Photography Musings
Over the last several years, I’ve become an avid amateur photographer. I use a Mac laptop and heavily utilized iPhoto as my “organizer”, but the editing capabilities were slim. I then had to purchase a little software gadget called “iPhoto Library Manager” because I filled up my hard drive and had no way to archive photos off and still be able to open them in the iPhoto library (which kept the organization structure). This software allowed me to have multiple iPhoto libraries, so I could have one for baseball, one for lighthouses, one for family trips, etc. and store them on an external firewire drive. Still, I found tagging photos with keywords arduous and a task often ignored. So my photo library became quite a mess as the years went on. My workflow consisted of offloading a card into the local iPhoto on my laptop and creating an album, then at some later date (usually when the hard drive was threatening to fill again), I would copy the album to a library on the external drive and then go through and delete the original photos on the hard drive. Time-consuming and not fun.
Then my mom (a 35mm photographer who is just entering the digital world) suggested I start shooting in RAW mode after being shown all the capabilities. That was fine and good, but I had to use a converter for my Canon’s CR2 RAW files before I could then use the photos in Photoshop. Blah - again, too much.
I was contacted by Arcadia Publishing to write a pictorial history on Maryland lighthouses, which is basically a giant research project. I recently did a “half way through the season report card” on the Washington Nationals baseball team and I was the only blogger who replied to the spam request and actually did it, so it was published by default. I kinda feel I’m doing the book under the same premise because I know other folks were asked and turned it down before me. My time constraints are rather restrictive, but I’m plugging along and am rather excited about the project. Call me an aspiring amateur writer and photographer who is quite thrilled at the prospect of being “published” with both text and photos, but it also allows me to dedicate time to one of my passions. Spending a day at Archives II in College Park, MD helped bring back all the love and passion for lighthouses that I had somewhat forgotten getting immersed in the day-to-day angst over boat issues and scheduling. Sifting through box after box of historic photos and lingering over each one (even Virginia ones, which is where I found this one - the coolest historic auto photo ever) was quite enjoyable. My only disappointment was being disallowed from taking photos out of their plastic protective sleeves or turning on the lights in the photo stand, so many photos are probably not useable for the book despite my digital developing prowess.