2006 Maryland Renaissance Festival Revisited

Doug and Ariya invited me to go the the Maryland Renaissance Festival with them and having that Sunday free, I grabbed the camera and headed east.

Wandering the festival with DCPhotogs is a bit different. We rarely stop to see shows but instead move through the festival like a roving pack of animals intent on capturing images. This was a bit more sedate and we stopped to see more of the shows. I knew the Mediaeval Baebes were going to be making an appearance this year, but I didn’t know it would be this particular weekend. Fortunately, we got to see one of the shows. I always enjoy hearing them, though the person handling the sound for that performance was not doing the best job.

Still, having the camera, I ended up coming back with lots of images.

I used Adobe Lightroom, beta 4 to process these and it looks like it has a lot of promise. But, to get any kind of decent performance you’ll want lots of memory. I tried beta 3 on the PC (with 2GB ram) and performance was bad. Unusably bad unless you were very patient. For beta 4, I had just received my new Mac that only had the stock 1GB of ram in it. Performance was even worse. However, a few days later when my extra 2GB of ram showed up, performance was much improved. I really like what they’ve done with the “develop” panel. It’s pretty intuitive and really flexible. This could keep me from having to resort to Photoshop unless I want to do any compositing or other manipulations beyond the normal color, exposure, contrast, curve types of adjustments.

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