On My Bike

DAM stands for digital asset management and covers the entire aspects of structuring, retrieving and sharing your photos. If you're an advanced amateur or professional photographer, you need a wide range of tools to keep your digital projects creative and organised. Many provide all the essentials in one package. Having been an avid fan of iView for many years I was looking to upgrade, unfortunately the iview team sold-out to Microsoft and in turn they sold it on to Phase One and there seems to be very little support or development, but even so it’s still a great bit of software. But! (there’s always a “but”) I recently purchased a new Apple mac and was looking to upgrade the software to use the full power of the Mac, so Aperture was the obvious choice, as with all Apple software it’s easy to use and never lets you down, but Adobe have also thrown their hat into the ring with Lightroom 3 along with Phase One, Bibble and Portfolio so I downloaded the trial versions to compare.
 
Aperture
http://www.apple.com/uk/aperture/
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Lightroom
Lightroom http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshoplightroom
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Phase One
Phase One http://www.phaseone.com/en/Software/Capture-One-5/5-Overview.aspx
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Portfolio
Portfolio http://www.extensis.com/en/products/
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iView
iView http://www.phaseone.com/Phase%20One/Online-Store/Expression%20Media.aspx
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Bibble 5
Bibble 5 http://www.bibblelabs.com/

I settled for “Adobe Lightroom” what really sets this apart from the others and make this the winner for me is the huge array of Black and White pre-sets and plug-ins, up until now no software has been able to compete with the darkroom when it comes to creating beautiful black & white images, but Lightroom has got me excited about mono images again. Its interface is clean & tidy with everything easy to hand, and if you are stuck they have the biggest collect of online tutorials of any software product I’ve ever seen, thanks to Julieanne Kost and Adode TV.
So move over Darkroom and bring on Lightroom.
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Julieanne Kost tutorials can be found at
http://tv.adobe.com/show/adobe-evangelists-julieanne-kost/

Along with Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy,
he captured and helped create the 'Swinging London' of the 1960s

Another part of my youth torn away with the sad news of Polys death.

Former punk star Poly Styrene who front X-Ray Spex, died today afther a battle with cancer.

Real name Marianne Elliot-Said, she had cancer of the spine and breast.

Poly was one of the first female punk icons.

Poly formed her band after watching the Sex Pistols perform on Hastings Pier on her 18th birthday, with her unpolished vocals and unorthodox style she became known for her rallying cries against consumerism and environmental destruction.

Poly Styrene occasionally re-emerged into the limelight, and released her third solo album, Generation Indigo, last month.



http://www.poly-styrene.co.uk/

What happened to the youth clubs? don't know about you but around this way they have all been shut down over the years with nowhere for the kids to hang-out and only the local parades to there kicks, leaving a trail of mess and graffiti, upset locals and easy pray for the asian drug pushers in this area, sourly the cost of sorting out this kind of mess is far greater than funding the youth clubs in the first place?..



Most of my teen years where spent in youth clubs close to where I lived in Wadhurst, right up to my late teens when I started working a could afford to go to the pub….

I seem to remember somebody saying many years ago "it's just a phase he's going through" Well here I am all these years on, knocking back the years and knocking back the scotch, I've gone gray in places I used to play but I'm still on two wheels. I was thinking about the “Streets of London”, what can I say about this place? anyone who knows where I'm talking about will now sit back, remember what it was like and smile. The Streets of London was a bikers pub, a cellar bar under the Castle hotel in Tunbridge Wells, dark, damp, the smell of oil, leather & booze. I was 15 when I first started going down the streets and I would be there every weekend for the next 4 or 5 years until it closed (if anyone has any photos let me know) made some great friends there, some of whom are sadly no longer with us, great memories, but I’m still rocking & still bad for good.