A first, and some before after

 Here's a first. The very first photo edited with a tablet and pen system. I'd always struggled with the adjustment brush in Lightroom. It usually made things worse. Much worse. Some of it was an imperfect understanding of how the application tool worked, but part of it was the physical tool, a track pad. On or off. Click, boom.

Here's the after.

And the before.

Before the tablet I wouldn't even have attempted to adjust those little sunbeams. The result would look terrible. As it is, I'm pretty pleased with it as a first attempt.

There's lots of ways to configure it, and I spent a happy few hours playing and thinking about how I do things, and how I could do things. I'm not convinced I've got it perfect, but it's easy to tweak. It made me think about the controls in Lightroom that are also keyboard commands, which I tend not to use. This is all part of my experiment to try to take my photography up a level, so I'll be playing with this for a while, perhaps going back and redoing old images.

The tablet is really designed to work with Photoshop, and I'll be starting to play with that a little more as well. That should keep me busy and out of mischief for the rest of my life.

How did I come by it? My friend Lynda (not my wife Linda) wasn't using it and gave it to me to try out. She doesn't want it back. So far so good, as the saying goes. I'll have to find something nice to do for her. We met up yesterday in a socially distant way and went for a walk in Fish Creek, catching up socially and professionally. We are in much the same profession, and met on a contract. We have lots to talk about during photo walks.

Here's another before and after.

As it turns out, appliances are manufactured on a much faster time frame than they used to be. Planned obsolescence and all. Our old oven was 16 years old and the door latch/lock mechanism failed, locking the oven shut. There were various remedies proposed by Mrs Google, but none worked. A call to the manufacturer rep didn't generate any new ideas, but did disclose the replacement part was likely no longer available. 

As a digression, the part, or a functionally identical part almost certainly exists. Somewhere. Finding it is the challenge. There were a certain number of them made for the production run of the appliance, and somewhere there is an algorithm that tells the manufacturer how many more to make to honour their warranty commitments. They live in a warehouse somewhere, or some number of somewheres. Eventually the last one is sold, and maybe for a while there is a bit of trade between warehouses, but then that oven starts getting old. The remaining parts start gathering dust. They get moved. They don't get counted in an inventory and drop out of the computer databases. For all intents and purposes they cease to exist. It may be possible to tinker with the lock to disable it and yet have the oven continue to be functional. Maybe. I'm not going to experiment with an appliance that is designed to optimally mix natural gas with air for combustion. These things are always more complicated than it might seem on the surface. Someone not in the trade never knows what interlocks or safety features are part of the design, and it's generally a bad idea to disable or circumvent safety devices. 

We were willing to call a service tech and pay for the call, and the part, but we weren't willing to call the tech, be told the part was not in stock, that there wasn't even a similar part that would work, and still be on the hook for the service call that didn't fix anything.

So Linda went oven shopping. I was buried in work meetings. This one includes an air fryer rack we are eager to try out, and a griddle that sits in the middle of the cook top. One of the burners puts out about a third more heat than the biggest one on the old oven, so the morning coffee routine goes about a third more quickly, and that's a good thing, as long as I don't get distracted by the cat, or the sunrise, or, or... There's already been one adventure with hot chocolate.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Paperweight