Things go boom

We’ve had our first strong storms, and with them we’ve had our first things go boom.

The first was our first down tree of the season, which happened to drop right across the entrance to the path leading to our other parcel.

We have the tree folks coming to clean this up soon. It made me take a fresh look for danger trees, but I and my tree person did that a couple of years ago and while there isn’t zero risk or something coming down on the house, I think we’re in good shape there. It’s always possible we’ll have something come down on the driveway, but that’s why I have both a chainsaw and a tree guy. That looks to be an older alder, and they tend to get brittle with age. There was enough wind in this storm to push it to where it broke.

The other thing that went boom will cost us a bit more: we had two nights in a row where we had power outages, and again, the backup generator didn’t come on. It’s been a problem since we moved in, and we more or less agreed that if the last repair didn’t take, it was time for replacement. It’s going on 15 years old, so this isn’t a huge surprise. So as I write this, I’ve just signed the contract for a replacement, which should be installed before U.S. Thanksgiving. Not exactly cheap (> $10K U.S) but I’m looking forward not having to fight to keep it running any more. I did have the tech I’ve been working with come out to see if we could get it running to bridge us to the new unit, and he found that we’d had a new failure, with the transformer in the charging unit going poof on us.

The house we are in underwent a fairly major renovation in the 2010-2012 timeframe, which is, we think, when the downstairs area was converted from basement to an elder flat. it’s not at all surprising that we’re in the 10-15 year range where various bits and pieces are wearing out — but with a new water heater, new well pump and now a new generator, I think we’re set up for what I hope is a fairly quiet and routine decade. The oldest piece of house infrastructure now is the furnace and HVAC, and it’s in good shape. (knocks on wood)

Office Makeover

One of the projects I’ve been working on in the background for a while is a makeover of the office. I actually started thinking about it when I retired, but it took a while to understand what I wanted to do, and then find the right pieces to make it happen.

There were a couple of issues I had to address. I had five drawer chests in here, and all of them were of the “inexpensive particle board covered with black laminate” type you can easily find on Amazon (which I did). A couple of them are over a decade old, and I was noticing that some of the drawers were starting to fall apart where the connectors weren’t staying tightened.

The other real issue was that two of those chest were the legs for me “desk” which was really just a particle board with black laminate slab stuck on top of them. It was set up in a way that I couldn’t actually get my legs under the desk, so I was literally using the desk side-saddle. Not optimal. Plus, of course, I’d let the top of the desk get fairly cluttered, so when I wanted to use it for something like building a lego project, I couldn’t easily spread out on it.

I was also just tired of the “everything is black laminate” look, to be honest. I spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out what I wanted to change to. Ultimately I found chests made of real wood (the key to searching Amazon for things like this seems to be the phrase “solid wood”), and after a lot of searching, I found a “solid wood” desk with legs I rather liked.

I spent a lot of time trying to convince myself to bring in “nice” desk, but to be honest, even the most basic desks with a Walnut slab — at least the ones I’d consider buying — started at $600. Ultimately, I felt I’d rather spend that money on other things like birding trips.

The desk ended up under $200, and I brought in a pair of 8 drawer chests at $129 each. These are all “solid/real wood”, and to be honest, we’re talking pine/fir or something similar, so nothing fancy, but I’m pretty happy with the quality overall, and I spent $500ish for this, where if I went with a fancier wood, we’re talking at least 5X that amount. At $129, those solid wood chests only cost about $20 more than the particle board and laminate ones, so if you’re looking to keep to a budget but want something that’s a bit nicer, I think they’re actually a good option. And with a bit of de-cluttering, I was easily able to go from five chests to two, and I have empty drawers to grow into.

To reduce the clutter on the desk I added a floating shelf on the wall over the desk, and I put in a new, brighter light as well. All of the art got pulled off the wall and then put back up. The computer desk area basically didn’t change — I tried a few different configurations and this works best for me.

The area behind the computer desk (my “IT closet” area) is still a work in progress. I replaced the multiple printer stands with one that lets me stack the laser printer and teh Canon photo printer on top of each other. I’m still figuring out exactly what to do back there; with my computer desk in this configuration, it’s easy for it to turn into that place I shove stuff and just pretend it’s put away. I’ve ordered a two shelf book case to go in there to hopefully organize the storage a bit more. I’m also slowly starting to go through and clean up and organize the books.

So, still more work to do in here, but the big working space piece is done, and I’m really happy with the results. And I can actually set at the working desk without doing so side-saddle now!

Switching from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom

The other project I started this month was a move from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom (the mobile/cloud version). I’ve used Lightroom Classic (in it’s various names into the past) since version 2, when I shifted from Apple Aperture.

This is the start of a fairly big re-invention of my digital darkroom workflows, and I expect it’ll take me another 2-3 months to fully get things settled down and be comfortable with. There’s a lot of muscle memory I need to tear down and re-build here, and it’s very definitely a work in progress.

Why am I doing this? A couple of reasons:

• As I start to use the iPhone more as a “real” camera, I’m just not thrilled with the look of iPhone images processed by Lightroom Classic. Because of that, I end up with images in multiple places, which I hate, and trying to keep it all organized was just annoying me.

• I’ve also become more and more unhappy with not having my images available wherever I was; Lightroom Classic is tied to the Mac Studio downstairs, so if I go out on a photo shoot, I can’t sit upstairs with Laurie and evaluate and process them in the evening. Or, well, I sort of can, but I kept feeling like it was increasingly a chaotic mishmash.

I’d been looking at migrating finished copies of images from Lightroom to Photos and making that my “this is where my images live”. It worked okay, but ultimately, I started considering if there were better ways to do this, and I kept circling back to shifting to Lightroom, if only because it’d allow me to keep my “real” photos and my “casual” photos separate, with one in Lightroom and one in Photos. And by using Lightroom, I can import and process images in the laptop upstairs, and not need to have to go downstairs to do the import on the Mac Studio.

So the hope is that ultimately, this will simplify my life. One place for “real” photos, one place for my “casual fun” ones, and both of them available on whatever device I happen to be on at the time.

Phase 1 of this project was figuring out how to get my photos from Lightroom Classic into Lightroom. I ended up deciding to put them all through Topaz Photo AI which is the tool I use to sharpen and do noise reduction, getting them all cleaned up with the most recent version. After that, I exported them as uncompressed TIFFs and imported those into Lightroom.

I made a conscious choice here NOT to import the DNGs into Lightroom here; I still have Classic if I choose to re-process something, or I can choose to grab that specific DNG and pull it over as needed — but in reality, I’m unlikely to want/need to reprocess these photos often, so I didn’t feel like the complexity of migrating the raw images and organizing all that stuff made a lot of sense.

This actually went a lot faster than I expected; about 6,000 images were cleaned up, exported and moved into Lightroom in about five days.

One decision I made I want to make clear: my plan is to build a “Lightroom native” workflow; I’m not moving to Lightroom, but then trying to make it the way I’ve had Lightroom Classic behave for the last decade+. This is a complete tear down and rethink, not just taking my existing habits and trying to shove them into Lightroom. So I’m taking this one step at a time as I find the things I want to do, and then figuring out how to do them in the new tool.

There are a number of next steps; one is to start experimenting with how I want to process new images from the Sony: do I continue doing so in Lightroom Classic and then exporting/importing into Lightroom? For now, that’s what I’m doing, but I expect that as I get more comfortable, I’ll go Lightroom native here.

And how do I want to process iPhone images? Do I want to use Lightroom or some other app like Darkroom?

Lots of stuff to explore here. One thing I’ve done to bootstrap this is I’ve bought a copy of Brian Matiash’s class called “Lightroom Everywhere”. He’s one of the better photographer’s I know when it comes to the mobile/cloud version and I’m now going through a few of his videos every night to help me figure out the tool. Strongly recommend this if you’re curious about this flavor of Lightroom.

So far, I’m pretty happy with where things stand. I’ll go into more detail about this as I move forward, and will probably go over the whole thing once I feel like my new workflows have settled in and are working for me. But for now, I’m still definitely figuring it all out…

Thanks for the feedback

I want to thank everyone who wrote in after last issue and my call for feedback. It was quite helpful and it was fun to hear from a few folks I hadn’t talked to in a while. It really helped me get a feel for what things to write about in the future, and I’ve put a few things into the hopper and we’ll see what pops out down the road.