Day: August 20, 2014

We went to Embra today to witness the madness of the Embra Festival.  One of the great things about being retired is the ability to travel on the less-busy weekdays rather than the mental weekends.  However you have to remember that Scot Rail will try to screw you up at every opportunity.  So, today, mid August, festival in full swing, do Scot Rail put on longer trains to Embra?  ‘Course they don’t, they put on the standard 3 unit train, which means there were folk standing everywhere.  What did we do?  We just sat in First Class and pretended we had FC tickets, knowing there was little chance of the conductor making it through the crowds to chuck us out.  Result!

Had lunch in Valvona Crolla in Embra and had the worst (and most expensive) lunch we’ve had in a long time – we won’t be back.  Only pizza napolitana I’ve ever had without anchovies.  “Oh we’ve got an apprentice pizza chef on today.  Sorry.”  Not the best way to encourage return custom.

Photo of the day was a juggler whose patter was even better than his juggling.  Just one of the maddies we saw today.

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It is one of my favourite subjects, the centre of the rose without its petals. Sometimes the centre is more colourful than the full rose and often it is more detailed. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with the basic shot, so I decided to do some ‘shopping.  I started out in Lightroom 5 more of which later.  I exported it to Photoshop and made a copy of the layer in Photoshop and blurred the lower layer.  I then changed the layer type of the top layer to Overlay and then returned the image to Lightroom.  There I trimmed it and lightened the shadows and then removed some of the noise.

To install Lightroom 5 I had to upgrade my mac to Mountain Lion from Snow Leopard.  I object to this as it would appear that on a PC, LR5 will work quite happily on the aged XP.  Is this another case of designed obsolescence on Apple’s platforms?  Having said that, the upgrade went very smoothly and LR5 seems to run very well.  Shame Adobe make it so difficult to find a stand-alone version of this great program.  Why are they so determined to sell us the ‘cloud’ approach?  I suppose the short answer is money.  I hope LR6 when it appears will still be available as a stand-alone, but I doubt it.

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