Last night we had the privilege of being in attendance for the Ladysmith annual Light-Up ceremonies. This specific event brings in thousands upon thousands of people from Victora, Nanaimo, Duncan, etc. The streets are lined for kilometers along a specific street where the parade goes through.

At the end of the parade, the people are then moved down to the end of the street to watch an amazing fireworks show. This year, it was amazingly well put together. It went on for a good 15 minutes, and many “ooo’s” and “aaahhh’s” from the crowd. It was great fun to shoot fireworks once again with a camera that worked, without having errors.

A feature within Lightroom is the crop tool. It gives you the ability to quickly and with great ease, make an image the perfect crop, if you didn’t get it right straight out of the camera. One ability within the crop tool that many people don’t know about is the “Crop Guide Overview” menu. This unique menu within the “View” menu on the menubar allows the user to select from multiple different looks of the lines on the crop tool. As seen in the image, it has many different and unique looks.

If you are one for shortcuts then simply hit the “O” key to cycle through the different guildlines, and if you want to go back hit “O + Shift” together.Another great little hidden gem when in the crop tool is a nifty short-cut to go into the “Straighten” tool. Simply hit the “Command” key and your cursor will change from the default crop tool to the straighten tool.Well that’s my special list for the crop tool. If you have any other crop tool tips or tricks please drop them in the comments!

As I was checking my RSS feeds this morning I came across a very cool find! A prominent Mac productivity blog was using one of my images on their site. This specific image is found on my iStockphoto page. Thanks to Usingmac.com for their great website on OS X tips and tricks!

Well I just went into my iCal to check out what I was doing on a specific date and….nothing. My iCal had been wiped clean of all the events, calendars, and to-do’s! There was a moment of panic, a word or two that may have slipped out, but then it hit me. I use Back-Up for .Mac!

I know a lot of people harp on this piece of back-up software as being the worst out there for Macs, but with this recent event and the successful re-installment of all my calendars, events and to-do’s, I’d have to say that it WORKS! Thanks to .Mac and Back-up 3, I can breath again!

From This:

To This:

Recently I was going through my personal photo library and was noticing that some of the images were of iStockphoto quality. Thus I started to upload some to the site, which then plummeted me into a vortex of updating my stats and some images.

So here is my proclamation - I am back on iStockphoto as a regular contributor.

Check out the images:

Here we are again, Adobe seemed to be in a “updating” kind of mood last night. Not only did they release Lightroom 1.3 but they also introduced the newest version of Photoshop CS3, with Leopard compatibility.

Here are the release notes from Adobe.

If there has been on thing that has me annoyed with a specific developer that so many depend on, it’s the folks that make Super-Duper. Their development of the software seems to have come to a complete halt when it comes to Leopard compatibility.

Now I know, they are probably working hard on the newest greatest version of the software, but I can’t keep doing these hand made back-ups for very long. This almost has me to the point of going to another program for backing up.

With the release of 1.3, there came the great improvement to “export”. As seen in the screenshot.

With a quick glance of the window, it brings me back to the look of the Aperture export window. With the left bar filled with custom exports. At the very top of the window there is a “Export File to Disk” drop down. I wondered what this was for, so I scoured the internet for some recent news articles. What it looks like is this is where the third-party add-ons will go. A Flickr Uploadr directly from Lightroom perhaps? I can only hope!

Just checked my RSS articles to find out that Lightroom has been updated to 1.3. Along with Canon G9 support (yahoo!) and Leopard support (yahoo!).

Here are the release notes from Adobe.

Lots of people have asked me what I use to blog with and what system I use for the back-end. Well here is the “tell all” story of what I have used and what I am currently using.Blog Posting Software:For a while now I have been using Marsedit (by Red Sweater Software) to help compose and post my writings. Now if you are on a PC, this program will mean nothing to you. But I feel this program is the perfect writing tool for a blogger. It’s a local program on your HD so you don’t need an internet connection to be able to start writing up a post. That is the biggest selling point for me!It also allows the user to edit the posts in multiple textedit programs such as; WriteRoom, Textmate, SubEthaEdit, TextWrangler and BBEdit.Blog Software:For those who have been following this blog for a while, you will have noticed that I have switched my blog software as of late. I used to be a member of the Typepad community, but after realizing that I wanted more control over the design, look and functionality, I went for the popular open source Wordpress.Not only has Wordpress given me funtionality that I wanted, it also gave me the savings of $8/month to put towards things like, more camera equipment! The community around Wordpress is amazing and the developers are constantly give the users better abilities and features.Personal Blogging Tools:For a personal blog where you want to throw up lots of random content I would suggest using systems like Tumblr. I use this system for my *life by jordan blog. The features and clean design make this a great easy to use easy to read tumblog.Another system that I use for moment to moment blogging is Twitter. This is again a much different style of a blog. For people who like to “personality spam” the internet, this is your premier way of doing so. There are even abilities to update it using your mobile phone. This is what some people call either the ultimate stalker blog or the ultimate chat room. It’s definitely fun that is for sure!

Over the past 2 days I have been having issues connecting to or even posting anything to the website. After waiting to see if the issue would resolve itself, I had to contact tech support (at my hosting service). Within a couple of minutes I had a response, within 2 hours I was back up in and in business.For some reason my IP got on a blacklist for their servers. So I had to go through the process of getting off of it. Which, surprisingly, was an amazingly smooth experience. Thanks to A Small Orange for their help!

After a little bit of a run around by UPS, I finally received my G9 yesterday evening before dinner. Unpacking it was a joy, Canon really knows how to package things up nicely. Immediately I knew that I had a lot of re-learning to do in the space of Point and Shoot cameras.

Overall the camera is a nice size, being a little on the largish end. You definitely wouldn’t consider this a “compact” point and shoot, but it has a great comfortable heft and feel to it.

Today I headed down to the warf in Crofton with some Kaleomites to take a short photo session in the area and my G9. Shooting in RAW in AV mode, with the ND filter on.

The images came out amazingly sharp and textured. Doing a bit of pixel peeping will show that the images definitely are of 5D quality but are relatively close to a Rebel XT.

Where does the G9 die?

The exposure of the camera is lacking a bit, with it constantly over exposing the highlights. There are 3 different light metering modes, but I found that the camera consistently likes to revert back to it’s default (I don’t like it that much) which is center weighted. The on camera flash is a bit … harsh at times. Which was to be expected but I feel it still could have been better implemented.

RAW support as well seems to be lacking as of late. Lightroom will load the RAW images but seems to want to add an amazing amount of blue in the white balance of the images.

Where does the G9 shine?

If there was one area that I was blown away, it has to be in the macro mode. With a lens that can go down to F2.8 and a focus distance (from what I can tell) is about 1.5 inches. It has been so long since I’ve been able to really get so close to a subject that the end of my lens is just about touching it, so this was a great surprise!

As well with great macro features, the G9 is amazing at video. I usually never shoot video with a point and shoot. Although this camera has brought out the video man inside of me. With a great resolution of 640×480 @ 30 FPS, this captures some impressive video.

Overall?

After some initial personal grumbling about the manual settings, I have grown to love this camera already. Being a photographer who only had “large” cameras in his arsenal, this “small” point and shoot is the perfect carry around camera.

How can you go wrong with RAW support, 6X zoom (200MM), 3″ LCD and a hand full of other great features? This is a camera that I will never leave at home.

This man is a pioneer when it comes to copyright evolution. You may have seen the Creative Commons logo before, in places like Flickr, Youtube, etc. In this video he explains what it is, how it works and why it works.

Just over a year ago, I spent a day on a beach on the south eastern tip of Vancouver Island called Mystic Beach. There I was able to capture an amazing shot that I still love to this day.

Well, this week I was able to travel back to that beach with the Kaleo guys. This time the beach looked much different then the usual. Since the large swells that have happened recently the beach was no longer a beautiful sandy beach, but rather it was filled with rocks and logs. Putting all that aside, there was still a beautiful display of magic in the form of a sunset that evening. With a student posing peacefully in the foreground and the wonderful colors behind, it made for the perfect shot.

After much debate and the dollar being so high, I took advantage of this and bought the Canon Powershot G9. Saving roughly $150 in the total package. I’m pretty excited to get this sucker out of the box and play with it.

Delivery date is set for tomorrow, just in time for a trip to Victoria for a Warren Miller film! Nothing starts the ski season off right like a good Warren Miller film. I’ll be sure to post some sample images of the quality after the event.