Today’s Caturday is special for a number of reasons. Reason number one is the focus (pun intended) on one cat in particular, which for today would be Joan Jett, the dilute tortie. Joan is the only cat we’ve adopted where we left her with the name she was given at the shelter. It just seemed to fit.

Reason number two is all of these photos are straight out of camera (or SOOC). I’ve shut down my monthly Adobe Lightroom cloud account this month, for reasons I’ll talk about at the end of this post. In order to move my digital photographs off the camera’s SDXC card, I’ve written a Python script to do a simple catalog of everything on a card, and then use that information to copy all the photographs locally to my Mac. I’m going to write another separate post about that Python utility.

All of the photos were taken with the Olympus Pen F and m.Zuiko 75mm/1.8 at f/2. No cropping, not fiddling with exposure, no touchup.

As I mentioned earlier, there’s a reason I’m dropping Adobe and going my own way with my own tools. I’ve spent years paying Adobe $10/month for the privilege of renting to play with their software. It’s been going on since Adobe announced no more updates to their last stand-alone Lightroom 6. I kept using LR6 for as long as I could, before a macOS update to full 64-bit made that almost impossible. If LR6 still worked under macOS I suppose I’d still be there.

I’ve known for some time that the only reason I stayed with Lightroom was because it kept my digital photographs catalogued and filed, going all the way back to 2009 when I first started to use Lightroom. I still have all those old digital files, still accessable as regular RAW and JPEG. It’s not like my work is locked away from me. But I came to realize that staying with Adobe because of its cataloging feature was not a good reason. After all, it’s folder based. My Python utility does all of that, and starting today I’ve successfully started to pull off all my camera photos and storing them in an area that helps me keep up with them.

And I have other tools I intend to learn how to use if I want to make image modifications to the RAW images. Again, more about those later.

So far I’m happy with the utility. Everything is pulled over, including each photo’s metadata, meaning I retain the photograph’s creation timestamp. This represents an interesting crossover of two of my interests, programming in Python and digital photography. I should do more of this…