And boy is there a lot of sun just lately! Like lots of other places, Calgary is in a big heat wave. Yesterday topped 30 C, which is a hot day for us, and today is supposed to be even hotter. They are thinking that some century old weather records are going to get broken.
But at least it's a dry heat. Bone dry. Linda is out watering the plants as I write, at just past 5 in the morning. They are loving it, I'm pretty sure. The white, red, and pink peonies are going gang busters, and I've been out photographing them, morning and evening when the light is nice, getting them both wet and dry. A few of the peony photos are spectacular.
The roses are doing really well too. In fact, one photo, this one, is not at all what I expected, but I love it. No weird processing.
1.
I haven't strayed too far afield for other photos, but there's been lots of planning for future photos. I'm going to have to clean up the photo computer and make some space on the internal drive. What I like to do is keep the current month on the internal drive, because it's an SSD. Much, much faster, and the current month are the photos I'm most likely to be looking at. But, it's only a 500 GB. A mere half terabyte. As an aside, the very first half terabyte drive was made in 2005.
That's for all the current photos and the Lightroom program itself. Pretty well everything else plus backups are on a 18 TB hard drive array. There are two alternating 5TB hard drives that get swapped out monthly.
I've only had a few computers. An Atari ST, a Mac 5200 (I think), a Mac Cube (which I still own and still intend to use for photo display if possible, just because it's so frigging cool), a iMac from early 2008 that does email and most browsing for Linda, a Macbook Air laptop from 2012 (I think) that's used mainly for writing and preliminary photo work when on trips, plus the current iMac from late 2015 that is mainly for photo work.
It's only with this computer that I've had to manage the memory. All the other ones were half full at most when the time came to replace them. Generally, each new computer was about 10x better than the previous one. Buying a new iMac just now for photo work is not actually much of an improvement, even after almost 6 years. I'm holding out for the new chip, then Linda gets this computer. (Fingers crossed, knock wood, and all that, hoping the old one holds out.)
Right this moment, Lightroom shows I have 1363 photos for June (just under 48 GB), and I have 46.5 GB of room left. So roughly speaking, I can put about 2800 photos on the internal drive, and for many months, that's perfectly fine. I can probably clean up the internal drive a bit and make some room, so lets say 3000 photos.
Any race or community event could easily be 1000 photos. I did more than 3000 in one day shooting a theatre group. I have several community and theatre group shots scheduled for July and August. I'm signed up for 2 road trips, one of which will involve setting up the camera and letting it click away capturing the night sky, until the battery dies or the card fills up. Plus I'm rounding up subjects for my first personal project. Trying to add more photos than there is space for is a huge problem.
So, I should have bought a bigger internal SSD. Yes, I could buy a big external SSD, except the connection between them is the bottleneck. That's why the external memory is a hard drive, plus saving me several thousand dollars. A new computer will come with the much faster chip, faster transfer speeds, and the biggest SSD I can afford.
Just back from an 8K walk down to Fish Creek and back, desperately trying to keep up with Linda. She was moving along like a vampire trying to avoid sunrise. There were already several cars in the parking lot. I expect by mid-morning the parking will be completely full, and people will be dabbling in the stream. The water level is down to summer lows, and is probably warm now. It's getting to be time for the photo-wade.
2. Since I'm talking about Fish Creek, lets see some photos of recent walks there.
3.
4. Take your splash of colour where you find it.
Of the Day
14. Driftwood, but first a Curtis serendipity. Such a handsome kitty. We miss him.
Celina with tongue, but first a serendipity that almost certainly has been blogged. But who doesn't like a nice skyline?
16.
18. Peony
19. Flower
20. Susi first.
Here's a pair of photos, same subject, very different treatment. The first has been processed in Photomatix with filters to bring up colour. Most photographers would think this is well along the way to overbaked. The second has what I think of as my regular processing. What I saw with my eyes was between these two, probably closer to the second.
21-a
21-b
22. And Linda, posing.
