I'm still here...

Yes, I still am taking pictures. Here's one from a new series that I'm beginning to work on, entitled "Paradox":



Doing a lot more reading and studying, though, trying to perfect my craft even more. Here's an article that captures a lot of what I've been pondering, but from a slightly different perspective -- Strobist: Photography's Vanishing Middle Class

I've also taken a plunge I swore I'd never take. I bought a Mac. The final straw for me was when I was trying to manipulate a 100+ megapixel composite image I'd created from 70+ frames on my D1H. It was only 45 MB as a JPG, and no matter which software I tried to open it for tweaking in, it took about 5 minutes to open, and then my relatively beefy WinXP machine basically started choking, letting me do precisely nothing to tweak the image. So, to test the Mac I ended up buying, I opened the same file from my USB-powered external hard drive (through a USB 1.1 connection, nonetheless), and while it took about a minute to open the file, I was able to do some manipulations without the computer and the program completely choking on me. The thing is, when I bought my WinXP laptop, I kept in mind the hardware requirements I thought I might need to do some decent photography manipulation. It's about a year old now, and it has 1 gig of RAM, a decent processor, and it should've been able to handle this file relatively fine. Nope. The 4-year-old Mac with 1/2 the processor speed and 640 megs (1/3 less) RAM, ran circles around that machine. It keeps up with it for everything else, too. Plus, the battery life is at least twice as long, if not longer (I haven't really given it much of a test).

So, yeah, I'm slowly weaning myself away from doing my photography on the PC, and I'm switching to a Mac. Lovin' it so far!