Last Day of March, 2015

Seen in a couple of Valley View yards today, we have some lovely wisteria blooms:

Believe it or not, I didn't have the Nikon with me when I drove by these yards, so these were taken with my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 smartphone and tweaked for sharpness (and vignetted, like I tend to do with almost all my photos -- maybe it's hackneyed, but I just really like the way photos look when they're framed-in with black vignette) in GIMP on my laptop after I got home from school.

Spring is often such a busy, frantic time of year for me... ever since I was hired on at Valley View High School, the job of yearbook adviser has belonged to me. Lots of schools like to get their yearbooks before the school year ends, so they can have signing parties... but we like to have the WHOLE YEAR represented in the book, including all the end-of-year senior activities... so our book doesn't get wrapped until graduation is over, and we get the books in August.

All that to say, I tend to be pretty crazy busy starting about now, and it doesn't slow up until the day after graduation when I submit the finished book to the publisher.

This year has been a bit different... at the beginning of the year, I finally got the new computer I'd been begging and pleading for since forever... in years past, most of the yearbook had to be done on my home laptop because the computer on my desk just couldn't handle the photo processing. For example, during one evening of basketball in which there are four games, I can easily go over a thousand pictures. Ninety percent of those photos are useless, so the next day I spend time shuffling through all of them and deleting the ones that don't make the cut. Then with the hundred or so pics I have left, each pic has to be white-balanced and sharpened. My old computer would take at least ten minutes just to finish processing ONE photo. Obviously I got very little yearbook work completed at school, and my free evenings were spent at home at my own laptop trying to get all the pics done.

The new computer, as our IT guy emphasized to me, is the best computer on the entire campus. LOL I wasn't trying to compete, but I knew what kind of processing power I needed and I asked for it. Repeatedly. Until I got it. [grin]

Which now means I can whip through photos with blistering speed.

Which, in turn, has meant that I am further along in yearbook completion this year than I have ever been in the previous seven years.





This pleases me.