Wes’s Life

With the ter­ror­ism plot foiled, we have stepped up our secu­rity to a liquid-​free level. Yes, that means no liq­uids what­so­ever, bar­ring a few excep­tions (for­mula for babies if the mother will drink it in front of the secu­rity agents). Over at The Con­sumerist they found a few images and decided to joke around with em. I think it’s good to keep laugh­ing even when some­thing like this hap­pens, laugh­ter is what I live for.

Ter­ror­ist JuicyJuices, a Photo Essay

DSC_4134, orig­i­nally uploaded by Wes Baker.

I went to the Wood­hall Vine­yard a week­end ago and trounced around their prop­erty snap­ping up what­ever I could. My timing was ho-​hum, but I still man­aged to take a few shots that I was proud of. Take a look at the rest on flickr.

Wood­hall Vine­yard Set

Adobe man­aged to sneak this one out pretty qui­etly. I haven’t seen to much in the news yet, but I’m sure its about to explode. The Light­room beta, that was once exclu­sively avali­able to Mac owners and their shiny hard­ware, is now freely avalaible to the wanton major­ity of us. What can you expect? I’m not too ter­ri­bly sure to be honest, but since it is an Adobe prod­uct, you could prob­a­bly wager that it’ll be semi-​polished, a memory-​hog, clean, and useful to a fault. I would def­i­nitely have to rec­om­mend that all RAW shoot­ers at least give this a shot, espe­cially since Cap­ture NX seems to be as fast as the speed of smell.

Edit: After using it a bit, I am quite astounded at the clean­li­ness and sim­plicty that this pro­gram offers. Yes, I was cor­rect about the memory-​hog bit; it man­aged to get up to about half a GB of my memory and around 85% of the CPU. Yet, I love the fact that you can hide the major­ity of the inter­face and leave your­self with the image and the edit­ing panel. I do think it needs a few things to finish off the job. It def­i­nitely needs a way to adjust the curve (and yes, I did notice the con­trast slider, but I want my curve).

I think that once this pro­gram goes retail, I might be seeing if they offer an edu­ca­tion dis­count on it and pick it up at my book­store at col­lege. I highly rec­om­mend you take a look at it.

Adobe Light­room

Went out for a nice walk on a nice day. Took plenty of great pic­tures, ended up with around 300 shots, which leads me to around a total of 3200 shots! Played with my 30mm a lot more and got some great shots. I was out for around two hours and walked around the farm near Foxridge. I got very close to some don­keys and cows and man­aged to snap up some sheep with my 70-300mm. The cows just didn’t move, but the don­keys came to the fence because there was a mother and her son feed­ing them apples. I had a pleas­ant con­ver­sa­tion with her about pho­tog­ra­phy and what I do after I take the shot.