In the late 1960s when I was wandering around the New York City area with a Nikon F over my shoulder, a slice of 42nd street pizza in one hand and a Miller Highlight in the other, I was most heavily influenced by the words of John Lennon ("what if they gave a war and nobody came"), Frank Zappa ("don't eat that yellow snow") and Tom Rapp. Now I know that most of you (even the ones who are as old as I am) are thinking, "who is Tom Rapp?"

Tom Rapp was the creator, writer, musician (almost all instruments), and singer of the Pearls Before Swine. OK some of you are starting to nod your heads now, and some maybe even remember their first album (1967) "One Nation Underground" and the cover art from that album, Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden Of Delights". ("Drop Out" was the song that actually influenced me the most from that album).

Well anyway, on the Pearls Before Swine third album "These Things Too" (1969) there was a song entitled "These Things Too".

"These Things Too"
By Tom Rapp

There was a Persian king
Who wanted to know
What he could say on
Every occasion
That always would be so

Illusions, circles and changes
Illusions, always changing
Like the wind and the rain

He summoned three wise men
From his eternal throne
One from each border
Gave them his order
To write words always true

The wise men thought so hard
For a night and day
Found these words to say on
Every occasion
These things too shall pass away

© 1969 by Thomas D. Rapp

Now that I have your full attention, you must be wondering what this blog is all about. Well I was reading the other Inside Lightroom Bloggers posts a few days ago and something struck me about Michael Clark's post. It turns out that I am not the only one who is not using all of Lightroom's features in my workflow and I don't have to make excuses about it.

Software applications are tools for us to use, it is not necessary for us to be shaped by our tools. After all does anyone use all of Adobe Photoshop's tools? Not even remotely, but that does not negate the power and the usefulness of the application.

Michael stated that he does not use Lightroom to catalog his entire image library, that he is quite happy with his own cataloging system and uses Lightroom to organize and work with current photography projects and flushes them out of Lightroom every month or so to keep the Lightroom image cache small and starts over with the next project.

Interestingly enough I do exactly the same thing. I had been thinking about changing over to using Lightroom to manage my entire image library, but I have to thank Michael for stopping me in my tracks and making me rethink my next move.

What I will probably do is dedicate one computer to managing the entire library using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, mainly so I can write about the experience, but keep my current image library where it is now.

I will continue to use my main working computer for current photography projects only, using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for organizing, developing and distributing my project images.

What this process will of course insure, is that my images will be safe and my personal cataloging system intact, just in case these things too shall pass away.