(Whatever happened to the sad young boy on the right)
There's a new photo-editing software that is meant to compete with PhotoShop. I am not so convinced, but it's easy enough to try the 10 day free trial and see, I suppose. So far it has crashed on me twice when I tried to import a folder of photos. CS sent me a link to an article in which one can sign up for a beta version, blah, blah..
I am going to start editing my photos more. At least that is what I keep saying. I have focused on taking snapshots, doing as much as I can do within the camera, but it is time to expand, time to grow. My assumption is that learning more outside the camera will help me make better decisions within the camera. Many friends tell me that Adobe Lightroom is the application to obtain. Apple is doing away with Aperture soon and iPhoto as well, we're told. Two apps which I have been using for free for many years, having been given them as gifts from Apple. I mainly only crop photos and might adjust the exposure slightly here and there.
For some reason the Nikon D700 does not employ spot metering as well as my other cameras, a thing that I use often, though it is more likely that I have somehow not figured out how to adjust the settings within the camera.
Ah, I just did some research and discovered why the spot metering is so bad on the D700. It is a system that is left over from the 80's. That's too bad. I'll start experimenting with center-weighted metering more. I like to shoot subjects that are backlit, to give them a glow. This can be a metering/exposure challenge.
It's time to grow again. I feel a swelling in my heart.
I will borrow Rachel's copy of Rosetta Stone for Spanish, will stop watching so much pornography first thing in the morning, will memorize the Greek alphabet, and on Sundays I will try to help the poor, and all of the widows that I can find, starting with the youngest, until I run out of energy.
Well, we'll start with the new photo editing software and see where things go from there.
At least I don't have to give up on video games, having never been lured into the world of gaming, though often mocking from its peripheries. Not really mocking, but sneering in quiet condescension. No, not that either, really. I work in a community of people that are smitten with gaming, and without much effort I have found a way of being a lonely outsider there as well.
Some say loneliness is the source of my troubles.
Yesterday, a confused meth addict referred to this site as the "I'm a sad man blog." It's all true, of course. It just took a temporarily wandering convict to point it out to me. Female meth-addicts cease being Ms. or Mrs. and end up being referred to solely as the alleged so-and-so.
Oh, I should not be so mean. She just happens to have been involved with another addict who shamelessly stole several things of value from me, and then in a lucid moment tried to apologize by blaming his behavior on all of the ways that the world of music had wronged him over the years.
One day, perhaps, I'll tell the whole story. It's a familiar one, the world of music and drugs is littered with people just like them. Everybody will recognize the common thread, the one that leads to the inevitable VH1 conclusion. Where were they then...
Loneliness gives rise to sadness, despair to contemplation, inspection to scrutiny, analysis to abstraction, thought to troubled action... All roads tend to lead. The labyrinth of addiction seems like a map to those entranced by its curved corridors.
It's all quite sad, which returns us almost to the top of the paragraph above, somehow never making it all the way to the singularly unaddressed beginning, loneliness.
It is quite sad, though, all of these old man concerns trotted out for open inspection.
If you think these words look so terrible placed here then you should see them on the fading, cracked lips of a woman.
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