I made it up to the mountains with some friends last weekend. We stayed at my grandfather’s cabin in Central Camp (a couple thousand feet above Bass Lake) and got some rock climbing in at Fresno Dome.

View of Bass Lake from side of the road

Driving from Central Camp to Fresno Dome

My friend let me cruse around on his beautiful quad. I naturally found the largest puddle I could and blasted through it.

The hike to the rock

Base of our route

Top of the first of four pitches

We didn’t make it to the top. Short on daylight and out of practice. We had to descend to the bottom and hike back out the way we came. Making it to the top has the added bonus of getting an easier hike back.

Jeremy descends to set up a lower rappelling station

Overall very relaxing and a wonderful break.

After watching the promotional videos its clear to me that Apple’s Aperture photo management / post editing software is best-of-breed. The demos are simply impressive.

I liked their method of photo “version control”. It always keeps the original photo intact and all changes are new versions (where only the changed data stored). This allows you to work with photos in RAW format from the shoot to post editing yet it will not take much hd space to have hundreds of revisions of a particular photo. Check out this demo

From the F-Spot Site:

F-Spot simplifies digital photography by providing intuitive tools to help you share, touch-up, find and organize your images.

This is a little vague, as it doesn’t mention my two favorite features. 1. Displaying a time line of photos (you can skid the bar over to 2001 and check out your photos from then). 2. Packs a useful image tagging system (create tags, select drag photos onto tags, see a photo as the icon for the tag)

Main Window Screenshot:

Fat Features:

1. Photo Time Line - time based view of entire photo collection
2. Image tagging system
3. Export photos to the web (Flickr, Picasa, or static pages)
4. Imports photos directly from digital camera
5. Keeps photos organized (on the hard drive) in folders according to date
6. Intuitive
7. Quick photo edits

Fat Shout-Out:

Its a little past the new year now, however, I needed to get a FatPenguin shout out to my favorite Linux application of 2006: F-Spot personal photo management software. F-Spot may not be driving the web servers of the future or taking %s away from IEs user base, but it is one kick ass piece of photo management bliss.

Tag Editing Screenshot:

Clean interface, intuitive, imports the photos directly from you camera, and quick basic editing functionality.