AaronSpruit

Lately here there haven’t really been to many rainy days, at least not on the weekends.  However, in the Bucktown/Wicker Park/Logan Square area, you’ll see this graphitti quite a bit.  This ones was actually on a USPS mailbox.

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I’ve just been very busy, or at least it’s seemed that way.  I’ve been neglecting a lot of other things too, which probably isn’t great.  Hopefully I’ll be back in the saddle for at least a little bit with this site.  I just haven’t had a lot of motivation, and walking around my new place hasn’t made me want to take pictures, yet.  I’m sure I’ll get there.  I also need to get off my duff and start taking more night shots.  Oh, and I doubt I’m going to keep the “daily” thing going on here.  I’ve noticed that I like it better when I don’t feel pressured and put up, what I think, are subpar images.  So updates may become some what sporatic (as if they aren’t already, I know).

I’ve also been looking at better ways to manage my “workflow”.  I was a beta tester for Adobe Lightroom, and, at the time, wasn’t a huge fan of it.  However I now think I see the possibility of it, or at least something like it.  Right now I don’t keep any images online.  They are all on CD or DVD, which is what I want because as much as I shoot (or at least used to), I’d eat through disk space like it was nobody’s business.  The downside to that being, there’s no nice way for me to be able to view all those archives, without physically putting a CD in.  I was creating contact sheets for each archive, but that becomes a pain and doesn’t really help.

A tool like Lightroom (it’s not quite Lightroom yet), would definitely help me in this area.  iView Media Pro, now Microsoft Expression Media, is another tool that does similar things.  The downside to both is that they really do a lot more than just what I need.  Lightroom could just get rid of the “Develop” and “Slideshow” section and I’d be happy, along with allowing for external media and better handling it (currently it is “teh suck”).  iView handles external media much better, but is again more than I need since I’m only going to use it for digital images.

Oh, and they’re both very expensive (if only Expression was included with my MSDN subscription).

I’m hoping that Lightroom v1.1 will fix my issues with the offline media, and it should be released sometime soon.  However, until that happens, I actually can not import any of my offlined images (boo!) since all the images sit in the root of the CD and are named similar (the naming’s been fixed from here on out.  I set my camera to not reset the file number count).  Oh, and there’s a bug for Vista users that want to import off of a CF card, yay.

So like I said, I’ll probably revisit this topic when 1.1 comes out, but sadly I’m stuck doing it the same way for now.