Saturday, August 16, 2008

Carnegie hall



I'm sorry for the light posting lately. Flipping past MSNBC last night I saw an insipid hairdo announce something along the lines of "Obama's teenage drug use vs. McCain's messy divorce from his first wife. Stay tuned for the important details." As the election approaches, I'm sre I'll hole up in my room and only come out to watch Avatar reruns. And plenty of others are communicating my political thoughts, so I find it difficult to justify why I should bother adding to the chorus.

Last night I went to a series of presentations at NYU by gifted minority students who have spent the summer studying public policy issues and working at related internships. I wish more people could see things like this. It would wipe the racist bullshit from the minds from all but the most corrosively idiotic rejects. These are the kinds of kids, like Obama, who will get into Harvard Law or wherever they want to go, without identifying themselves as black or hispanic on the application. That, assuming they aren't collateral damage in a ghetto gun fight or shot 41 times by a trigger happy cop who can't tell a wallet from an Uzi.

But mainly I've been practicing photo techniques for an upcoming project. A big part of that has been evaluating different photo workflow and correction software. For anyone interested, I've been comparing Adobe Lightroom, Apple's Aperture, and LightZone. I have my likes and dislikes about each program, but quality-wise they are hard to compare. Typically, my moods change with the breeze and what I like while I'm processing a photo in LightZone might be completely different the next day when I process it in Aperture. Adobe's Lightroom, unfortunately, is such a mess I find it unusable. That's too bad because feature wise it is probably the best.

I'm considering starting a photo blog to discuss this shit, but am generally of the belief that artists shouldn't talk about their art. Best to leave it to the eye of the beholder. So we'll see. Or not.