Keith's Odyssey to Planet Fitness: There was a downtown walk, but

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

There was a downtown walk, but

Once upon a time last summer Linda and I went to Newfoundland for a month. I'm still working through putting photos on the blog. However I ended up missing my community association's Stampede breakfast. Yet there are photos from the even on my photo blog page. How? My friend Sean stepped in for me and took a lovely set of photos. He shared that folder with me and I put a link to it on the blog.

Except photographer's run out of disk space eventually. I still have space, mainly because I've been pruning. We met up to pass over a USB stick, (yes we know there are ways to migrate from one Google Disk to another, but we didn't want to mess around with it, and I don't really trust some (or any, really) of the cloud stuff.) and went for a walk along the Bow. As always we discussed many things. I took along the 35mm film camera, with colour film, and used about half a roll. I've been carrying that camera around a bit looking for the rest of the roll. Not sure when that will happen.

I'm finally getting to the point of contemplating thinking seriously about replacing computers. This photo editing computer is a 2015 era iMac. It's beginning to show it's age when ingesting lots of images. It can't run the current version of Photoshop, not that I know how to use it.

The writing laptop is even older, I think it's 2012 or so. It's adequate for running Scrivener but it's beginning to fall apart and the trackpad is going wonky. I replaced the battery a while ago, and now this one seems to be losing it's zap. It can't run Lightroom, so I can't take it to a photo session to tether to the camera, if a client should ask for such a thing. The OS and browsers are old enough that some websites won't talk to it.

I think it's safe to say I got my money's worth out of them, but my problem is that I'm prudent with money, and don't like to spend it before I have to. As long as something is working I don't want to give it up. Yes, I hear the peanut gallery yelling "cheap, you're cheap!" And the monitor on this computer is the best one I've ever used in my life.

I've been thinking about getting a mid range M4 Macbook, and having to buy a replacement monitor. Except the immediate replacement is $2000. Yes, really. There are monitors almost as good as the one I have for half that price. And no, there is no way to continue to use the iMac as a monitor. Sigh. I've even contemplated using a low end mac mini as the front end to ingest and build previews, (previews are the bane of Lightroom) then do the final edits on this iMac. That's more than a little cumbersome. Stay tuned for news. If you have any advice on this topic I'd love to hear from you.

If you're in Calgary in February and interested in photography, you have to check out the Exposure Festival. If you come, you'll see one of my prints. Come on the 13th and I'll be there. If you want to get my take on the prints or learn more about the process, and can't make that date, buy me a coffee and I'm happy to give you a tour on almost any other day. Don't wait too long, I've already got one date booked.