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I constantly have friends asking me how I use Adobe Lightroom. Luckily, my cousin George invented it. Single-handedly. Just kidding. But he was one of the creators. Proof: His name is on the Splash Screen (or was, until LR3 came out). Plug for George here. This is not meant to be a definitive way to use LR. It’s just how I use it, for my needs. So let’s start there.
My Needs
I have two types of photography: Sports, and everything else. For the Sports photography, I typically do 500~1,000 shots in one event. For “everything else,” it’s divided into my daily photos (stuff I see when I’m out and about), and planned shoots – professional stuff, trips, etc.
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The Technology of Democratization
Last October I was invited to speak at the Telluride Tech Festival . My topic was the Zen of Productivity and I spoke about the gap between what technology has promised, and what it has actually delivered. The implied promise of technology – as articulated by George Jetson – was that things will get easier, we’ll go faster, and life will get better. And technology delivered. But there were off-setting side effects: because things got easier, we tend to do more, creating a confusion surplus and an attention deficit in everything we do. Because we go faster, everything is blurred – both literally, and figuratively. And because life truly did get better, now we want more and are less satisfied with what we have.
There were about 10 other speakers during the two-day event and they represented a wide range of “technology topics.” But if there was one common theme, it was the “maturation of technology.” In other words, now that we have all these gizmo’s, what are we actually going to do with them? Or, to paraphrase Ellie McPherson, the character in Carl Sagan’s Contact, “How to survive our technological adolescence.”
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Human (vs) Nature
I’m in a provocative mood. Not sure why, maybe it’s the dogs. Nature is amazing. It will be around long after we are gone. And nature will probably be the reason that we (humans) are gone, at least if we do not follow some of its rules. But as long as humans are here on earth, there are some rules that we do not necessarily need to follow. This “human delinquency” will enrich our lives while we are here, although it may at the same time hasten our demise. Case in point: natural selection. Nature is pretty good at weeding out the sick and weak: it simply lets them die – often before they can contribute to the gene pool. Or often enough. We as humans are born with compassion so we take the opposite viewpoint. We nurture the sick and needy, at least in most societies. Hence “the meek shall inherit the earth.”
So having said that, here’s a provocative what if:
What if…
…I was the ruler of a country of very able, very smart people. And I decided that I wanted to make them more able and more smart. Create the ‘perfect race,’ as it were. And suppose I was ruthless – or at best, objectively scientific. What would I do? I could collect all of my people and ship them off to containment facilities – let’s call them “filtering factories” – where I feed them very little, give them no heat, force them to live in close proximity so that their illnesses are all spread to each other – then force them to work until they collapse. Now, there would likely be a very high attrition rate. But wouldn’t the survivors be the perfect race? Those with the ability to ensure that our species – or at least the members of my ‘country’ – are best suited to survive?
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Panama Limited
Good morning America how are you? Say don’t you know me I’m your native son? I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans, I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
In 1960, when I first rode this train, Illinois Central ran two trains between Chicago and New Orleans. The Panama Limited was the all-sleeper night train and the City of New Orleans was the significantly cheaper, coach-only day train. Most ‘colored folk’ rode the City of New Orleans, but they also worked on the Panama Limited. I don’t remember much from when I was five, but I do remember trains. And I remember that I was five for a long time… [This is under construction, but to feel free to read on…]