Blogging: Of Language and Light

You’ve known people, surely, that if they had to keep their hands in their pockets, they couldn’t tell a story.

I’ve just realized that part the reason for the dearth of blog posts over the past year is because I’ve had to keep my hands in my pockets.

Photoshop 5 (at the end of more than a dozen years of upgrades) has finally stopped working after being maddeningly frustrating for more than a year. I can’t tell you how many draft blog posts never saw the light of day because I gave up trying to get a low-res 600 x 800 pixel image ready to post.

Good bye, Photoshop. No thanks, Adobe, I will not pay $120 a year to subscribe when I can own Affinity Photo Pro for $40.

So yes, all my muscle memory and actions and routine of a dozen years is useless, and I’m climbing up the learning curve on wobbly legs of a day-old fawn.

And so no more excuses (but not necessarily a whole lot more blog posts than recently). But my photo-life shows promise. The lack of tools to work with photos has been so severe that I have simply stopped thinking of taking them. Much of the joy of taking an image has been working with it to fully express what the light “felt like” or “had to say” about the subject. I’ve lacked that voice, and now have it back.

Meanwhile, I’ll be pouring more time into finishing up the writing project–the purported book. I may have changed the working title, and if so, will have to adapt some of the preface and foreword to reflect that minor shift in center of importance that this creates.

So much shop talk. Blog on!

THE IMAGE: My first exploration with Affinity, I pulled up a random picture–of spikenard, a relative of Ginseng–taken on Goose Creek Run. The mirror filter created the kaleidoscope effect. And it was really great news to discover that Topaz filters could be manually imported from Photoshop into Affinity, and the painterly effect was from that tool. Adult play. Keeps me off the streets.