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Bilt for Simmer

Decided it was time to put some “good” into my day and couldn’t think of a more appropriate day than today, Good Friday.  News and I have a history of not exactly getting along and as of late, that relationship has reached some dangerous levels.  A bit of simmer seemed like a good prescription to get the karma back in balance.  It has been a bit of struggle over the last couple of months trying to get the body back together – In physical therapy for debilitating levels of plantar fasciitis and visits to the chiro to repair a badly whacked back, both of which required workouts that I swear were more painful that the injuries themselves without the added training runs wedged between repairs.

Flowers from Biltmore visit in July 2014

Admittedly, these challenges pale to the trials and tribulations that I know some of my readers are currently dealing with – selfishly mine were just starting to get the best of me even without the talking heads spreading exaggerated doom and gloom.  Made a deal with myself to spend some time to just relax.  Best way to do that was to turn off the news channels, put the feet up and enjoy some ultra running podcasts and let the stress melt off.  The body was distrusting at first expecting to be called to duty at any point, eventually dispensing with the twitching and settling in so could focus on learning from some of the best ultra-runners in the sport.

Flowers from Biltmore visit in July 2014

Unless you are Linda hit the jump to enjoy a quick break from the norm here – Linda, you can simply skip to the next post ha.

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Spring is in the Air

I still need to process the pictures for the next round of blog posts so figured I’d take the easy path to the quota this month.  Been pretty exhausted from work lately and it’s going to get EXTREMELY busy in about a week so this extended weekend is all about getting some things out of the way and hopefully some sleep.  Thanks to a mouse this week my slumber was cut short .. but more on that in a future post.  Today is all about celebrating the arrival of Spring.  What’s the best way to do that?  How about some of these:

How’s that for getting rid of the Winter blahs?  These flowers all came from the Indianapolis Zoo/Botanical Gardens trip we took back in 2011.  While processing the statues for the previous two posts I found these sprinkled in.  Linda is usually the flower girl but since she keeps trampling into my bird shoots figured it was fair play.  I’m not sure I mentioned it or not, but my digital darkroom received an upgrade over the holidays.  Although I was becoming quite efficient at Lightroom 3, we decided to go ahead and upgrade to version 4.  It seems those people over at Adobe decided to make some changes that impacted my standard workflow.  Since these shots had a nice range of color and contrast, figured they’d be a good place to start re-learning.

To Adobe’s credit, they did carry over the old interface elements for those items imported into a Lightroom 3 created albums.  Not a big fan of paying for things I don’t use so immediately chose to convert those images to the new format and the experimenting began.  One thing that is immediately apparent is the improved ability to pull detail out of the shadows and recover it from the highlights.

There definitely needs to be soak time with the new controls.  Kelby has been educating me nightly on how to get the most out of Lightroom 4 (the book of the month.. okay maybe more like two or three).  Nothing too earth shattering, but did explain the white balance eye dropper which has been baffling me ever since I started with version 3.  His chapter on how to add meta tags on load was also a big help.

Hit the jump to continue ushering in Spring

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