It was about 57°F (14°C). The last pleasant morning until September or October. This was the last day of school, the last day of my 9th year as a teacher. This was the bad weather makeup day. Our school decided to have a "Field Day," a day of fun after finishing all required school, district, and state testing. A plane ticket to Europe along with hotel reservations had already been booked months in advance. I was given permission to be there for half a day and help relieve some teachers in their game station and help monitor the cafeteria.
Due to recent rains, these mushrooms grew on the ground:
.jpg)
.jpg)
I flew to Frankfurt that afternoon. I spent about two months in Europe before coming home for about a week. I took over 13,000 pictures, without counting some pictures that were eliminated before downloading the rest to my computer. I deleted the bad ones. Out of the possibly good pictures, I ended up with over 10,000 pictures left to edit. If my calculations are correct, I'll end up with about 9,000 pictures once I finish editing. I'll be sharing some of these here IN THE NEXT FEW MONTHS.
After more than two months after coming back I'm still stuck here, prioritizing my work and editing pictures at the end of the day. This process is extremely time consuming, and even tedious at times, but it will be worth it. Editing pictures takes a really long time, more than it did in the past. Here's why:
Windows 11 got rid of some awesome features of Windows 10 (these are called clarity and spot fix), but also added a feature to make colors a little brighter by reducing shadows. Fortunately, my work computer still has that feature from Windows 10:
I've been able to edit about half of the more than ten thousand pictures from this past summer with Windows 10, but coming back to school has made me work slowly on this. I've been trying to edit about 100 pictures per day from my school computer after school. I have no guarantee that the Windows 10 editing tool will not be deleted or downgraded to the Windows 11 tool, so doing that after school had been a priority while I was still enhancing the best photos that I've taken (before this trip) with my personal computer, using the Windows 11 feature at home. As I finished editing the best pictures that I've taken with Windows 11 about ten days ago, there's more time to edit pictures on Windows 10 only, especially on weekends, as I'm now bringing my school laptop home every night. Once all 9,000+ pictures are edited with Windows 10, it will be time to edit them on a program called Photopad. Photopad will help reduce the amount of yellow that comes up when Pixel photos are made more colorful, as well as fixing levels (I'm not really sure about what that means, but it often enhances the picture itself). After editing with Photopad, I will use the Windows 11 tool to make colors a little brighter by reducing the shadows:
The picture shown above is one of my old pictures that was taken inside a church in Portugal. A three-step editing process for all of these pictures will take months. I pray and hope that the spot fix and picture clarity pictures are added to Windows 11 in order to make this process a little faster. What will I do if the Windows 10 editing feature is eventually gone for good? I guess I'll worry about that when that happens.
