I still really love using Linux, but I don’t follow the Linux press like I used to. I’ve settled into a comfortable zone where I only follow Fedora and KDE news since that’s what I use. But I followed it very closely for nearly 10 years. Every year there’d be multiple articles asking whether this was the year of the Linux desktop, meaning people would finally see the Microsoft hegemony for what it was and throw off the shackles of proprietary software. It never came. Thanks to Ubuntu and Vista, we almost got there. Then there were the Netbooks, but the manufacturers chose horrible versions of Linux and underpowered machines and Microsoft came out with Windows 7 starter edition. And people went to Macs instead of Linux in the biggest tech comeback of … ever.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, I’ve been into photography since I was five years old.  That’s when I got my first Kodak Instamatic camera and started shooting photos and creating photo albums.  I have about ten photo albums, with most of them coming from when I got to high school and could really afford film and developing.  Ever since I got my first digital camera in my second semester of college, the number of photos I’ve taken yearly has increased nearly exponentially.  Because I’m an organized person, I started off putting my photos into event-based folders.  Once I realized that’d quickly get unwieldy, I decided to put them in folders by date.  Eventually, software like Picassa, Lightroom, and digiKam came out which would have allowed me to continue to to organized my photos by event because they could read the metadata and reorganize them by date.  However, I’ve found that my system has two main benefits 1)my photos remain organized even if my descendants don’t have access to programs that can read the metadata on the photos.  2) it’s very easy for me to very quickly find a photo.  It would be somewhere like 2010->Jan 10->So and So’s Wedding.

If you read anywhere on the web, you’ll see people talking about how Photoshop (and digital photo manipulation) is ruining the purity of photography.  People argue endlessly about this as if they could get everyone on their side.  Guess what?  This controversy is older than radio.  Recently I’ve been reading the great photography history, How To Read a Photograph.  It turns out that as early as 1898,  people were purposely publishing their photographs straight as they happened to develop.  In the 1920s there emerged a division between photographers over whether it was more proper for photographers to alter their negatives (and therefore become an interpretive art form like painting) or if they had to be developed as is.  People had already been experimenting throughout the 1900s with the usage of different chemicals to affect their prints in different ways.  Photographers even used different films from different manufacturers because they were known to give darker greens or more saturated colors or better grain.  Digital photography is no different - it’s just that dark rooms took years to master while anyone can get the basics of the Canon RAW (or Lightroom RAW) editor.  But, having seen that this division has existed within photography for the past 100 years, I don’t think it will be going away any time soon.

For quite some time I’ve been been struggling with the point of Adobe’s Lightroom.  Other than competing with Apple’s Aperture, it appears not to have a purpose.  Of course, right around the time Lightroom (LR) was hitting its stride, I stopped reading photography magazines.  The zine I loved the most was a British one published by the same company that puts out Linux Format Magazine.  Unfortunately, even with an exchange rate of $1:1 Britsh Pound (which isn’t the case), it’s still $90 per year.  So I may have missed lots of tutorial and explainer articles talking about why LR is such a great program.  My impression of it was of a Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw.  So I didn’t really see the point of paying $200 for that when those programs work just fine for me.  It also seemed to straddle some Photoshop territory and I just couldn’t figure it out.