Adobe has released a free beta version of Adobe Lightroom 2.

I began using Lightroom during the first beta nearly two years ago and have come to depend greatly on it for almost all my raw image post-production. Adobe had made some significant improvements to the first version so I’m looking forward to see what’s in this beta.

At $299 Lightroom is a bit steep, but for editing, color correcting and tagging a large collection of photos I can’t see using anything else. I haven’t had a chance to try out Adobe Bridge so I wouldn’t know how the two compare.

Download the free beta (Windows & MAC) here.

First I want to say Into the Wild writer and director Sean Penn is an incurable douche-bag and I really wish Mr Hand would have done more then just discuss American History with the surf punk.

That aside, Into the Wild is a very good, but not great, adaptation of a wonderful book by Jon Krakauer. Krakauer did an incredible job researching and studying the physical and spiritual path that Christopher Johnson McCandless took from his Emory University graduation all the way across the country to an abandoned school bus on the Stampede Trail near Denali National Park.

I was hoping for a little more spectacular cinematography from this film, especially of America’s last frontier and, more importantly, I didn’t get the same hopeless sense of isolation that came from the book. However, this is a movie worth watching and one of the better films I’ve seen in a while.

With a stirring soundtrack from Eddie Vedder and a heartwarming performance by Hal Holbrook this should be in your Netflix queue, but do yourself a favor and read the book, even if you’ve already seen the movie. Krakauer is a great storyteller and with all of the people he touched along his journey, McCandless’s true story really can’t be told in two an a half hours.

Also read Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a story about a deadly hike up Mount Everst.

Men’s Vogue (you know you read it) has an article about the rough and tumble world freighter pilots. A close friend of mine was freight dog for many years flying an antiquated Boeing 727 before transitioning to a major carrier and a new Airbus 318. Just a few months after starting with the new carrier I was fortunate enough to catch a flight from Ft Myers to Denver with him as first officer. He told me that while he enjoyed the modern, computerized 318 he really missed actually having to fly the steam gauge 727.

Best quote from the article? Four Floors of Whores. Read on…

Freight dogs famously fly decrepit, “clapped-out,” analog-only hand-me-downs from the passenger airlines, and brushes with the reaper, duly embellished, make for great table rants over pitchers of Watney’s at dog hangouts like the Petroleum Club in Alamaty, Kazakhstan; the Cyclone in Dubai; Sticky Fingers in Hong Kong; and the legendary Four Floors of Whores in Singapore, which, according to the dogs who frequent it, is a model of truth in advertising. It’s an article of faith among freight dogs that George Lucas based Star Wars’ famed cantina scene on the scuzzed-out cargo skippers at Bryson’s Irish Pub, a flyboy Rick’s Café adjacent to Miami International Airport through which generations of pilots have passed in a sort of demented finishing school. “We tend to be the rogues of the airline world,” Tony Baca, a 747 cargo captain, told me recently. “The airline pilot is all prim and proper. We’re not. It’s a whole different culture.”

Read the whole story here.

I found this link on the Ancient Pelican blog, a freight dog himself for seven years.