Organizing

I used to have a photo editor that I loved to hate. Have mentioned it before here; Aperture. It was Apple’s own, and they no longer support it, which I can understand. Good riddance, it was painful. The guy, in the photo shop here [sadly demised, greatly missed store], with whom I took the camera course five years ago, sang its praises. He had been to Halifax and taken a course in Aperture so he was the master of it 🙂 Compared to Adobe PhotoShop, it was really ‘cheap’, so I bought it. It’s all water under the bridge now, but one thing was good:

It totally altered my file system, which made me panic at first, but I grew to like it. That’s the one thing I’ve kept … the way to organize my photo files. One, big folder for the year and inside it, twelve sub-folders, in each of them one folder for each day [given that I’ve taken any photo that day]. That works for me, and I can’t even remember how I had them organized before. I’m really trying to be adamant about tagging them, because I know I difficult it can be to find an old picture otherwise. When I first got the Mac, almost three years ago, I missed out on tagging for some reason — perhaps because everything was so new. The tags follow the picture over to Flickr, which is my main, online storage. It still makes me nervous, because it’s Yahoo, and you never know what’s going to happen with them, but there’s nothing else I can do.

Yesterday I woke up to a bit of a ‘Winter Wonderland’, but that has all turned into a slushy mess now.

Mac…

It’s been two years since I switched from Windows to Mac. I anticipated a steep learning curve, and was surprised that it went so smooth. Very few times I had to ask around. Considering I’d been using Windows since 1996 [longer offline], and was very proficient there, I was glad it was that easy and I didn’t have to pester mac-friends and support forums all that often.

I loathe my photo editor!

it’s the 6th of June!

That means that it’s Sweden’s National Day! That wasn’t even a holiday until 2005, but then they removed another holiday … Whit Monday … and turned June 6 into a holiday.

Maybe I’ll hang the Swedish flag out on the balcony in the fog and drizzle. I doubt many Saint Johners would know which country’s flag it is. Perhaps a few hockey fanatics…

Not only is it Sweden’s National Day, but also the date of D Day … the allied’s invasion of Normandy 1944, where so many young men lost their lives … to make a better world for us.

Yesterday was a glorious day, weather-wise and I suggested to Gerry that we’d go for a spin … up to Norton and then take the road to Kingston peninsula. We drove that road last year, and in the back of my mind there was a picture I wanted to take … or a tree I wanted to revisit. Talk about strange hang-ups! 🙂

This, I didn’t tell him … just that I wanted to go. We started out, and after a little while in the car … on the highway before the exit to Saint John Airport, he mentioned something about that tree and how it was on a road to St. Martins. He remembered that picture, and most importantly … he remembered where it was, which I did NOT.

I was so mixed up. Had he not said anything there, I wouldn’t have found it again. Besides … on that road I’d suggested, there’s really not much to see … just forest. Now, luckily we took this other road and it’s gorgeous rolling landscape — now in particular when everything is so green and lush. The grass looks really juicy.

I found my tree, I don’t know if I missed the bloom or if it just didn’t have any flowers this year but it looked lovely anyway. I’ll put in both pictures here, just for fun and comparison.

Tree in May 2010

Tree in June 2011 -- Upham, NB revisited

I took oodles of pictures on this little trip. It was a «sunny 16» day [aperture 16] and several of them came out pretty well, in spite of the bright, midday sun.

Loch Lomond, Saint John, NB

Here’s one of Loch Lomond. We’ve driven by the lovely Loch Lomond a countless number of times but I didn’t have one picture of it so I  decided that ‘now is the time’.

Eventually, we ended up in St. Martins and we had scrumptious clam chowder on the beach. They pride themselves of having ‘the world’s best clam chowder’ … I don’t have all that many places to compare with, but if they ask me — it’s true. Perhaps because that’s the place where I ate my life’s first clam chowder.