“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.” - Dorothea LangeÂÂ
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This is one of my favorite quotes because it pretty much sums up the impact photography has had upon me.  I have kept it on my index welcome page for that very reason.  I have noticed though, however, that once you start to ’see’ like a photographer - it is hard to stop doing so.  Perhaps this is a bit detrimental to being just a normal person.  :-)   You appreciate things for very different reasons than some others.  Your mind ends up processing everything in terms of light quality, shape, forms, and textures, along with all the relationships between them.  A rock is no longer just a rock.
Getting a new computer can be a great source of fun, as well as a lot of work in migrating all of your software and data over.  Adding a new computer with a new type of operating system… you would think it compounds the work.  But actually it has been much easier than I expected.  A lot of people worry about software expenses in such a move from PC to Mac.  They can add up depending on the applications you use most.  My most heavily used applications are from Adobe;  Photoshop, Lightroom, and Dreamweaver, and are probably the most costly to buy outright.
Well, OK, a couple days belated, but nonetheless, a blogworthy event. There is a wonderful writeup about the history of Photoshop by Jeff Schewe over at Photoshop News, with all sorts of great links and backstory. Photoshop just celebrated its 18th birthday, Camera Raw its 5th, and Lightroom its very 1st. It is quite remarkable that the birthdays of Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom all coincide at the same time, without any forethought about planning them that way. The Digital Cosmos must come into alignment on February 19.
Wow, my first post from a MacPro… I am kinda teary eyed.  :)  I am still in the process of migrating data and files from my PC and am quite happy with my decision thus far.  There are some statements from Mac users on various things where it ultimately comes down to “It just works.”  I have to say I have had a few of those experiences so far.  It is pretty obvious that a lot of attention has been given to the entire experience by Apple.   The first time you turn the computer on you are presented with a little video show saying “welcome” in about 20 different languages in front of a little light show.  It’s not a big deal, but that small human touch that is nice to see.  Those small touches are everywhere, and I am seeing that they all add up to the complete experience. Networking :  Home networks can always be a somewhat tempermental beast to deal with (or at least what I am used to).  But I hooked my Mac up and was quite pleased to see it was automatically seeing the shared folders and drives I had been using with my PC.  No special settings, no configuring or fiddling - I plugged in the cable and it worked.  It made it easy to start copying some files over through the network.Dell Printer!  I have a Dell Color laser printer that is also on the network, and the Mac didn’t see this right away.  Dell actually makes a Mac driver for this particular printer (!) - so all it took was to download it, figure out how to “unStuff” a “StuffIt” file, and it installed complete with a icon that is a graphic of the actual printer, not a generic one. Adobe Lightroom :  I have Adobe Lightroom up and running, and my image catalog already transferred.  That also was quite easy.  One nice thing about Lightroom is that it already has cross-platform licensing.  So I simply downloaded the Mac trial version, and entered my previous serial number from my “PC version.”  Sweet!  I was also able to copy my database over and all my presets.  I did encounter one problem with the PC folder names for the previews - they transferred over as a single file to the Mac instead of a folder.  Have to figure that one out yet.Email  :  This one had me a bit nervous on transferring my old email over.  It was a combination of old email from Outlook Express, imported into Thunderbird, the program I have been using for the past few years.  Well, Thunderbird has a Mac version, and I noticed the Mac Mail application has a menu item for Import from Thunderbird.  Sweet again!  I copied my Thunderbird profile folders over to my Mac, ran Thunderbird for Mac just to see if it imported - it did!  Then a run of Mail - and it imported all the Thunderbird email no problem.  So I will probably end up ditching Thunderbird and using the Mac Mail app since it seems to be integrated with a few other programs within OS X. Don’t shut me down, only sleep :  One of the more dramatic differences are startup/shutdown times versus what I am used to on PCs.  Everything I have read state it is a rare occasion to actually need to reboot a Mac.  Most of the time it just sleeps.  This means it is nearly instant on / instant off.  I grew fond of that real quick.  ÂÂ
During the last weeks I’ve been obsesively working on a new version of PhotoEchoes (a computer kaleidoscope), it produces fun images, some samples follow.
Try them as desktop wallpapers, especially the last one (right click on a image and choose “Set as desktop background” choosing Mosaic if that option appears -it depends on the browser-)
I found this video from Art Wolfe quite entertaining because I think many wildlife photographers can relate to the wonderful experience it is to be so accepted into an animal’s space. (Although this probably shows acceptance more than he expected!
This time of year is filled with stories of the ‘best of 2007′ everywhere, so I suppose it is only natural for a photographer to think back on the images created over the last year and if any hold particular significance above the rest. So I offer up to you my “Top 10″ images (in no particular ranking order) that I made during 2007 and a few thoughts about each one of them. I hope you enjoy them as well.
One of the things that has always bothered me is mankind’s tendency to define the way things should be…according to us. Perhaps it is the result of watching too much sci-fi - but perhaps someday we will get a real kick in our perception pants. Out of the millions of species on this planet, it seems rather arrogant doesn’t it? I know, I know - not many other options out there.
