Well it finally happened, I finally got 10,000 page views. It actually happened about a week ago and I got to see it at 9,999 but I've been too busy to write a journal about it until now. It took a little over 2 years her on deviantART to get to that milestone. Its interesting looking back on my journal history as my 5000 page views was almost exactly a year ago on Sept 8th, 2008 so I'm averaging about 5000 a year. Maybe this year I'll step it up a little more.

Anyway lets move on...so a couple weeks ago I got a new computer for editing my photos. Until now I've been using my 2 year old laptop for my photo editing and while it works fine for the most part it is a little slow when working with panoramas stitched together from multiple images in photoshop. Those panorama files are often 20-40 megapixels after stitching all the files together. First off the stitching part takes quite a while to complete on my laptop and simple adjustments to the completed files are slow as well. So I built myself a new desktop computer from parts because its cheaper that way and really not too hard. All in all it cost me about $350 for a computer which would have been about $600 from the major computer manufacturers. This is the first computer I've built in about 10 years so I was a little nervous. Fortunately everything works great and it started right up the first time I turned it on(It's easy to forget to plug something in). The new computer processes files in photoshop way faster than the old one so I am pretty happy with it. For all the nerds out there its an Athlon II X2 2.8Ghz(I went with a dual-core because photo shop still can't utilize tri or quad core processors so they would be a waste of money for me), Radeon HD 4200 onboard video (will eventually upgrade to a better video card but again photoshop is just beginning to utilize video cards) and 4GB DDR2 RAM (will upgrade to 8GB very soon).

Now I am going to sell my laptop to my Aunt who was looking for a laptop and I'm going to get myself one of those nifty little netbooks so I have something a little more convenient and lightweight for traveling. So I will have a desktop with my 22" monitor as my main photo editing rig and a little ultra portable computer for offloading and previewing photos while traveling. Ideally I will eventually stock up enough memory cards so that I can leave images on them for the duration of a long trip so they are on cards and a hard drive as backup until I get home and can back them up there and clear my memory cards.

In other news I'm very excited about the new Canon 7D which was announced on the 1st. I would get the 5D Mark II if I could afford it but that won't happen any time soon. The 7D is a little more obtainable for me and a pretty sweet camera. 18 Megapixels, 8FPS Continuous Shooting, HD Video(Hey I think it would be fun to play with), A new AF system, New metering system, +/- 5 stops exposure compensation and +/- 3 stops Auto bracketing are the features I am most excited about. I was a little skeptical about 18 megapixels on an APS-C camera at first but it appears they have managed to actually improve ISO performance over the 40D and 50D and offer up to 6400(although I would probably never go above 1600 or 3200 and only if absolutely necessary).

I'm also excited about going to Arizona in a week. It isn't a photo trip though, the reason we are going is to visit my girlfriend's grandma. However, we are going to go to Sedona for a day which is an area famous for the red rock cliffs so I am really looking forward to that. I'm not going to get my hopes up though because it is just a day and who knows if the weather will cooperate or if I will get anything really great but we will see. Ok I think thats about it and this journal is getting way too long so on to the features.