HRRRUMPH

Irritated by everyone clogging up the Meadows? Forced to lurk grumpily on a bench? This gentleman should consider getting a camera to turn all the wandering annoyances into wandering photo-fodder. Alternatively he could undo the two helium balloons tied to an adjacent bench and amuse himself by telling the people distributing flyers to bugger off in the style of a munchkin. Alternatively again he could get a lovely tasty pasty from the nearby van and wander around the place shaking his head at the sound of the metal band in one of the tents to whom the phrase "nice tight ending" evidently means nothing. If none of those ideas pleased him he could just go and sit in a nice street-corner coffee shop, buy a nice big coffee and a vast chocolate muffin and snigger at all the interesting people passing by outside. Just a suggestion.

Perseids or sleep? HMMMM. The last time there were supposed to be some meteors around the place I spent most of the night up the hill which was all very pleasant but I ended up seeing few meteors and photographing none whatsoever. Tomorrow's work prevents me from going for the "probably best just before dawn" stuff (although if I get up at the earler end of the normal 05:10 - 05:30 range I might pop briefly out) so I'll pop out for half an hour or so just in case. After all, it's significantly warmer today than it will be when the Leonids next allegedly arrive.

Over the next month I'm going to try and switch to RAW rather than .jpg in order to try and get a higher hit-rate of decent images and (the main reason) to be able to properly get rid of the noise in situations where high ISO is necessary. I've downloaded myself a few TBYBs, cleared a few GB of scrap from the external drive and over the next week I shall reformat and possibly sneak in an extra smidgeon of RAM to ensure that I'm not sitting waiting for progress bars to edge their way across the screen. I've been using Paint Shop Pro for years, partly because it's nicer to use than Photoshop and partly because I found a copy of the former sooner than I found a copy of the latter. At uni when I was first exposed to fast computer and high-resolution images we were lucky enough to have access to most of the Corel suite including Photo-Paint and the latest PSP (now controlled by Corel since they bought Jasc) has all the niceness, menus, easiness and keyboard shortcuts of PSP with a couple of the nice features I liked in P-P.
PSP v11 is installed and currently browsing today's pictures. When all 461MB has finished downloading I'll give Elements a go and if it can be bothered to install properly I'm also going to give Bibble and DXO a shot although they'll only be for RAW conversion and noise reduction and will still require secondary fiddling-with. Some internet people apparently esteem the performance of Noise Ninja so the no-save standalone trial is already in place (and the PS version will hopefully speak to Elements as well as the more advanced but fuck-off-I'm-not-paying-that CS3).

It's already quite nice to be able to open the .NEFs directly and then save directly to the cropped-and-resized blipformat copies although it will mean an end to being able to just trundle directly through the straight-from-camera .JPGs and right-click them into the Flickr uploader. Although I have calmed down a little and have recently been taking only about 30-40 pictures a day I am vaguely concerned that the time required to properly process things will be a little too much, one external hard drive will be too small and my current two-or-so-year-old processor will be too arthritic but as the eventual aim is to gain the back-end skills to try and start using all the pictures I take properly it should be worth a little investment. I also need the practise if I'm going to be processing our wedding pictures next spring.

Yesterday in place seeing as I was back too late to do it on the day.
Remember it's the Perseids tonight, especially if you live somewhere unpolluted by festival searchlights and orange-tinted clouds...