Introduction

I have never really possessed a desire to blog.  And yet, I find myself  on the threshold of a pathway that will most likely require more attention to details, so this seems to be the most reasonable method of tracking my progress.  Plus, I expect that it will make it easier to locate things I have already done (but forgotten) when I need them later on.

I am not an artist; I trained as a scientist and veterinarian in the 1980s, and I continue to practice veterinary medicine full time.  My father and I built a black & white darkroom in the basement of our home in the early 1970s, and I have continued my interest and avocation in photography ever since.  I went fully digital just after the turn of the century.

Since that time, I have dumped most of my discretionary dollars into Apple computers, Nikon cameras & lenses, and Adobe Photoshop.  (The lack of a link on that last item is clue...)  At first, I was not bothered by the huge expense of Adobe's image editing product, even though I only need a half dozen times per year, since I did not purchase every single upgrade as each came out.  In fact, I only purchased the original version 7, and the CS3 upgrade a few years later.  I thought that was plenty for the little that I used it.

The current version of Mac OS X (10.8.x - Mountain Lion) is having a few issues with CS3, and the truth is that I am just plain frustrated about the push toward subscription based Photoshop, or as Adobe phrases it, Creative Cloud.  Mind you, I do not disagree with the concept, but $50 per month?  Sure, as a bona-fide CS customer, I would get $30 per month for a year, and full access to all the software (which is nice), but it does not work for someone who uses it as infrequently as I do.

I have considered just purchasing a month of everything, but which month?  It is simply impractical to manage it like that.  I am also not thrilled about coughing up another $200 for the full upgrade to CS6.  I would much rather continue to save for the next generation of imaging equipment, and improved computing power.  I understand that my choices are not always logical, nor are they necessarily what others would select, but oh well.  That's my problem.

So, I will spend the next few months learning the ins and outs of GIMP, an open source, no-cost image editing software package, and I will be keeping my notes here on what I learn, focused, of course, on the photographic projects I am currently working on.

I also plan to simultaneously explore inkscape, another open source, no-cost application, designed for vector drawing.  In fact, this is the "final straw" reason for my decision anyway.  I have been considering GIMP for a few months, but the image-editing functions of Photoshop have been working just fine (and I purchased a truly fabulous noise/sharpening filter plug-in from Kodak a few years ago that does not work as a standalone app) so I never really did anything to learn GIMP.   Truthfully, it is the drawing modes of Photoshop CS3 that are crashing my machine, and it is not like I was asking it to draw anything complicated, just some curved arrows (with effects) and an icon that looks like a stack of paper.

This discloses my alter ego, Mr. CodeBoy, who sells utility applications at the Mac App Store and has an occasional need for button images and application icons.  It is not something that I have any intention of hiring a graphic artist to do, since these apps are not generating an impressive revenue stream, so I need a very low-cost option to continue to make my own.

There you have it; a geek scientist, practicing veterinary medicine, pursuing photography, and coding computers.  Why not attempt electronic illustration as well?