I’m excited to be back from a Memorial Day shoot for a 9 day-old newborn girl. She woke up and gave us some sketchy looks, like, “what are you people doing? I’m trying to sleep!” But on the whole, she slept most of the time.
Here’s a sneakpeek, SOOC.
Today, I didn’t need any backdrop stands or clips. I was instead assisted by big brother, grandma, mom and grandpa. Pays to have a few helpers in the house! Here’s a behind the scenes shot of grandma, holding up the edges of my rosette blanket.
It’s been a week and I’m still in love with this baby!
I got a chance to see him again, when I took had a picture viewing for his mother, and she let me hold him and he didn’t protest at al. What a lovely, little one.
Adobe has finally jumped the shark. They announced Monday that after CS6, they aren’t going to sell Photoshop anymore, they are going to license it for $29.99/mo from the cloud. $30 a month? Really? All the people who bought a version and kept it until it was completely dead (me, included) are going to see a serious sticker shock. In their mind, it’s $about $400 a year, the same as buying a new version of Photoshop every year. Well, only corporations buy a new copy of Photoshop every year. I treat Photoshop like cars – I buy them and use them until they are dead and/or no longer serve my needs.
It’s expensive software, and I think that’ll be the end of Photoshop for a lot of people. I love it, but that sounds abysmal. And some speculate it’s to ward off rampant piracy, which sounds right for about 2 seconds until you consider that 1) there wouldn’t need to be piracy if it were priced at all reasonably and 2) they allow for the piracy for that very reason. They could’ve locked it down long ago, but to be seen as the market leader, everyone has to agree that it’s THE software to use. If that base had been limited to corporations, they’d never have gained the foothold they have now.
I’d sworn off Aperture because I didn’t want another Apple product, since they’ve been very predatory/ customer unfriendly the last few years, but at this point, Apple seems like a nonprofit compared to Adobe. Here’s a link to the announcement:
I feel sorry for all the people who make their living from Photoshop-related products, like makers of plugins and Actions and photoshop books and videos, because it’s going to start to dwindle as soon as CS6 can’t run on some future operating system. They aren’t just affecting themselves, they are damaging an ecosystem.
So in honor of Photoshop’s imminent pop-culture death, here are some links to some other software you’d better start to pay attention to:
Photoline
Acorn
and last but certainly not least,
Lightroom is affordable, but in addition to the fact that you simply can’t do all the things you can in Photoshop, a lot of people are going to be wary of Adobe products. The fact that you’d have to shell out another $400-$600 for a new version of Photoshop if you bought a new camera because they won’t update the RAW support for anything other than the newest Photoshop was already very costly and annoying. This last move is just unnecessary and ridiculous. And the corporate greed that is so rampant at both the companies I mentioned helps separate people across a large digital divide. Assuming that everyone has high speed internet and can use a cloud? Wrong. (I do, but I’ve been on high speed since the olden days of DSL filters and ISDN). Assuming that even those who have high speed want to be crippled by the constraints of their internet connection? Wrong.
Boo hiss.
I am an African-American photographer, but this baby is the first African-American newborn, other than ones I’ve created with my husband, that I’ve had a chance to photograph! The baby’s mom got a kick out of me saying that I didn’t know many black people. LOL. It is the San Fernando Valley, after all. Diverse with many colors, just not brown.
Now, if I could only photograph what me and my friends jokingly call The Unicorn of the Valley – a chocolate, baby girl. Someday. Well, maybe sooner than later. I found a meetup group called PAAC – Parents of African American Children (some people who have black kids, aren’t black themselves) are have an inkling that my portfolio is going to get more diverse quickly. But of the currently pregnant women in this group, everyone’s having a boy.
I’d love to be the Angelina Jolie of baby photographers – photograph babes from all the nations. 🙂
Took the boys to Disneyland last week. Punishing. Brutal. Chasing an elusive 2 year old or 8 hours wasn’t the most relaxing way to spend the day. However, looking back at the photos, they had a great time. And if they didn’t somehow, years later they won’t remember not having the best time, they’ll remember the reinforced memory of them having a blast! Photographs anchor memories, even replace memories once the memories fade. I’m glad I took the time to capture them on that day.
I’m sponsoring a local school by donating a photography package. I get to advertise via banner on their fence and I made my first banner and it looks so lovely! How exciting! I used to think I’d hate the business end of photography, but now that I’m diving in, I find that, at the very least, I love advertising and marketing. I love having to be creative and figure out new ways to think about old things. And I’ve noticed that my brain is changing. Once I started thinking of ideas for new promotions, they come at a quicker pace now, with no prompting. I’ll be in a car and see something on the side of a building, and boom! New idea! Sort of like songwriting. Now, if I could only get back into auto in that area again…
My son has finally learned to tricycle around our yard on the grass, super fast, as he would say. Our driveway is long, but very craggy, so it’s rough going. He often asks to go out on “the big sidewalk” out front, but that takes adult supervision, so most often we say, “go play in the yard with your brother.” Yes, having two kids now seems like genius. Here he is, whizzing around the yard. He paused just long enough for me to capture him here.
