As I woke up today, the sun was nicely diffused by a blanket of clouds and only a few beams of sunlight were able to pierce through. Combining that with a free afternoon caused me to pack a camera bag, throw on a bunch of layers and venture out. As usual, my close to home hiking spot is Ohiopyle State Park and even though I knew there would be no snow on the ground, no leaves on the trees and probably not much in the way of grand scenery, I had an urge to be out in the woods.
Once I arrived and to begin my hike, the clouds parted and the sun shone bright. It was right around noon and the light was harsh. This kept my camera pointed at the details rather than the majestic landscapes, not that I minded. I shot mostly with the Fujifilm XF 18-55mm f/2.8-4 and had some generic macro extension tubes on hand to assist with the close in shots. Walking around and finding interesting details in such harsh light was a fun challenge and I hope to be out again soon doing it all over again.
For the next part of me leaving Adobe behind, let me introduce you to the replacements. First up is the new hardware that is paramount to the switch. I’m typing this up on a Galago Pro laptop from System76. The specs on it are as follows: Intel Core i7 8565U cpu, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 250GB NVMe SSD, 2TB M.2 SSD (in a 2.5″ 7mm SATA adapter) and a 14″ 1080p matte screen.
Discrete branding
Look at those ports!
Keyboard and trackball
The guts
The casing is aluminum, but it is not a unibody enclosure like a MacBook. The laptop is very light for its size, however it feels well built and solid. Overall, it’s a very nice looking and feeling machine.
Ever since Adobe announced that Lightroom was moving to a subscription only model, I have read countless people online talk of moving on and leaving the Adobe ecosystem. The general consensus was that Adobe was just trying to wring every penny they could out of their user base and that since they were Adobe and had Photoshop and Lightroom, no one would walk away. For the most part, Adobe was right. The company made huge profits off of their subscription model and to be honest, the $10 a month they charged for both Lightroom and Photoshop wasn’t all that bad for amateur users and for professionals, it was a great deal. I however, was one of those who didn’t like being charged monthly, especially for a product that at the time was slower than the competition, more crash prone and had issues with the FujiFilm X-Trans raw files that I primarily shot.
