Montana

Back from Wyoming/Yellowstone, and Adobe CS4

Although our flight ended up delayed by 24 hours, we made it back to California OK.  I got a lot of great shots and I've decided that I'm going to put a book together with my shots from this trip and our trip 2 years ago for Christmas.  I made a simple test book of my shots from Vietnam and I learned a lot from that experience.  I want to give it another try and see if I can do (a lot) better. Last time I used to book printing module in Apple's Aperture software and printing service and I was happy with how easy it was to use.  I don't actually own Aperture though and my 30 day trial is over so this is a good excuse to try some other tools.  The next logical choice would be Blurb, and I've downloaded their BookSmart software and I was surprised at how limiting it is, although people seems to really like the printing quality/value.   Luckily you can just upload pre-rastered pages from anything that outputs and use them purely as a printing service.   (As a side note, I believe that you can set up Aperture to output pages of any size and use Aperture for the layout without using Apple's printing.)

I have Adobe's InDesign and I've always wanted to get more familiarity with Adobe's Creative Suite so I'm going to give it try on this project.   On a whim, I went to Barnes and Noble to see if there were any books out for CS4 yet and to my surprise, there was already a copy of Adobe InDesign for Dummies on the shelf.  (Pretty fast, since CS4 started shipping last week.)  I checked the copyright page and it's copyrighted 2009!   Is that legal???

In Wyoming

We've been in Wyoming for a couple days now and everything is going well.  We're staying at a friend's hay ranch and we've taken a trip up to Silver Gate, Montana and spent some time in Yellowstone and had a quick trip to Grand Teton National Park. The wildlife viewing has been excellent and the aspens are beautiful.  Our Internet here is spotty but I hope to have some photos  shortly.