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James Duncan Davidson

Biography

James Duncan Davidson is a photographer, author, and software developer living in Portland, Oregon. He is the co-author of O'Reilly's Running Mac OS X Tiger and a contributor to Mac OS X Hacks, among others.

He is perhaps best known for his work on Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant, both open source software projects created during his tenure at Sun Microsystems. More recently, he's been working on lots of Ruby on Rails based websites and Objective-C based Cocoa applications. Since 2005, he has been the photographer for all the conferences produced by O'Reilly Media.

Articles

Blog

A Backup Disk Solution

August 17 2008

Earlier this year, I wrote quite a bit on this blog about storage and backing up. Starting with a New Years Storage Resolution, I worked my way up to The Simplest Storage Solution. In short, I keep multiple copies of... read more

Viewing Your Masks

August 06 2008

When applying localized corrections in Lightroom 2, it can be sometimes difficult to see the bounds of the mask you are working with. This is especially true if you are using a very subtle correction, such as just a bit... read more

Lightroom 2.0 Hits the Streets

July 29 2008

The wait is over. Lightroom 2 is out of beta. This release brings loads of new features, including 64-bit support, localized corrections, and dual monitor support. There are even some features that are new since the public beta, including gradient... read more

Picking Out a Tablet

July 17 2008

When Lightroom 2.0 hits the streets, you can be sure that one of the features you’ll want to experiment first with is the new localized correction tools. As I’ve said before on this blog, I think that localized corrections are... read more

George Jardine Leaves Adobe

July 01 2008

George Jardine has said farewell to Adobe and his position as an evangelist for Lightroom. Over the last few years, he’s been a welcome voice on his series of Lightroom podcasts, a library of content from which I’ve learned quite... read more

Lightroom Used in New Canon Ad

June 26 2008

Canon's new Rebel XSi ad is making its way around the Internet and probably out onto the TV airwaves as well. It's a really nicely crafted ad and one that will hopefully inspire budding photographers everywhere to pick up a... read more

Adobe Camera Raw 4.5 Release Candidate

June 25 2008

Today, Adobe posted a release candidate of the Camera Raw 4.5 plug-in via the Adobe Labs website. By release candidate, Adobe means that the software is well tested, but they would like to see additional community testing before it is... read more

The Usefulness of the Quick Collection

June 18 2008

Over the last few months, I’ve been extensively using the latest versions of both Aperture and Lightroom in gigs large and small. I’ve long been comfortable using both, but with the 2.0 versions of both, I’ve really wanted to dig... read more

Looking for the Right Level of Keywording

June 03 2008

After using modern workflow tools, like Adobe Lightroom, for the last few years, I'm finding myself approaching a crisis point with keywords. When I first started really adding keywords to image metadata years back, I took the same approach many... read more

Lightroom 2 and Soft Proofing

May 28 2008

Most of the features that I wanted to see in Lightroom 2 are in, including multiple monitor support, metadata based localized corrections, and tons of improvements in the Library. There is one significant missing piece to me, however,and that's soft... read more

Lightroom 2 and 64-bits

May 20 2008

One of the bullet point features of Lightroom 2.0 is that it supports the latest 64-bit systems on both Windows and Intel-based Macs. For 64-bit Windows Vista, you have to use a separate download to get 64-bit support. On the... read more

Localized Corrections and Masking

May 15 2008

The headline feature of Lightroom 2 will be localized corrections. Sure, multiple monitor support is nice, print packages are pretty cool, and 64-bit support are all great additions, but localized corrections are what really will get people's excitement going. Because... read more

Auto Sync and White Balance

May 10 2008

Brandon Oelling has been extolling the virtues of AutoSync on this blog, and for good reason. It can make quick work of adjusting dozens or hundreds of images at once, especially for simple adjustments like exposure and contrast. There's one... read more

Import Considerations

April 20 2008

Because of the fact that I spend so much time working with digital assets, or maybe despite it depending on your point of view, I'm always quite curious to see how other people deal with the problems of managing large... read more

Lightroom 1.4.1 Released

April 10 2008

On March 16th, Lightroom 1.4 was pulled from Adobe's servers because of some rather nasty bugs that slipped out into the world. This was a disappointment to many because Lightroom 1.4 contained support for lots of new cameras, including the... read more
James Duncan Davidson