A weekend without pictures

ZeGads! That's right. I did not pick up my DSLR once this weekend. In fact, my memory card is still sitting beside my computer in it's reader, having dumped another 300 or so pics on Friday night.

This weekend, I left the pics to a real pro, Penny Silvia. We met her at Ocean Beach in San Francisco for our annual family portrait. I say annual like we've been doing it for years when in fact this is only really year two and year one was full of shoots after welcoming Ms. Daisy into the world. Penny has been taking pics of Missy since she was in my belly. We did maternity, newborn, 6 months, one year, and are now on the annual plan. Since I take an unholy number of pics of my daughter on her own already for photo practice, our goal for our Fall beach shoot was family pics, which we have fewer of for obvious reasons.

Of course, Missy DID NOT get the memo on that.

Daisy took one look at that deserted stretch of sand and took off. And that pretty much sums up the shoot. Us, chasing Daisy up and down the sand. In typical toddler fashion, the only direction she wanted to run was with the wind at her back, which does not work well for photo shoots, especially when your mumma's hair is long. So, there was lots of cajoling and kicking and fitting as we attempted to redirect her, mostly to no avail.

Even Penny, who is a pro at shooting kiddos, was having trouble keeping up with her. She would run ahead of us, look down at her camera to get exposure, and then turn back only to find Daisy blowing by her, arms flailing. I have absolute faith that Penny got some great shots but we made her work for them and I'm sure glad I wasn't shooting us.

Talking of shooting...I had another photo shoot with friends this past Friday. I think I got some great shots but I am presently unable to verify given that my computer has pretty much crapped out on me. It's 6 years old and decided that it wants nothing to do with any program other than Google Chrome. Any attempt to open a photo editing program like Lightroom or Photoshop, results in little gray warning windows popping up all over the place. Basically, my scratch disk is full and despite defragging, compressing, and deleting, I am only able to free up enough space to open a photo, not actually do anything with it. And when I do, it's mind-numbingly slow anyway. (I'm also missing a "Ctrl" key which hints at how often I've done the "Ctrl-Alt-Del")

So, I had to take a deep breath on Friday night and buy a new computer. I knew the day was coming, I was just hoping I could eek this thing out a little longer, maybe make some money on the photography and then put that towards my "ultimate" dream Mac. My hand was forced, however, and I do not have $3k to spend on my dream computer right now. Nor can I devote the time or money toward retooling myself for the Mac world. Therefore, I cringed and bought a desktop PC. Yes, a desktop. Why? Because I can get 8GB of RAM, 1TB of hard drive, a 945MHZ processor, and a great graphics card all for under $1,000. And the RAM is upgradeable to 16GB, which means I'll have some legs on the thing. Am I thrilled about having one of those hulking CPUs on my dining room table? Nope. I haven't had a desktop in probably 10 years. But needs must and this is a need that musted.

Once I have the Hulk up and running, crap cleared off my ailing laptop, I'm going to take it into the Geek Squad or something, to have them tune it up. I still want to have a laptop around for basic stuff, so I can be more mobile when I'm blogging or surfing the internet. Plus, this thing has been through it with me. I bought it for myself as a 30th birthday gift, back when it was Dell's top of the line model, then I took my frustrations out on it a couple of years ago and killed the motherboard and it hasn't really been the same since, bless it.