Hooray: A Wacom Drawing Tablet!

Being in business for ones self has many perks. Among my favorite is "spending-down". Usually in the last quarter of the year I look for things that I have needed/desired/lusted after for my business and I buy them. It comes down to a simple principle: either spend the money now or get taxed up the wazoo for holding too much cash. So the decision is simple: let the spending begin...

If you ever worked within a graphics program such as Photoshop you know how hard it can be to work with a mouse. You just don't have the control necessary to do fine work. A drawing tablet is a must for any fine work within Photoshop. I currently have an older Wacom Intous2 tablet. Unfortunately it for the legacy ADB Macintosh and isn't supported by OSX or any Macs born after 2001. I have used it on a few projects, but it was always a pain to have to boot OS9 and work with older versions of Adobe programs on my aging B&W 500Mhz G3. My primary computer runs Windows which wouldn't run this old tablet. The tablet eventually was wrapped up and is never used.

Friday night I am sitting here doing some photo editing on the PC, cursing my mouse for its inadequacies. Suddenly I find myself at Amazon.com with a 6x8 Intous3 drawing tablet in my cart. I don't know how it got there. I don't question it. I just produce my credit card and I a few moments later I blackout. I wake up several hours later in a ditch on the side of Route 9 with a pounding headache and a light wallet. Was it all a bad dream?

The Intous3 line represents the professional series offered by Wacom. I don't know why these things are so damn expensive. I would love to have the larger 9x12 tablet, but the near $400 price is hard to swallow. Amazon recently lowered their prices on the 6x8 tablets which finally pushed me over the edge. With free shipping the total cost was $280: Hardly a deal.

I have a lot of RAW photos to process and dreading having to go through them all. Now that I have a new tablet en route, I can't wait to dig into them. Amazon is giving me an estimated delivery date of Oct 11th. Sigh! Waiting is always the hardest part.

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Pelham Sing

The Pelham demonstration sing is a special sing for both Amy and I. Apart from being the closest sing to our home (about 15 minutes away), this particular sing represents Amy's introduction to Sacred Harp which ultimately led me to a Sunday sing in Amherst a month or so later. So the Pelham sing is a yearly milestone of sorts in our singing journey.

The singing was short, both in numbers and time, but enjoyable nonetheless. The singing takes place in a quintessential New England meetinghouse in Pelham. Daniel Shay and his fellow frustrated farmers organized their rebellion from within this very meetinghouse. The place is steeped with history and a pleasure to sing in.
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One Project Down

It's very hard to be creative on demand, but sometimes you have no choice. This job for an 11 x 17 poster for an upcoming bodybuilding competition came in and needed to be completed ASAP given the October 8th contest date. I was provided with some crummy photos and no direction whatsoever apart from the info text. Somehow I was able to whip together this initial comp on Sunday evening surprising even myself. The road represents Route 6, the flat somewhat desolate entrance to the Cape. Some severe photo touching and the addition of a lighthouse, shadows, etc. were needed to bring it all together. I wanted to avoid the obvious cliqued Cape beach scene and make for something a wee bit more interesting. Given more time I am sure I could refine this peice even more. But hey, what can ya do?

Looking at it now, I think this piece was subconsciously influenced, albeit subtly, by my recent obsession with David LaChapelle, the phenomenal pop art photographer/videographer known for his sexy surreal photoshop-sculpted masterpeices. His site is probably not safe for viewing at work/school due to the superfluous nudity, unless your workplace is cool with that like mine. Check out his
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Been Busy!

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