The beginnings of some informational documents (photography)

Well, I've finally started something I've been thinking about for a while. There's a lot I still intend to do with this, but it's a start, which will hopefully encourage me to do more.

I now have the beginnings of a guide to the Canon EOS 30D digital SLR.

There's a whole lot more to add to that guide (photos of menus and such, much more detailed analyses of existing concepts, other controls, and general prettification), and many other guides (other cameras, as I get them, and various peripherals and such) to write.

Hopefully, this will become a useful store of knowledge for folks wanting to find information about their equipment.

Eventually, I may even supplement things with short videos. (Gotta get some decent video capability first, though -- and of course more disk space to store it all!)

Aperture versus Lightroom

I just found a blog post by an acquaintance of mine (Ted), comparing Apple's Aperture with Adobe's Lightroom. It's well written, and I think I agree with everything he says in there (well, some things I hadn't tried doing, but everything I've tried...)

I, like him, am frustrated with the lack of an update for Aperture lately. I really liked it for a while there, and I miss it, now that I'm predominantly using Lightroom. And yet, that's the situation: I'm predominantly using Lightroom, because of issues with performance in general, and also, something Ted doesn't mention (because I presume he hasn't tried it), the way that Aperture utterly fails to behave properly with a project whose RAW files are on an NFS-mounted drive, once you quit Aperture. There's a way to work around it ("reconnect" the masters), but boy is it a pain. Those files are in the same place they were last time, and the drive is online and mounted, so very frustrating for Aperture to claim they're missing. Not to mention slow to reconnect a large number of them.

So, here's hoping Apple is still working on this -- both because I want Aperture to improve again, and I want the pressure of continued competition to make both options better.

Alas, for a variety of reasons, the notion of writing my own competitor is unlikely to ever happen... it's very tempting, though. I think the world could have a lot better than either of those programs, in certain ways.

If anyone wants to start an open source project, though, I'd be glad to contribute some time and ideas, and likely code, to the effort.

Google, here we go!

While I must admit to a little bit of ambivalence about returning to the work in the tech industry, and certain other little nibbling concerns, the fact remains that mostly I'm excited about the prospect of working at Google. The amount of time I have for my photography will surely decrease, which saddens me a bit, yet on the other hand, I've been feeling frustrated for a while by inability to make a few key equipment purchases, and having a salary again should help out quite a bit with such things, not to mention having health insurance again, etc., etc. So we'll see. Who knows, it may even re-invigorate me in ways that will leave me doing more photography. Or at least more of my art in that realm. That'd be nice. We'll see...

Anyway, yeah. I've accepted a job at Google, and I'm due to start on January 7th. There'll be two weeks of training down in Mountain View, CA, in the buildings I once worked in when they belonged to SGI. That'll take me back. (And my recollection of that place goes back further than that, as well -- I remember going with my mom to the little produce stand on the edge of the field that once occupied that same land. That was when I was in high school, and my mom worked at SGI, in a group a later worked in. Hmmm, there seems to be some circularity to my life, eh? ;-)

So, I'd love to try to get together with old friends from the bay area, so if you have any time free between January 5th or 6th and say the 20th, let me know, and we'll see if we can make something happen.

I shall do my best to keep to the "don't be evil". :-) Wish me luck.