Happy New Year

I reaped a fine amount of booty this holiday season, "aahhrrr!" Some of it photog related. The best (that doesn't attach to a camera) was from my girlfriend who got me a copy of Scott Kelby's latest book on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. I'm only a tenth of the way into the book but it already has rewarded me with some good tips on Lightroom. I'd recommend it for those just starting out. I've only got about 1-1/2 years of Lightroom experience and most of it is fairly rudimentary.

The remainder of my holiday break has been to complete my summary of work titled Retrospective 2008. I'm preparing a set of large format 2009 annual calendars and a book using Blurb's BookSmart software for friends and family. Hope to have it all complete in January. If you're a close friend you might get one free. Links will be posted here once they are available for purchase.

It has been an immense amount of work and I will be changing how and when I post process images for 2009. To give you some flavor of the task, in 2008 I shot approximately 7700 images totaling over 45 Gbytes. All of that boiled down to a set of acceptable images for print of exactly 549 images totaling 2.89 Gbytes. Of those only a smaller amount will make it to print of course as I further refine and select for appropriateness.

It is a labor of love because I can expect to actually sell none of it. And in learning Lightroom 2 I also want to return to my 2007 library of images and process them down to a 2007 Retrospective publication. Again another 7200 images and roughly 32 Gbytes. These will be a bit more challenging because I didn't shoot in RAW for most of 2007, and Lightroom treats JPG images different from RAW.