Today is not July 27th, 2020. Today is December 25th, 2020. It’s the tail end of Christmas day. The truth is, I rarely post my blogs on the day they are dated. The date you see is the day that the photos are taken, not the day that I write the post. I go through my photos, reconstruct a story from memory, back-date the blog post, then upload. So why am I telling you this, now? Why, after so many years?

Last spring, the children and I walked down to someplace on a close by river with Claudia’s family. I brought my camera and some water kefir. Unfortunately, the water kefir— an acidic, sticky liquid— exploded in the backpack & drenched my wonderful delightful beloved perfect awesome superb magnificent & all those other superlatives camera. Oh, crap. My $1,400 USD camera.

The camera worked intermittently for a while. First, the battery died quickly. Then the optical viewfinder was stuck on half-way useless. It worked long enough to me to order another camera, to be picked up at the end of summer in Syracuse. I bought the same camera. The software and some other aspects of it had been improved, which was nice. The price had also improved up to nearly $2000 USD, which I was not so terribly happy about, but the camera would make me happy, so I didn’t bother thinking about it. I’ve wasted as much money on foolish mistakes before. This would not be a foolish mistake.

I loved Lightroom. Did I tell you I loved Lightroom? I like to shoot RAW file format (unprocessed data) & do all the processing myself. It’s like being in the darkroom, only one is highly unlikely to receive chemical burns unless the computer explodes. So I bought the new camera. Unfortunately, I could not import the files into Lightroom. The old version of Lightroom that I own did not support the new camera. I would have to get the new version. The new version is the typical Adobe pay-per-month program. Even if I wanted to get the new version of Lightroom, I couldn’t get it unless I installed the newest browser on my Mac. However, both of my computers are from 2012 & are not compatible with the newest OSX browser. So in order to use my camera with Lightroom, I would have to buy a new computer. But my computers work just fine!

After bringing the camera home, I spent about a month trying to determine which development program would be best for my needs. I settled on ON1 Camera RAW, tho I can’t say I like it nearly as much as Lightroom. Nonetheless, I didn’t have to buy a new computer. However, I did have to clean up my old catalogue, organize a few thousand old photos and figure out a new way to catalogue and organize my new photos. To make a long story short, ON1 is really quite different than Lightroom.

After all that, I found that the program worked incredibly slowly on my computer. So I bought a speed-em-up, clean-em-out program to streamline all the garbage on my computer. Still slow. Finally, months later, I decided to use my relatively fast laptop for photography and my relatively slow desktop for everything else. I have yet to solve the problem of my need for another external monitor and a larger desk. I hardly know how to use the new program, which I find excessively large, disorganized, and slow. But, look! Almost exactly 5 months after taking the first photographs on my new camera, I have learned how to process & export them to post on my website for your viewing pleasure. I almost hate the program. I can’t even get a good consistent watermark across photos. I have to put a different watermark on each photo, depending on its orientation and output size. I haven’t got that square yet so you’re going to have to suffer with lousy watermarks this post. I’ve already spent two days trying to get me a good watermark. It’s just so non-intuitive. It’s un-intelligent. It almost makes me want to pay a couple hundred bucks per year for Lightroom and a few more thousand for a new computer. Which I would do, for certain, if I had nothing else I needed to do with money.