All About Balance » Photography

Garibaldi Lake, June 2005

Rob — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 08:22:59 +0000

Four years ago, Pokin and I with a few friends hiked up to and around Garibaldi Lake, just north of Vancouver, BC. Calling these three pictures a “set” is being a bit generous I think ;)

Vancouver 2010 Photos!

Rob — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:36:22 +0000

Pokin and I visited Vancouver over the closing weekend of the Olympics. Have a look in the Flickr gallery at such classics as “Terrified Man In A Pub Full of Canadians Quietly Hoping Team USA Doesn’t Get Shut Out”.

New Photos!

Rob — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 04:29:31 +0000

In addition to not blogging about design, I also have recently not been blogging about photography. I’ve managed to work out Lightroom 2 and the amazing Flickr Export plugin to my liking, using some images taken during a 2-day stopover in Hong Kong earlier this year. Still working out the difference between Sets, Collections and how to keep things organized.

In the meantime, my Hong Kong, May 2009 set!

Galleries Updated

Rob — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:07:16 +0000

Before it was a UI blog, All About Balance was the home of my photography from 2003 to 2006. Those photos are back online (Galleries) and I’m working on several years worth of backlogged images, which I hope to process and upload in the coming weeks.

I was an early adopter of Apple’s Aperture. The idea of eliminating my bubble-gum-and-paper-clips RAW “workflow” (I use the term more loosely than it’s ever been) was, and still is very attractive. As with any version 1 product, there were glitches. The most unfortunate of which was the removal of my PowerMac Dual Core 2.0 GHz from the supported platforms list. Rather, the platform is supported but performance is so poor I opted to stick with the devil I knew. Not to mention RAW conversion quality issues, lagging support for bodies (e.g. Nikon D200) and an extraordinarily high price tag… Aperture 2 has been released, but I just can’t imagine performance has increased to the point where my now 3 year old PowerMac can keep up.

Along came Adobe with Lightroom. Over the course of 3 weeks, I used a beta version of Lightroom to cull 1500 images from my trip to Africa. Performance was terrific. RAW was terrific and already you could see the marked improvement in usability over their other tools.

Two years later, Lightroom is now at 1.4 and I’m working on understanding the ins and outs before importing all of my images, specifically with respect to backup and restore. That process does not seem well understood by many, and it needs to be bulletproof for me to take the plunge. Aperture had it right with their notion of a Vault, and first-class support in the UI as we’ve come to expect from Apple.

Currently on the lookout for good Lightroom books as I start to experiment…