Exhibition
I held an exhibition of nature photographic images at Fancourt Conference centre on 26 January 2010. These were general nature images from Africa including landscapes, birds and mammals. I did a digital image presentation on "The Plains of Southern Serengeti" which covered part of my earlier trip to this area to specifically cover the birthing of the wildebeest as they move through the southern Serengeti. I had managed to finally capture the actual birthing moment. The presentation also contained images of the attendant predators, both mammalian and avian. The evening was in aid of the Keegan Langley Trust which has been established to help young Keegan Langley, a grandson of George resident Mike Reinders, recover from very serious injuries as a result of a motor accident earlier this year. Over 300 people attended and by all accounts it was enjoyed by everyone. Copyright @ John B

New Digital Workshop and School
   

I have always worked from home where I had a good computer set up and just about enough space to do the things I was doing. However as the computer system grew with multiple screens and more and more digital storage needs, never mind the space requirements for large format printers, I have decided to move into a suite of offices here in George. This now gives me the opportunity to do what I have always wanted to and that is to teach!
I now offer individualized tailor made tuition – whatever your need may be. From understanding your point-and-shoot to sophisticated post processing using layer-based PhotoShop techniques or the digital workflow offered by LightRoom. This will be on a one-on-one basis  or very small groups.
The new premises is up and running very well.

Adobe Lightroom
Whilst being a reluctant starter, I am becoming more and more convinced that Lightroom will best serve most serious digital photographer’s workflow needs.  It is in essence a workflow tool for digital photographers. It is a one-stop all-encompassing program that downloads your pictures, backs them up simultaneously, organizes them, manages the meta-data and keywords, processes the RAW file if that is the format you captured the images in, produces slideshows and web galleries and a lot more.  If you are serious about digital photography and you are considering a major software purchase, then  I don’t think you can go far wrong with Lightroom. There are both MAC and PC versions covered under one licence.

Computer system


I have more recently gone the Apple Mac route with my laptop and upgraded to a 17” MacBook Pro running both Windows Vista 64 bit and Mac OS X v 10.6 Snow Leopard in parallel. The graphics are superb but  do think Windows slows things down a bit when using Parallels. Seems faster just using BootCamp but then you have the hassle of re-booting into each system.

My love affair with Mac continues. I now have a dual quad core Xeon 2.93 Ghz Mac Pro installed with 16B of memory. It has two display cards driving two 24" Apple LED Cinema displays which makes editing an absolute pleasure. Had some problems with drivers for Snow Leopard but pretty much sorted out now. Windows 7 running in parrallel initially also had a few driver issues. The Windows 7 system certainly runs Photoshop betterthan the Mac version which is still not 64 bit. Lightroom (Mac version) is a 64 bit application and is my main program for sorting and RAW conversion. Engineering of the Mac Pro is very tidy with no wires floating around. Adding hard drives or memory is just a cinch.

Networking with the 17" Mac Book Pro is easy to set up and works very well.
Enough about hardware and software – after all we are here to get great images first and foremost!
     

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