Tralfaz

Month: October 2016

  • Photography

    About a month ago, I posted about how I was finally cutting the cord, and moving all my serious pictures out of the Apple Photos application. It was just too constricting, and while their “Pro” app for photographers, Aperture was great, they have abandoned it.

    I began seriously using Adobe Bridge which was free (as in beer) and worked pretty well as a lightweight photo manager. But it’s major flaw was that the importer really didn’t handle RAW files gracefully (the version I had, CS6, wouldn’t preview the .CR2 files from my camera, so I couldn’t do any pre-sorting. Lame.)

    SO, it is back to Lightroom, a more feature rich Adobe product, that integrates well with Photoshop, and offers many capabilities. A bit overkill for a hobbyist like me, but its importing tool is incredible.

    Now, I am going through my images, re-organizing them, and selectively editing them. If you follow me on Facebook, look at my photo albums for some of the results.

    One thing I was turned on to are a set of filters from Topaz Labs, plugins for Photoshop, that give you some insanely cool effects for your pictures. I have to thank an old friend Inge Fernau, for this addiction. I will write about them in future posts, but to summarize them, they are plugins for photoshop with presets (and other manual controls) that give a huge variety of really incredible effects.

    Here is a gallery of images that I have processed.

  • Train kept a Rolling

    Train kept a Rolling

    Having rejoined the working world, I am now lucky enough to be working for a company that it makes total sense to take the VTA Lightrail in to the office. I live about 1.1 miles from the Cottle station, a 20 minute walk from home. Then 50 minutes to get to Tasman station, and a 5 minute walk to the office.

    Since driving the 18 miles takes between 40 minutes and an hour, and the train gives me a low stress travel versus the stress of stop and go traffic.

    Over the last 7 weeks, I have learnt the following.

    1. The trains have wifi. Cool, and it is free. But it appears to be a single cellular connection. Ok to surf Facebook, but it is too inconsistent for logging into VPN. That’s OK, I prefer the solitude and reading my Kindle to working.
    2. The first five and a half weeks, not once was there a fare enforcement officer. I was beginning to think that it would be low risk to not swipe the Clipper Card and pay the fine if caught. Then in the last week and a half, there have been 5 verifications.
    3. Apparently, if you want to score some pot, near the Santa Clara stop is the place to do it. It seems like every day I see some dealing going on on the sidewalk or in that parking lot.
    4. It is (in general) worth timing my commute to catch the limited express. The express saves 6 stops, and about 10 minutes.
    5. $2.00 a trip is a pretty good deal. I figure that if I would drive, 34-35 miles round trip, at 21mpg and $3 a gallon (Stewie needs premium), that is about the same cost to drive and ride the train.
    6. Some smugness, to know that I am doing even a little bit to reduce my carbon footprint. Of course, I wipe that out by driving a sports car for fun.

    Yep, it is a pretty good deal.

    An aside: Taking the train is convincing me that one day I need to bum around downtown San José and take pictures. St. James park, the post office, SJSU, victorian homes, and others are begging to be captured.