.”

I took him at his word, and turned that option off. And Scott was right — the import was speedy. However, as it ends up, that setting is dreadfully required (at least for me — YMMV) to get my mojo working on my MacBook. Here’s what I think was going on. I think the MacBook knew the external RAID had been disconnected, and so Lightroom knew it too. I believe this caused Lightroom to freak out and try to find all the photos, and that left me sluggish and more than a little peeved at Lightroom.

I let it settle down (maybe 30 minutes — the Cardinals were winning, so no prob finding something to do ), and then I forced it to create standard-sized previews. And so The Little MacBook That Could began to whir and spin and work…. all night. In fact, it still wasn’t done when I left for work this morning. Scott was right again — it takes a while to perform that work.

(For those of you keeping score at home, it’s Scott 2, Colin 0. )

In the end though, it was those previews that seem to be the key to keeping Lightroom sane, and keeping the MacBook from turning into a home for wayward spinning Frisbees. It’s also those previews that allowed Lightroom and I to kiss and make up, and allow it to continue to be my tool of choice for workflow.

I’m up to page 15 now in Scott’s book. Wonder what I’ll learn next!

Years ago, I managed a group of Windows technical resources, and after a few years doing that, I moved back into a technical role, plodding my way through a UNIX engineering group for a couple of years, followed by three years of work on a middleware engineering team.

Our company is always looking for new ways to do things. I spotted an opportunity like that, applied, and have accepted a position on the Dark Side.

Come Monday, I will be a engineering Manager again.

I’m really excited about this new gig, and have already started working on the job postings for the folks I will be hiring. A promotion is always a good thing — and this one was hard fought against some other very qualified candidates — but this one’s especially sweet because of the conditions. No 24×7 oncall, no production support duties, and best of all, I’m charting new waters for the company as well as for myself. And, I’m hiring my own staff, rather than inheriting an pre-built team. That’s a tremendous amount of latitude… and responsibility.

What a great way to end the month of April!

This morning, NewsFire picked up a piece by Steve Simon on the O’Reilly Digital Media Blog talking about Warming Up. Basically, the focus of the article centered on preparing to photograph.

There were a few tricks in the piece — none of which I’ve tried — but the real meat was to get your mind in the right frame for taking wonderful photographs, and ensuring you’re ready to do that when the moment comes. I think that’s a huge thing, and probably something that’s not talked about enough. I’ve had folks tell me to shoot everyday — that’ll get you ready for anything. Others say to shoot a lot everyday. But to do that, you still have to prepare. Even Lance Armstrong stretches out before going on a daily ride.

So what’s the best way to do that? Well, I dunno. I can’t even tell you what I do, but I do know that inspiration (for me, anyway) is key. If I’m in a beautiful locale, I’m drawn in and swept away with the feel and sense of the place. And when it all comes together, and I’m hearing the sounds, smelling the smells and seeing the place — really seeing it — then I know I’ve found my muse, and I’m ready to make some beautiful images.

I think that’s why I get a little dry on new images when I’m not travelling or when some kind of beauty hasn’t struck me in the yard. I have a tough time getting motivated when there’s not something beating on my senses, compelling me — forcing me — to go photograph. That’s probably not something only I suffer from, but it’s something I’ve gotta get beyond.

Ideally, I should be able to find something interesting to shoot daily. Maybe it’s not all beautiful, maybe it’s not all nature, but there’s a kind of discipline that can only come from practicing my craft, opening my eyes to new things, and trying new techniques on a near-daily basis. There are folks out there that shoot daily, and post a photo from that day’s shoot — why not me? Dunno if I can keep up with doing that daily, but surely more than once every couple of weeks would be useful!

Watch this space!

Today, Adobe finally released Photoshop CS3!!! I’ve been waiting a long time for this, and am looking forward to the improved Photoshop experience on my MacBook. This also clears the way for me to get myself off my Quad G5, and continue my migration to a more portable, mobile experience.

However, there’s still a fly in the ointment… My trusty filters from Nik Software aren’t yet universal, so to use them, I’d need to still run CS2 (which has to run under Rosetta), or force CS3 to run under Rosetta and take the performance hit there. Blecch. Hopefully Nik will get it together soon, and get us PPC-to-Intel folks taken care of.

In any case, it’s time for me and Mr. Adobe to have some conversations about getting their code running on The Little MacBook That Could!

Friday night, Darla and I took part of our tax refund, and picked up a new MacMini for the Deauxmayne. Once again, I’m just blown away at how easy it is to set up these new Macs. Just awesome.

However, the migration wasn’t without its warts. I had a horrible problem Saturday with the mail server. Everytime I’d send mail, I’d kill the network. Well, everything pointed to an MTU problem, and that ended up being part of the problem, along with a bad network cable. Apparently the MacMini, while Gig-E enabled, couldn’t handle the 9k MTU I was trying to use. Once I changed it, all was well.

Today, I spent the day getting the blog working, and once the work was done, I was migrated completely to the new machine. Cool, huh?

So, enjoy the new server, and let me know if you see any dust lying about!

Word’s down today that the new OS from the Fine Folks from Cupertino — Leopard, or OS X 10.5 — won’t be released until October.

Apple’s original plan was to have it out this spring, but the spectre of the iPhone, and the work to complete it, have whacked Leopard to Q3. That’s uncool. I understand the rationale, but still…. uncool.

For me, I think the potential for possibly integration of Windows apps on the desktop and official support for Boot Camp are the biggies. Those are not huge things, but big nonetheless. There’s supposedly a bunch of other goodies, both visible and under the covers, that’ll make Apple Life much more enjoyable.

So, I’ll sit and wait to see when this comes, and what kind of hardware updates may accompany the launch of Leopard. I’m still holding out some kind of hope for a quad-core laptop. It seems just about doable, and that might just be what it takes to get me off the Little MacBook That Could.

Yes, I brought back the old skin for the Deauxmayne.

Why? Well, I noticed a couple of things. One was some folks telling me it was hard to read — smaller font, white on black, etc. Another was that I noticed that conversations have just flat disappeared from the site! In a few weeks of having the new skin up, there’s been next to no conversation. That ain’t the point of this thing!

So, the old skin is back. There’ll be some tweaks as I spruce it up a bit, but I don’t think you’ll see anything too dramatic.

Scott Kelby posted a link today to a video on YouTube called Masters of Photography. It’s an interesting watch, but the thing I notice is….

There’s almost no nature or landscape photography in the show. I feel slighted!

In truth, I understand the desire to capture the human condition on film, I really do. However, I think seeing the condition of the planet is also just as important. We measure time with photos, and while the changes in nature can be on a planetary scale of time, capturing those images and reflecting upon them is no less important.

So, nature photographers unite! There’s a whole world out there, just waiting to be seen!