Category: NFN

Thank God, the Jesus Tablet is here. If someone could give me back the past 30 minutes, I’d skip the impartial (oh well) cover stories of Time and Newsweek, and head right over to “Fake Steve,” here.

“Needless to say,” as they like to say in photo-blogging, only to then go right on to say whatever is needless to say: I’ll buy one as soon as I’m back in Manhattan.

I’ve been shifting more and more work from Adobe Photoshop to Lightroom during the past two or three years. Still, every single image had to go through Photoshop at some point. But now, the latest beta version 3.0 of Lightroom, out for two weeks or so, has become so good though that I don’t need Photoshop anymore. Not only that. For the things I do in post processing, which is mostly local changes of contrast, Lightroom is intuitive and quick — no more tedious selections or messing with layers, for example. And, obviously, all edits are “non-destructive” and can be copied to similar images, which saves a lot of time.

If you’re on a Mac and dislike Adobe, the latest version of Apple Aperture is not bad at all and, in principle, does the same things as Lightroom; unfortunately, my up-to-date Macbook Pro, equipped with generous amounts of extra RAM, is brought to its knees by Aperture after only a little bit of editing; and, at least for my camera, the raw conversions, on a pixel level, are more refined with Lightroom no matter how much work I put into Aperture.

What am I to do with all that free time now? Take the bar exam? A Ph.D. in philosophy perhaps? Sleep more?

Well, my confidence in the human skeleton is sky high these days. My surgeon removed the metal fixtures he applied after last year’s fall in the mountains, and the shattered elbow feels as good as new already. I just had to make a photo of the metal pieces as well, simply because I’m quite amazed how much stuff fits into one joint, and how well things can grow back together. A nice touch: When I opened my eyes after anesthesia, the first thing I saw right in front of me where the nicely steamed metal pieces, *all* of them, sealed in a plastic bag. There was a risk that the nails would not come out in one piece, but they did. And the cut is modest compared to last year. As I said earlier: If my work is remotely as good as that of my surgeon, I will always be alright.