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Thirsty Thursday: Analog

Rambler: Terry
Drink in Hand: 2009 Paraiso Zinfandel Irie

It's been a long week since last Thursday. In fact, the days have blended together and I find myself wondering how it can be another Thursday already. Last weekend I had hoped to go through some of my Germany / Italy pictures, but it's amazing how fast plans change. These are the shots that I was able to edit throughout blur of last week. Unlike most of my edits (which are almost completely done in Apple Aperture), I discovered that my Nik Software Aperture plugins were automatically updated by Google. I'm still not thrilled that Google felt that it could update software on my computer without my knowledge (not even a notification). However, I have fallen in love with Nik Analog Efex Pro. I'm actually quite surprised that I enjoy these type of finishes so much. Many moons ago when I started to get serious about photography, I found myself waiting for the digital era. I didn't want a film camera. I didn't want a Holga. I suppose I was just naïve. I just wanted a DSLR. I didn't want to deal with developing film. I wanted sharp and crisp images with vivid colors. I wasn't a big fan of black and white photography. I didn't like the imperfect artifacts of film. But that's something's changed lately. I simply love it. There's something about the imperfections and the textures that I love. In fact, some of the images weren't perfect to start with. . . a bit blurry or maybe a poor composition. All of these images were taken with my Canon 5DMKII and processed through the Nik Analog Efex Pro plugin for Aperture. This set is a mixture of images from both Germany and Italy. I hope you enjoy them and all their imperfections. They seem a bit more real to me.

Thirsty Thursday: Color-Free Joshua Tree

Rambler: Beth Drink at Hand: Fog Head Chardonnay...Monterey County makes some yummy chards!

Welcome back for another Thirsty Thursday! Time to pour something yummy and make those weekend plans. I found out today that I might head to the desert for work in a few weeks (who knew you could grow lettuce in the desert?!), which made me think back to my trip to Joshua Tree National Park last year. I had the privilege of having the park shown to me by a couple of incredible local photographers who just wanted shoot with some friends for a few days. It was a fun week.

I revisited the photos from that trip in the archives this week (mainly because the "archives" are getting much too large for our storage space) and found a few I didn't share yet. In that group were 3 images that I processed in Nik's Silver Efex. I'm in love with Silver Efex (now Silver Efex 2) for black and white processing. So enjoy a few rockscapes from Joshua Tree. Visiting there in winter is really nice. Just make sure to bring some pilars to get the cactus spins out of your shoes.

Get out there and do something fun this weekend!