14 February 2006 Archives

The second beta release of Adobe’s Lightroom was released today, and it is a significant improvement over the first. It runs faster and has a superior toolset, including the much demanded cropping tool. Adobe says it will also run on the new PC Macs, which surprised me.

Beta 2 also has the ability to add music to a slideshow. If you want to have music, check an option and then pick a playlist from iTunes. The music then plays in the background of the show.

I’ve been using the tool tonight to create slideshows of my orchid photos from the 2006 Missouri Botanical Garden Orchid show. This year’s theme is based on the classic children’s book, Wind in the Willows, and I’m using the soundtrack from the play based on the book. In particular the Overture and Carl Whidden’s Will I find New Dreams work amazingly well. Unfortunately, the exported versions of the slideshow don’t include either the fullscreen option or the music and the resulting slideshows suffer in comparison. Disappointing, because the shows are rather nice on my laptop.

I hesitated to put any online, but decided to publish one of the smaller ones, as a valentine to soften some of this week’s rough edges. You’ll have to pretend the photos are fullscreen, with Will I find New Dreams playing in the background. If you’ve never heard this song, it’s a wonderful song.

I’ve added a second Flash show, with photos adjusted more for the PCs. The song I mentioned is from a soundtrack album for Wind in the Willows. The eMusic page has 30 second snippets of the tune. iTunes also features the album. I love this type of haunting, almost melancholic music.

The song Member of the Gentry might bring a chuckle in light of some of the this week’s discussions.

I discovered that the SxSW panel on Increasing Women’s Visibility on the Web: Whose Butt Should We Be Kicking is still happening, under Blogher management. One of the original panel members, Virginia DeBolt, is still on the panel, and it looks like a goodly mix of people will be featured.

I am disappointed that the original panel fell through, though I’m glad that Blogher was able to salvage it. As reticent as I am of meetups, this was one of the few events I was anticipating keenly this year. The fact that it fell through, and how it fell through was a disheartening event for me. Such is life, the world still turns or some such thing. Perhaps I’ll do something other during this time frame: travel to the UK or the Antarctica or some such thing.

I am still going to write up what I planned on discussing on the panel, but I’ll do this closer to the event. In the meantime, Tara Hunt, one of the new panel members, has a post related to the topic.