Lightroom Article, Part 1. Organizing your Images

Before I get started with the Lightroom stuff, I have a couple of small topics for those not into LR.

What to do when it's really, really cold:

Bundle up and keep warm! Note the sheepskin coat, ski pants, funny hat and warm gloves. I use my snow scoop as a sledge to bring firewood into the house.

Take neat pictures. I shot this one from my front porch, about 10' from the door. Obviously in the middle of a snow storm, I thought this high key image came out pretty well.

I also went for a walk out on the hard water, to the ice fishing huts. I took a few pictures while I was out there, but no real keepers in the bunch.

What is the best aperture to use?

The next day, I brought the camera with the 200mm lens and the 2x converter out and shot some photos of the ice fishing huts from the road. The far shore is about 1 km away, so we're looking at some real long reach-out-and-touch pictures here. I had the tripod with me. It was snowing and I wanted to try different shutter speeds to see what the best image would be. These two images were cropped out of sequential frames, with the settings as shown:

Now that's interesting... the wide open shot is MUCH sharper than the one with the lens closed down tight. The snow, of course, had something to do with it, but not everything. Oh, and it was on the tripod and I used the self-timer so there was no camera shake involved. So I know now, stopped right down with the telextender mounted is NOT how I should be shooting pictures. When I get a chance, I'm going to take a series of shots (in better weather conditions) at different aperture combinations to find the sweet spot for this lens combination. I'm guessing it'll be around f/11 or f/16 (remember that includes the two stop penalty imposed by the telextender).

Converting to Lightroom

Introduction

I don’t know if I should call this “part 1” or “part 2” of the Lightroom (LR) articles. I think I’ll stick with “part 1” since the post last time was really just an introduction.

 What we’re doing here is documenting my conversion to LR, with a focus on “WHY” one would make certain choices, not “WHAT” or “HOW”. For how to use the program correctly, pick up Scott Kelby’s book “The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for Digital Photographers” which is available at http://www.photoshopuser.com/. You don’t have to be a NAPP member to buy the book, but if you do join NAPP, you’ll get a discount and all kinds of other benefits, including a subscription to Photoshop User magazine which is worth its weight in gold. If you decide to join NAPP, use this link so I get my brownie points!

 You might also consider contacting Jim Camelford at jim@photography.to. Jim is the local LR guru and not only does he teach LR courses but he imparts a great deal of wisdom about the right way of doing things.

 This series of articles looks at three of LR’s strengths: “Organizing your pictures”, “Editing your Images” and “Creating Output Files”. LR does many things well, but these three were the factors that convinced me to convert to LR. Combined with Photoshop (PS) LR provides an elegant way to handle your workflow, whether you’re a high volume user or just starting to delve into the world of Digital Photography.

 These articles are intended for those who have converted to LR or are considering doing so and want to start it the right way from the beginning. Or those who might need a little convincing!

 /introduction

 Part 1: Organizing your Work

 This article is about why you should get started organizing your photos and some strategies on how to do it. This is about setting LR up so you can find them again when you want to.

 I’ve been shooting pictures and doing graphics for 50 years. When I look back at some of the old stuff, I think, “Wow, what an amateur!” I suppose I’ll look back in 5 years at what I’m shooting now with the same jaded eye.  

• My images from the old days were
• 35mm slides. I have boxes and boxes of these in the garage. I haven’t looked at them in years. 
• 35mm negatives. I had these in binders in plastic sheets, with a contact sheet filed next to them. I don’t even know where these are any more.
• Large format negatives and transparencies. I have absolutely no idea where they are. I think there’s a box somewhere.
• Boxes of old prints. Some framed, some not. Some in albums, some not.
• When I started doing digital graphics in the ‘80s and ‘90s I had a mixture of MAC and PC equipment and used whatever media were available at the time for backup and storage. There were tape drives, I remember a 100Mb cartridge drive (called a ZIP disk, if I recall), and of course 5¼” floppy disks. Not only don’t I know where these are, but I don’t have any way to look at them anymore, anyway.
• My early digital photographs were relatively small files stored in the “My Pictures” folder on a hard drive. I backed them up from time to time and there’s still a folder of old stuff on my backup drive.
• Starting about 10 years ago, I copied data to CD for backup purposes. The first dedicated photo backups started in 2004 and I have at least one CD (now DVD) for each month since then. Finding anything earlier than 2008 requires looking through these disks one at a time.
• All of my photos since January 2008 are stored on my 1Tb external drive, with DVD backups. They are imported into LR and I can find anything virtually instantly.

 What I’m afraid of is that if I rewrite this article 10 years from now, I’m going to lament how I can’t get at the pictures I’m doing now. Who knows.

 But what I’m trying to say is, I’ve archived a ton of “CRAP”. Pictures I never, ever will look at or use again. Why? Because it was easier to throw it all in a box than it was to go through it and toss the bad stuff out.

 Seems to me there are two reasons to keep a picture:

• You want to keep a record of something.
• You did a commercial shoot. You need to keep the original shots, even the bad ones, just in case the client wants something one day.
• Pictures of your kids growing up, your grandparents when they were the age you are now, trips you’ve taken, things you’ve experienced and want to remember.
• Photos of people before they became rich and famous. Hopefully your kids.
• You want to use it for something
• Great pictures that you’re going to print and exhibit in a gallery some day, with 4- and 5-figure price tags on them
• Pictures you’re going to sell to the news media or to National Geographic
• Pictures you want to use in a slide show or video presentation
• Pictures you’re going to publish in a book when you get around to it
• Stuff you might want to share online in the hope that someone might think, “what a great talent this guy has!” and write you a cheque with lots of zero’s in it or provide you with other benefits (use your imagination).

I’m sure you can think of other reasons to keep your images. We all have our own personal reasons. But why keep the garbage? As I said a minute ago, it was easier to keep it than to go through it and weed out the bad stuff and it didn’t cost you anything other than some storage space. The down side is, it makes it harder to find the good stuff when you have to weed through all that junk to find it!

 As I said, in my garage, I have several large cartons containing boxes and boxes of 35mm slides. In the 1960’s and 1970’s I was a prolific amateur photographer. I took thousands of images at home and during my travels (mostly in North America and Europe) and I never threw out anything. I haven’t looked in these boxes in years. At one point, a long time ago, I went through my slides and chose the ones I liked best: there were about 100 of them and I kept them in a single Ektagraphic Carousel tray, which I still have. I’ve scanned most of these, I still have a batch to do.

 In that tray are a few slides that I took in the Painted Desert in Arizona in 1971 when my (ex) wife and I did a road trip across North America in a VW beetle. Great pictures. But now suppose we wanted to go through the slides from that trip on a stroll down memory lane (unfortunately, I don’t have a working slide projector right now). I have the 400 other slides in little yellow Kodak boxes, but the good ones – those I just mentioned and a couple from Kansas, and some from Wyoming – they’re not in those boxes. So looking through the trip we’d miss the good ones!

 Here’s where LR is so much better than any of those old methods of storing images: you can virtually instantaneously find any image you have made, provided you took the time to categorize it properly at the beginning.  And you can keep a link to that one image in a virtually unlimited number of collections.

Take this image as an example

• This is one of my favourite images. It’s in my collection of my best shots, my “Dirty Dozen”.
• I roll through a slide show of about 200 images as a screen saver on my desktop. It’s in that group.
• I’m planning to include it in my next Blurb book
• I’m using it in this article.
• I’ve entered it in the GTCCC competition this year and in the RHCC competition last year (where it was voted best print in the show, thank y’all verra verra much).
• I might create a slideshow of images that I’ve entered into various competitions.
• Hilarie taught me how to create this using Painter 11. I’ve done other paintings and I might want to look at my development as a pixel artist one day.
• I’ve sold a couple of prints of this picture and I hope I can sell some more.

OK, I’ve listed 8 different reasons why I might want to find this image. LR allows me to store ONE COPY of this image on my computer (we’re not talking about backups here) and categorize it in a variety of ways so I can use it or find it for any of these purposes. You can use any or all of the following, in any combination.

• I’ve flagged the image with 5 stars. It’s definitely one of my best.
• I’ve set a “blue” colour flag to indicate that it’s been completed.
• I’ve added a link to it in a whole bunch of collections that relate to the above list
• I’ve marked it with a bunch of keywords so I can find it again: “mountain man; painting; portrait; george; high falls gorge; july 2008 road trip…” etc.

This is where LR excels. It’s like having a gigantic virtual filing system where you can instantly find anything you’re looking for.

Technology changes {sarcasm}you’re kidding, right?{/sarcasm}. So how you store your images today is different from how you used to store them (in little yellow boxes in the garage) and it will be different tomorrow. I’m going to leave the “HOW” up to others. Contact Jim Camelford. He’s got a better grasp on this than I do. As I write this, the state of the art is DROBO and RAID systems of individual high capacity hard drives, but for those of us who are not so technologically driven, a few (not just one!) portable hard drives in the 500Gb to 1Tb range will do. If the average digital file is 10Mb in size, a 1Tb drive can store 100,000 images.

Hopefully you’ve gotten the message: you want to keep your digital images so you can look at them some time in the indeterminate future, because it costs nothing to shoot digital images you have thousands of them, and how are you going to find the ones you want anyway? This is WHY you need to organize your pictures, whether you have a huge archive already or you’re just starting out. This is WHY you want to keep them in such a way that you can transfer them to whatever the latest technology is down the road. To that 1000 TeraByte pocket drive using subatomic technology based on detecting the strangeness of bottom quarks during weak interactions that’s going to be invented next year that will make all your CDs and DVDs obsolete. That will work whether you’re in the MAC or PC environment, doesn’t matter.

LR is designed to handle big databases. Its search engine is based on SQL and it can index and handle thousands of records with ease. My own database is about 15,000 images so far and LR doesn’t exhibit the slightest hesitancy searching those files. So it can be argued that for now, you can store all of your images in one place (backup, backup, backup!) and you can keep the links to them in one big database or ‘catalog’. LR will do the latter for you.

 You can keep them separately in multiple catalogs if you want. There are many arguments in both directions, but it doesn’t matter. A professional photographer may want to keep the weddings he’s shot in different catalogs, because he sees no reason that he would want to view or use different brides or grooms in the same presentation. Even if he did, he could bring them together by creating a combined catalog in LR. No sweat, just a few keystrokes. And he might want to keep his travel shots, his trips to South Africa and New Zealand in another catalog. Fine. You choose. But if you’re doing an article on “Mountains” you may want all of those travel shots in one catalog.

So I’m torn. There are those who suggest all your images should be represented in one massive master catalog, and others who think you should separate them into logical groups. Doesn’t matter – just do it! Whatever works for you. LR can handle big databases, if you think that’s the way you want to go.

Choose a manageable starting point. You could make tomorrow the first day of your new LR digital life, or you could go back to the day you got your first digital camera. Or anywhere in between. I chose to go back 2 years and I can add old stuff slowly to it when I have the time. I currently have about 15,000 images imported into LR and categorized. Remember, I only needed to categorize the “keepers”, so it wasn’t as daunting a task as you might imagine.

Let’s talk about backups for a second. Clearly you need to back up your images somehow. My backup strategy is weak. OK, the strategy isn’t but the tactics are! Right now, new images are transferred to my desktop hard drive, and a backup goes to an external 1Tb WD MyBook drive. Every month I also burn these to DVD. I’d like to say these are stored in another location, but, well, I don’t have another location right now. If my house burned down, I’m toast. If someone broke in and stole my computer and external drive, I’m almost toast. So I try to keep them separate. There are schemes where you can store your data online at a remote server, and other ideas, but this is “HOW” and not “WHY” so I promised I wouldn’t get into it. You figure it out.

It’s important that you understand that LR contains information about your images, not the images themselves. That’s what an LR catalog is. If you open the folder where it’s located, you’ll find two kinds of files: an “lrcat” file and something else called “Previews.lrdata”. The former is the information about your images: the latter is a record of the high resolution preview of your images which is generated by LR. You can force LR to generate these previews again, although it might take a while. But there’s no compelling reason to back these up. Good thing, too, because this file is BIG. Not as big as the images themselves, but BIG. In my case, with 15,000 images, my previews.lrdata folder is about 9Gb in size, while the .lrcat file is only about 200Mb.

So when you’re doing backups, what do you need to keep copies of? Certainly the images themselves, and also the .lrcat file. The latter contains everything you’ve done in LR with your images. Remember, it’s not “IF” your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of “WHEN”. It will. Be diligent about backups.

So do you see WHY you might want to start using LR? Even if you never edit a picture, or print one, or sell a picture to a client or to the media, just being able to store your pictures in an organized way and being able to instantly find the one or ones you’re looking for is reason enough!

Next: Getting your pictures into Lightroom.

Winter's Back!

Winter's back with a vengeance. Boy, I wish I could go to Photoshop World in Orlando. If I were a full-time photographer, I would. Oh well. Check out my "Weather Bug" screen shot

They aren't kidding with the little igloo graphic! Not only is it -20°C but check out the winds: out of the North at 20kph. I wonder what the wind chill is at! I looked out the window at a brilliant tangerine sunset. The sky is crystal clear, as it usually is when it’s this cold. I thought of going out to take a shot or two… for about 3 seconds. I think I’ll stick near the fire. Now tonight, I might be up for some star time exposures… or not given how cold it is.

PS: it's now 9:45pm and the weather bug says -24°C and winds 26kph from the Northwest. Forget the star shots!

PPS: it's Saturday morning at 8:45am and I just added the weather bug image on the right. No words required.

I’m decidedly uninspired. I go through that from time to time as I’m sure almost everyone does. I’m up North and when I look out the window or go out for a walk, it’s the same-old, same-old. Although I seldom venture out without a camera, there isn’t a lot out there that begs to be photographed. It can be argued that every snow-capped fencepost or icicle presents a photographic challenge, but I’m not seeing them these past few days.

Still, I shot a few “camera motion” type forest scenes, my axe lying on a pile of freshly cut kindling, a dripping icicle…

I did get one image that I liked last week. I went for a drive to the Minden Wildwater Preserve where I shot kayakers in the summer and got this shot of the fast flowing water as it cut a path through the ice. I did do a little colour manipulation, to increase the visual contrast between the tree and the monochromatic winter scene.

I got the following image a couple of days ago. It was actually quite warm out and I was trying to capture the impression of the dangerous ice conditions. I wasn't successful. However I started playing with this picture and kind of liked the results.

 
I want you to know that this picture never saw Photoshop! It was entirely done in Lightroom which is about to become my main topic of discussion for a while.

By the way, Apple just announced their iPad. I hear there’s going to be a high end version with 64Gb of memory. Rumour has it it will be dubbed the “Maxi-Pad”. Sorry. Had to.

There are a few other small topics I’d like to share before I dive into the main subject of this post.

Snapshots vs. composed images

You don’t always have the time – or want to make the effort – to compose your images. Or do you? Certainly, if you practice enough, if you’re familiar with your equipment and if you have an understanding of the ‘rules’ of photography (even if you don’t follow them all the time), even your snapshots will be reasonably good. If you’re a sports photographer or a journalist, your only chance of success is to be able to capture images instantaneously without a lot of forethought or preplanning. Or is it?

Well maybe not. I’ve recently been looking at some sports pictures and trying to analyse them a bit. Last year, I attended a couple of presentations by Richard Lautens of the Toronto Star and he talked about all the pre-planning that went into some of his images: choosing the best vantage point, prefocusing, being aware of backgrounds, etc. But what I’m talking about is that spur-of-the-moment opportunity, stuff that happens without warning.

Here’s one that was ALMOST successful but in the end, was not because of inattention to detail. The grader came by and plowed in my driveway. A followup tractor cleared my neighbour’s place, but not mine, so I ran out to try to grab him on the way back and ask him to do mine too. He had been intending to all along but needed to do mine from the other direction so was going to catch it on the way back. I thought the bright yellow tractor would make a dandy shot, so I ran back into the house to grab the camera. I knew I had only a few seconds, but the wrong lens was on the camera! I mounted the 24-120, ran out the door and fired off a quick shot or two.

So what's wrong with this picture? I’ve talked before about using your eyes and not missing things. I did it again: notice the wind chimes and bird feeder in the foreground that ruined the shot. One step to the right and it would have been so much better. This is laziness. This is ‘knowing’ in my mind that I can fix all kinds of stuff in PhotoShop so I’m not careful and I ignore a lot of things.

So I’m posting a not-very-good image in the hope that you’ll get the message. Use your eyes. Look at your picture BEFORE you trigger the shutter.

I did a little better with this next shot. It is cropped slightly, to get rid of a tree on the right and excessive foreground. I can clone out the telephone pole and wires on the left (I didn’t crop them out because the back of the tractor would have been too close to the frame edge). I took several shots, this was the best because the building was not entirely obscured and the tractor was in the right “rule of thirds” location in the image. That’s what I mean: I actually thought of that as I composed the picture. And it worked (in my humble opinion).

Here’s one more “Snapshot” that ALMOST works. Not terrible, but not great. Here, I should have moved the bowl to the right a bit and zoomed out to include more space at the bottom. And shot from a different camera angle instead of straight down. I did not take the time to mount the external flash or the Gary Fong diffuser for a purely selfish reason! My dinner was hot and I was hungry! Letting it cool and microwaving it would have ruined it, so I chose my stomach first! Shot using the horrible on-camera flash.

Home made Pad Thai. Completely from scratch, except for the sauce that came out of a bottle. And the rice noodles that I should have separated a bit more. I do have some talents…

Speaking of Gary Fong, he should be paying me for this.
I have to say, that Gary Fong diffuser is probably the best $50 that I ever spent. Every time I use it, I’m impressed. I tried something a little different yesterday with some success!

You know what it is, right? It’s a piece of plastic that looks like a Tupperware bowl and fits on your flash. I’ve written about it before or you can go here to read about it and even see a little video. You can buy it lots of places, the best one of which is B&H Photo in New York. Choose which one fits your flash, then go here to buy it.

Up to now, whenever I’ve used it, I’ve gotten really even, really soft light. I don’t know exactly why the results were different last weekend— well I do, but I didn’t expect it. Here’s my setup.

The subject was seated in that chair, I was standing off to the left outside the frame of this picture and I had the subject turn his or her head to look over their left shoulder at the camera. This gives some depth to the picture and changes the dynamic. Having the subject totally square to the camera makes for a horrible image. The flash was controlled by the “Commander” mode in my D300 (most of the DSLRs will do this). The on-camera flash triggers the other one and in this case, I set the popup flash so that its light was NOT captured in the image. In other words, the only light was from the SB-600 flash and the diffuser.

The shadow on the left side of the subject’s face was fairly deep because there was nothing on their left to reflect light. Some light bounced down from the ceiling to define the hair (or lack thereof!). That’s OK – another one of those ‘rules’ is there can be as much as a 3:1 ratio between the amount of light on the two sides. But if I hadn't been so lazy, I should have brought a reflector disk with me. I will next time.The higher the ratio, the more dramatic the image but for an ID shot, I’m pushing the limits here. Notice the nice skin texture (click the pictures to blow them up). Great for guys but not so good for girls! So I went back and reduced the clarity in Lightroom on the girl’s picture. Here’s another version where I really cranked that slider down so you can see its effect better. I wouldn't normally make it so extreme, but this demonstrates how it works.

 

The black guy was a real problem. His skin was MUCH darker than it even appears in the picture, and I COULD NOT get a good exposure. I had to adjust it in LR and PS to make it acceptable. Again I had to reduce the clarity to get rid of the hard reflections . More importantly, the reduced light on his left side didn’t get any of the detail on that side of his face. I added a graduated filter to bring that side up substantially. It’s really quite easy in Lightroom! Compare the following picture with the one above.

OK. Now for the main feature. I’ll wait right here while you go make some popcorn.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

The Lightroom articles will all be in this colour. So if you're not interested in LR,
you can simply skip over it. Go ahead, I dare you!

First this disclaimer: “I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the communist party.” Oh wait, wrong Blog. Seems to me that quote would be lost on anyone much younger than I am. Of course you could Google it… What I really want to say is that I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination, an expert. But I figured that by sharing my learning experience with you, you might get a fresh insight.

There are a million different ways to do things. Adobe Lightroom is just one of them but its approach to the management of photo files and the workflow of a photographer is elegant. The problem is, like Photoshop (PS), it’s such a deep program, it has endless little alleys and pathways to explore and a steep learning curve if you want to use it right.

I don’t have formal training. Not as a photographer, not as computer nerd, not as a writer, or an artist. Hell, I ran a graphic design company for years, doing graphics and layouts and pre-press, without ever taking a course or anything. And a photo studio. I learned FORTRAN in college, then taught myself about 6 other computer languages. I learned PS by muddling through it on my own, by watching what other people accomplished. I’m one of those people who needs to understand WHY you do something, the WHAT just comes. As a former formally trained mathematician and theoretical physicist, that’s how I learned – I’d derive things from basic principles so I had a pretty good understanding of what was behind the math. I was pretty good at that and I have deep regrets that I didn’t pursue it

So why am I telling you this? Why am I sharing the secrets of my soul? Because that’s how I’m learning LR as well. I figure that knowing WHY you do something is the easiest way to learn HOW to do it. So when Jim helped me set up LR on my new computer and gave me a 20-minute tutorial on how to make it work, I went home and started playing with it on my own (I had fiddled with it before so I had a basic idea what it was about). I very quickly realized that I couldn’t learn to use it properly in a vacuum – and if you didn’t set it up right, you were never going to get the benefit of what LR’s designers had in mind when they created it, then refined it

Scott Kelby, the President of NAPP, has a great teaching style. I’ve read more than one book and article of his (he regularly contributes to Photoshop User magazine which, as I’ve said several times before, is VERY worth subscribing to, click here). So I bought his book, “The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers” and I read it cover to cover. He also explains WHY. The only objection I really have to his approach is his heavy reliance on keyboard shortcuts, which I can’t remember even when I turn to the next page, never mind a day later! “Press ctrl-alt-shift-delete while holding down the right mouse button with your nose and like magic, the icicles will fall off your roof” {Scott, at least include a reference page in your books listing the shortcuts!}. LR has lots and lots of little trick things in it, flippy triangles to click and switches to turn off and panels filled with scrubby sliders. Scott’s a detail guy – he’ll say, “reduce the clarity to 61% then increase the saturation by 9%...” but you have to understand he’s just telling you exactly what he did for THAT image and you’re not expected to remember the exact numbers, just the concepts.

I’m rambling. I’d say “to make a long story short…” but it’s way too late for that! I’m planning to write up my LR learning curve. I’ll break it up into a series of articles and try to make it sequential so you can follow it. I’m directing these articles toward those people who would also like to start using LR, and to those who are already using it but are not convinced that they are doing it right and would enjoy picking up a few tips here and there. I’ll differentiate it from the rest of the Blog so that you can skip the LR tutorials if you’re not interested.

Again, this is just a view of my experiences learning the program on my own, and some of the pitfalls I’ve avoided (and fallen into!). I’m not going to explain HOW to do stuff – pick up Kelby’s book or learn by playing with it. I’m going to try to get the concepts across, the WHY.

Another way you can learn how, and again some of why, is to spend some time with Jim Camelford. I spent an hour on the phone with him the other day and came away understanding a lot more about LR. He’s teaching LR to small groups of people, even 1 on 1, and he’ll go anywhere in the world to teach you. He’s really good at it. Contact him at jim@photography.to.

There are 3 things in LR that have convinced me to switch. I’ll tell you what they are, and they may convince you that you should too. Or not. Then I’ll talk to you one at a time about those 3 things. It’s going to take me a while to do that, so you can either browse the sections until they’re all finished or just take me at my word and dive right in. It’s up to you.

Here are the 3 things that I found that LR does really well (among many others):

1. Organizing your photos. LR makes it possible – actually easy – to organize and later find your pictures. You can save your favourites, dump the rejects, mark and group them by subject and function and any other way you can think of, and you can do all this quickly with a minimum of effort. If you think this is trivial, you’re wrong.

2. You can edit your pictures one at a time or in batches, much faster and easier than porting over into PS and all of your edits are non-destructive and reversible. And elegant. Sure, there’s some stuff you have to go to PS to do, but you can do that and come back to LR with ONE MOUSECLICK.

3. You can output pictures for dedicated purposes with virtually one click of the mouse. For instance, I gathered the pictures I want to enter in the next club competition, then exported them to a folder called ‘xport rhcc competitions’. I resized the images to the club’s specifications, got rid of the watermark, sharpened them for viewing onscreen, renamed them and took the metadata with them all in one shot. And if I have to do it again tomorrow, it’s now ONE MOUSECLICK. Oh and if I want to print these pictures, or upload them to my SmugMug site or even create a Flash web gallery page, once I’ve set it up it’s ONE MOUSECLICK. Oh, and I did the same thing with the pictures in this Blog.

OK, now you decide. We’ll get started next time.

It's January in Canada. Brrrr....

December is an active month. There’s lots of stuff going on, revolving around the holidays, people, parties… and winter is just beginning so you get your cold-weather stuff out in preparation and venture out to make sure everything works and keeps you warm. January is another story. It's a quiet time, and I have to work at getting motivated after the holidays.

Maybe it’s just the weather. As I write this, my thermometer says -17.6°C (that’s close to 0°F). It’s 8:30am and it’s dull out – f/8 at 1/15 sec, ISO 400. It’s snowing lightly, but you can see the wind swirling the snow off the ground, you know it’s cold out there. Every now and then, the snow drops off the heavily laden trees, making it look like a full-blown blizzard out there.

Last post, I showed you how the lake hasn’t yet frozen over, but now it has. The locals have put their ice fishing huts out and one guy I talked to said the ice was 9” (22cm) thick out there, and that was a couple of days ago when it was still hovering around the freezing mark. Last year I went out and took a few pictures of ice fishermen, I’ll probably do so again this year. I may even get a chance to go out and actually fish a little: it’s warm in the huts and it looks like a good excuse to relax and wet one’s whistle, so to speak.

OK, the huts are not really RGB (oh, you didn't notice?). Well the blue one is, but I coloured the others. The Red Umbrella Inn prepared the huts to be dragged out on the ice and took most of them out there on Saturday, January 2.

Inside one of their huts. Notice the heater and the mandatory "2-4".
This was taken last year.

This fellow was nice and cozy in his portable hut. Also from last winter.

Going to shoot some pictures out in the cold?

Just a few thoughts about what you should do if you’re taking your camera out to shoot pictures in the cold:

• Dress warmly. You can’t take good pictures if you’re shivering and you probably won’t have the patience to wait for that perfect shot if all you can think about is getting back indoors. Overdress, in layers so if you get too warm, you can open up things or take them off.
  
I have a very fine set of wool underwear. People think wool is itchy, but not this fine stuff. I’ve tried lots of other types but I’m always warm when I’m wearing this. And it actually wicks moisture away so it’s not too hot either. I wear them when I’m motorcycling or teaching the riding course on cool days. It’s called “Next to Skin” or something like that, and I bought it in a camping/outdoor store (Tent City on Steeles/Dufferin in Thornhill). I know the owner, and he told me to buy it, even though it was expensive. He was right: you can’t go wrong buying the best.
• Gloves are important. Yesterday I went out with a light pair of fleece gloves and within 5 minutes, my hands were cold. I actually have a set of layered gloves (inner glove liners, and over-mitts, which I admit I probably can’t press a shutter release with, but I can take them off to shoot and still not have bare hands. Anyway it’s winter in Canada, and if you don’t know how to dress for it, you should either stay indoors or live somewhere else.
  
• That camera body is cold. So is your tripod. Stop by the local hardware store and get that foam stuff they use for wrapping pipes, and put them around the legs of your tripod.
  

• Let’s talk about your camera. And your lens. They’re in a nice warm room, then suddenly you take them out in the cold. What happens? Not a lot. You would think that the air inside your camera, which contains a lot more moisture than the cold air can hold, would cause condensation to form. Maybe, but unless the camera is airtight, that moist air is going to get exchanged with outside air. So you might correct me if I’m wrong, but not much really happens, unless you do something silly like remove the lens and blow in the camera.
  
Do you wear glasses? Do they fog up when you go out in the cold? Not unless you breathe on them. But what happens when you come back inside? NOW THEY FOG UP. Why? Because the surface of the (glass or plastic) is colder than the air, and that moisture condenses on the cold surfaces. This can also happen inside your camera. So here’s a recent suggestion by Lance Gitter: seal your camera inside a big plastic bag when you come in from the cold (hmmm. I wonder if that would make a good book title? Nah, it might have been done before…). Now it’s surrounded by the cold outside air which contains very little moisture, so nothing will fog up. Let it slowly warm up to the inside temperature before opening the bag. Make sense?

Here’s a free suggestion. What’s it like inside your camera bag? I keep several packets of silica gel in the bag, which will absorb excess moisture. Where do you get silica gel? Try your local audio/video store – they often pack some in with electronic gear. Or motorcycle dealerships – Japanese bikes that come by seafreight from overseas have silica gel inside the crates, which the dealer throws away when they unpack the bikes. I found some at a shoe store: little packets inside every shoe box. A friendly store manager let me have a couple of dozen little packets.

• Cold temperatures affect your batteries. But you knew that. Just like a car battery, they deliver much less power in the cold, so keep it charged up and a spare in an inside pocket.

If the weather outside is frightening (tune stuck in your head?), you want to protect your camera against the elements. Pretty well all cameras are reasonably resistant to moisture, but not completely. So you can get them a little wet with no damage. WARNING: that is NOT true if you’re in a marine environment where there’s salt water. Salt will EAT your camera

I worry about water and stuff like windblown sand getting into the camera or in between moving parts. So I bought a “Storm Jacket” which I use when it’s nasty out. There are lots of different ones, but the one I bought has elastics at both ends so you can seal it at your lens hood, and you can leave the back open to access your controls and viewfinder.

This is mine. You can buy it here 

There are lots of different brands, ranging in cost from $15 up. Look here

Of course a simple solution is a plastic garbage bag with a hole torn in the bottom to stick the end of your lens through. You obviously can’t shoot through the plastic. You could also use a garbage bag as a raincoat, but doesn’t a real one make more sense?

I did go out to shoot a few pictures in the last few days. I think it was worth the effort. The snowmobile is the ubiquitous transportation mechanism to mid-lake, although people actually walk out on occasion.

I told you it was worth going out in the snowstorm to shoot pictures! This one's going in my favourites folder and is being submitted for competition as well.

Sunsets are different in the winter, too:

Some indoor photos!
Instead of going out in the cold, I decided to set up my light tent on the dining room table. I was curious if there would be enough light just relying on whatever came in through the windows. There was, because being on the tripod, I could simply increase the exposure time.

I was also curious whether I needed more than one light source. Turns out, I didn’t. I set the camera in ‘commander’ mode and remotely triggered the Nikon SB-600 , holding it in different places – inside and outside the light tent, from various angles. The differences were subtle. All of the following pictures used different setups, and they all look very similar.

This is a 60 Gb Creative Zen Vision M. It's for sale. Send me an email if you're interested in a steal!

I also played with direct lighting from a little flashlight.

So the message is, you don’t have to go out in the cold to take some neat pictures.

Light tents are not expensive, and easy to use. They fold down like a reflector disk, but damned if I can figure out how to fold it back into its original shape!

You can get one here.

A quick word about Lightroom.
I love it. I find myself editing things much faster and especially, when I output images. The pictures for this Blog took me about 5 minutes to prepare: I saved them in a collection called “Blog Topics”, then selected the ones that I wanted, clicked “Export” and chose a preset to fit them in a 1280x1024 container. Done. All I had to do after that was drag them across the network to the other computer (which I probably could have done directly, but I wanted to keep them in one place for archiving).

I still get confused a bit – for instance I’ll select a whole new collection and find the image I was looking at before still on the other monitor. I dunno why! Next time I’ll talk about the workflow, and flagging, rating and labeling images. I want to work on my routine a bit more before I share it.

Have a great day!

It's that time of year!!

You know, when you’re tempted to buy stuff you’d like to have but you don’t really need. I actually went out on Boxing Day to see what I could find (researched online first) but bought nothing. I was looking at the iPod Touch, because of the killer “Camera Control” app that would let me remotely control my D300 via wifi. One question I didn’t find the answer to was whether I would need to install Nikon Camera Control Pro to use it: a $200 investment. If I do, then it doesn’t make sense to spend all that money for this occasional use. If not, well it would be nice to have a new music device at the same time. Still, I didn’t find any deals except for a FutureShop thing where they were throwing in a speaker dock. By the time I got there, they were sold out.

I have some time to go on my Blackberry contract: next year maybe I’ll get an iPhone to do the same thing.

I went online to Kelby Training (you know, the NAPP people) and started to order some books. There’s the Scott Kelby Digital Photography Library, a Lightroom book (now that I’m using it), a book on Digital Painting and I thought I’d finally break down and subscribe to Layers magazine. However when I tried to enter the order, it wanted a ridiculous $44 for shipping! I cancelled the order and wrote them an email. I could have them ship to my son in New York and for $10 he could mail it to me, but I don’t really want to put him to the trouble. Watch this space to see if NAPP or Kelby, actually, does the right thing here.

 I really want a new digital tablet. Specifically, the Wacom Intuos4 (Buy it here) .

I really like using the little Bamboo, but it’s a bit small and lacks some of the features I’m just starting to appreciate, so the medium sized Intuos is what I need. I’ll keep the Bamboo for portable use with the laptop but this desktop is crying out for something more precise. I’m pretty sure there are some people out there who don’t use their tablets and wouldn’t mind selling it. Drop me a note if that describes you. Otherwise, I’ll order one in a month or so.

There’s some smaller stuff too. I wouldn’t mind getting a couple more CF cards for the D300 – 4Gb fast would be nice if they’re on special. Another 1Tb backup drive as well, so I can back up my backups. Actually I would dedicate one to my photos only, now that I’m getting into Lightroom.

Then of course there’s a new car, remodeling the bathroom and some other work in the house, an ATV, trading my motorcycle for a newer dual-sport, and so on. Anyway, that’s a short list of the material things I’d like to have.

 Money and things aren’t everything (well they help…). What I really wish for is health… for me and for those I love. Because without that, the stuff I listed doesn’t mean much. That’s what I hope for all of you.

 I saved a couple of topics from the last post because it was getting too long.

 So the topics in this Blog post are:

• The Santa Claus shoot I did with Jim & Jen Camelford
• Some notes on the Photographic Judging Workshop I attended
• My early experiences with Lightroom
• A neat thing you probably didn’t know you could do in Photoshop
• Doing screen captures
• A cool music site.

Before we get started, here’s a little reminder:

 Is your firmware up to date?

 (For you lo-tech types, I’m NOT asking about how your diet is going!)

 I read a note on the Kelby site that made me go to the camera and check the firmware revision. Both “A” and “B” were versions 1.03. The Nikon site (the better one to go to is the US site at www.nikonusa.com) said the current version was 1.10. You should check yours. The update is easy, and free. Follow the instructions, though – there’s a warning that if you don’t do it right, your camera may have to go back to Nikon for service! I’m not sure (OK, I don’t know!) about how it works at Canon or any of the less popular brands. There’s firmware in your Point-and-Shoot as well. Best to check.

 Santa Claus shoot

 In a conversation one day with Jim Camelford, he told me that he was committed to doing a shoot at a local school, the kids with Santa. It was a fundraiser for the school and was of course pro bono. Jen would man the computer and keep track of the names. The resulting pictures would be printed and put in a card frame for each kid. Apparently there were about 300 kids to do. I volunteered to help Jim and Jen out.

 The school had their idea of what they wanted the pictures to look like. They had set up a bench with a snowman and a tree and a furry rug and… about a million props. Both Jim and I thought a tight shot of a kid with Santa would be best, but it’s whatever the customer wants, sometimes.

Santa and friend

Same shot, cropped tight.

We had thought in advance about how we would do it, so I bundled a backdrop and stands in the car and drove 3 hours through the snow to get there. Just for fun, I threw one of my studio strobes in as well, with an umbrella.

Our original intention was to use a couple of Nikon hot shoe flashes – Jim has an SB-800 and I have an SB-600 – both equipped with Gary Fong diffusers. The flashes were to be remotely triggered by the D300 in commander mode. It would have worked, but since we had the big strobe, why not use it?

 So this was our lighting setup.

The main light came from the big strobe and we used Jim’s SB-800 on (our) left to fill in and soften the shadows a bit. The SB-600 was placed further over to the right, again to kill some shadows and throw a little extra light on Santa’s face. I personally hated the backdrop but it was better than what was there before. If we could have set it up from scratch, it would have been better to move the bench forward about 6-10 feet so that the backdrop would be right out of focus. We were also challenged by the fluorescent lights overhead which were too bright to eliminate completely. The shoot worked pretty well, and in the end was nicely organized. It was a real challenge to get the kids to smile and pose less-than-stiffly for the camera! And Santa himself, who had to stand at least 6’5” had to hunch over most of the time!

Santa's cute helper. Salimah is one of the teachers who seems to have a perpetual smile and great attitude. How come we didn't have teachers like this when we were in school? Later we had coffee in the Principal's office. Again, it wasn't quite like I remembered it from so many years ago! I softened the face with the clarity slider in Lightroom, otherwise it's pretty well as shot.

Jim, of course, is a huge Lightroom user. He is very skilled at organizing and batch processing and he was the only reason this shoot worked as well as it did. All I was there for was to help provide some lighting hints, and try to get the kids to loosen up a little (“Simon says, make a funny face. Now look at Santa. Simon says, look at Santa…”. Amazing that kids today still know who Simon is!).

 I had fun. I don’t envy people who do this for a living, though. It’s hard work!

We could have done this whole shoot with the two Nikon flashes. The Gary Fong diffusers work really well and if you don’t have one, you should. As I said in a previous post, you can read the details at the Gary Fong site here, and even see a little video on how it works. Down near the bottom of the page is a chart showing which model fits your flash. You could buy it there, but for the same price, and free shipping right now, you can buy it at B&H here.

Judging Course

I attended the Canadian Association of Photographic Art (CAPA) workshop last month. It was run under the auspices of the Greater Toronto Council of Camera Clubs (GTCCC) and was offered to selected camera club members. Attending the course does not make me a certified judge, but it is a step along the way. I was interested in following that path for two reasons:

• Learning how judges think and what they’re looking for will make me a better photographer, and
• I’ve watched some judges in action and I think I could contribute, and help other photographers improve their skills.

Now I’m not going to reveal any secrets here (CAPA and GTCCC people, you can relax now!) but I will tell you that if you have the opportunity to attend this workshop, take it. It will make you a better photographer. It’s all about seeing stuff that you missed, and looking for that “wow” factor in your images.

 Part of the purpose of judging photos at the club level is to educate and encourage photographers. A good judge is more like Paula Abdul on American Idol than like Simon Cowell. Find something good about an image, and compliment the maker, then objectively come up with a suggestion or two to improve the image. The trick is to do that within the 20 or so seconds that you have to look at each image in a judging session.

 Here’s an example.

“Winter Road”

This isn’t fair, because it’s my own picture and I’m biased. Putting that aside, if I were judging this image I would say something like, “This is a well exposed image, with detail visible both in the white snow and the dark trees. The viewer’s eye is drawn from the dark lower left corner, along the curving road. It is sharp from front to back, however there is no defined subject and the dirty road takes away from the pristine feeling that the maker was presumably intending. This image scores a “6”.

One of the toughest challenges is to properly evaluate and score ‘artistic’ images. You have to think about what the maker is trying to convey and put aside your own likes and dislikes.

 Here are a couple more images, they are for you to score and comment on. Use the comment tab below this post and try to rate these images objectively.

"10 Below"

"Dawn Chopper"

I'm going to submit this one at the club next competition, so we'll see how you did compared with the accredited judges, OK?

If you are not now a member of a camera club, go out and join one. People all have different learning styles, but one of the best ones is to see what someone better than you – or different from you – is doing. So if you are in a club, be sure to participate in the competitions – you will learn, I guarantee it. By the way, the really best way to learn how to do something is to teach someone else. Think about it!

As far as I know, there are no clubs up here in the Minden/Haliburton area. You'd think there would be something affiliated with the Haliburton School of the Arts. I’ll keep looking, but if not, I’m going to try to start one. There are lots of artists and photographers up here.

Speaking of Lightroom… (I was, wasn’’t I?)

I’m starting to get used to it a bit. My workflow isn’t quite right and I haven’t properly organized my photos and backed them up the way I should, but I’ll do that this weekend. The beauty of the program is how you manage your files. One thing that really stands out for me is how easy it is to output images for the specific purpose intended: for instance, I used to open each picture in Photoshop to resize it for this Blog – in Lightroom I select “Export”, tell it to make .jpgs and fit them in a 1000x1000 px square, and click “OK”. All done. If I want the same images for print, I would do the same thing but just change the size and resolution parameters. And it doesn’t matter how many pictures I do at a time, it does them all at once. There are lots more good things in the program, and I’m slowly learning them.

How? Well by trying it, and emailing Jim when I’m stuck (happening less frequently now!) and by going through my back copies of Photoshop User magazine. By the way, the “Help” site is one of the few that actually works! Type a question in the search field and believe it or not, a RELEVANT document or documents are there. I’m impressed. As I said above, I’m going to acquire some Kelby Training books in the next couple of weeks to keep me on the right track.
I’ll leave you with a picture I took a couple of days ago on the way back to the house. The temperature was +1°C.

Some people have IQ’s smaller than their shoe sizes. Outside this little bay, there’s open water – the first freeze was only a couple of weeks ago and what looks like solid ice in the distance is not, it’s the beginnings and probably less than an inch or two thick. To top it off, there’s fast flowing water from a culvert coming in at the bottom left of the picture and that is open water you’re looking at. And some idiot’s snowmobile track about 6’ away from it. Darwin was right…

So did you know you could do arrowheads in Photoshop? Bet you didn't! I didn’t until I came across it while looking for something else recently. Here’s how.

Select the line tool which is nested under the shape tool in the tool palette

Click the little down arrow in the option bar at the top, and the arrowhead dialogue opens up. The values in the dialogue seem to be the default, except for the “concavity” which I increased to its maximum (50%) because I liked what it looked like.

Now drag to draw your arrow on your image. It comes in on a separate layer, so you can use layer effects like a drop shadow to make it look cool.

While I’m at it: “how”, you may ask, “did you do the screen captures?” I used a simple free utility called “Screenhunter 5.1” which is available at http://www.wisdom-soft.com/. They have a couple of more fully featured programs for a few dollars, but the free one does what I want, except for one thing: it doesn’t have multi-monitor support. It only works on your main monitor. You can set it to capture a rectangular area, the active window or the whole screen, at the press of the f6 key. It saves the file in your choice of a number of formats, I chose .jpg as a simple choice. Pretty cool! If I recall correctly, Hilarie pointed me at this one.

A cool music site

I often like to listen to music while I work. I don’t have a great CD collection, I don’t own an iPod (yet), I haven’t burned a whole lot of music tracks. The 100 or 200 tracks that I do have are getting a little old, if you know what I mean.

I used to be on a site called Pandora.com but they kicked off all non-US IP addresses. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a new site called http://www.jango.com/ which doesn’t have any obtrusive advertising, allows you to specify which artists you want to hear, you can even mark songs you like and don’t like and you’ll never hear the latter again. Every now and then, they throw in a new or budding artist, and ask you if you like or dislike him or her. When you ban a song, sometimes it pops up a box letting you see an advertiser and keeps it there for a dozen seconds before it goes away. I’d say once every hour or two. It’s clean, no viruses, etc.

My playlist is mostly jazz and blues: from Oscar Peterson to Stevie Ray Vaughan, Diana Krall and some technically good artists like the Eagles, CCR, etc. You choose what YOU want to hear. Their selection was quite limited at first, but there’s more and more stuff on there every day. Anyway, I like it – you might too!


Season’s Greetings, everyone! See you in the new year!

Busy, busy times!

I’m sitting here writing this in front of a curved bank of 3 monitors. The Biggest one is on the left, it’s the new 25” spectacular HP screen, running Lightroom and showing me the selection of photos that I’ve chosen to accompany this post. This new monitor is outstanding.

When the screensaver comes on, it runs a slideshow of my favourite images. I’ve seen them before, obviously – it’s the same screensaver I use on the other computer – but they’re so bright and crisp, I get carried away just watching them. I love this new monitor, but the only issue with it is that it’s too brilliant. I just got some prints back and they’re less than I’d hoped: the operative word is “muddy”. The colours are calibrated on the new monitor, but the image is so brilliant and beautiful I don’t want to turn it down! In future, I’ll use the other monitor for final tweaking of the brightness and contrast levels of my photos before sending them to print or posting them.

To my right is the laptop screen. My Blog is onscreen, with the previous post showing so that I can refer to it as I write this one. It’s dull by comparison.

In the middle is my Dell monitor, the one I’ve been using as the secondary monitor with the laptop up to now. It’s currently connected to the laptop, and I’m running MS Word, writing this. I like to pre-write the blog in Word, then cut and paste it in when I’m done. I installed a “KVM” switch – a $25 device I picked up at Tiger Direct which allows me to switch this monitor to either computer, along with the keyboard and mouse (actually my Wacom tablet/mouse) at the press of a button. Slick. I keep an extra mouse plugged into the HP computer, and I have the touchpad on the laptop keyboard, so I can navigate and switch pages and applications on the machine the keyboard is not connected to (great English, right? “Never end a sentence a preposition with!”).

Cool. Looks like the dashboard of a Boeing 787. My computer table is getting a little crowded, but if I sit up and look out the window, I can still see a corner of the lake. Or I could if it weren’t night. Or winter. The Inn across the road has some Christmas lights up, I really should go out and take some night shots. Nah, it’s -20°C out there. I’m rambling, aren’t I?

---

Tell your friends what you want for Christmas.
Here are a few ideas. Clickable links.

• A membership in NAPP. The gift that keeps on giving.
• A Gary Fong Lightsphere. I used to carry a ton of lighting equipment, now just a piece of Tupperware in my camera bag. You want the “Cloud” one, choose the right size for your flash here (scroll down), and buy it here.
• A 2x teleconverter for your long lens
• A new lens. Nikon or Canon.
• A new camera

OK, you're allowed to dream, right?

Here comes the whiny part: I haven’t done a Hell of a lot of productive work in the last week or more: installing this new computer, plus dealing with the networking issues took a lot of time. Then a Blackberry Desktop application upgrade crashed my laptop and I had to actually go back to an earlier restore point to get it going again (there must be a registry issue with my laptop. Any new software install causes it to sit and cogitate for 30 minutes or more on the first reboot afterwards. I’ll have to look into that sometime). Then we got hit with a gigantic snowstorm and I’ve been dealing with clearing snow, getting my snowblower repaired, having the roof cleared, etc. I also had to deal with updating a website I’m responsible for and helping Jim with a Santa Claus shoot. So it’s been busy, and that’s why it’s been 3 weeks since you’ve seen a new post in the Blog!

Took me a long time to say that, right? Oh well, that’s what you love about me! And I hope you like reading my stuff because this post is turning into a long one! Through the magic of the computer, I came back and added this paragraph after the fact and decided to postpone two topics I was going to include, for another day.

OK, so today’s Blog topics are:

• Some computer issues
• Switching to Lightroom
• The wondrous human eye

Computer Issues.

Here’s the thing. I said I didn’t lose any data when I lost the old desktop, but when all is said and done, it takes forever to get a new machine up and running. I don’t want to start the old Mac vs. PC debate but…. Anyway I have my reasons for sticking with PC and I won’t bore you by going there.

I’ll just say this: what happened to the good old days when Windows was just one file? The Windows 7 folder contains over 65,000 files in over 14,000 folders and occupies 12.5Gb. Does anyone else think this is a little over the top?

Networking was the biggest timewaster. Here’s a hint, folks: in both Windows 7 and Vista you have to not only specify the folders you want to share, you also have to address the permissions in TWO places: on the sharing tab and on the security tab. You have to create a user named “Everyone” and set the permissions for it. “File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks” has to be turned on and installed. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to find someone who does. I could just barely do this, and not alone, either (thanks, Jim!). When I got up here today and fired up the laptop, it was all wrong and didn’t work again. I think it’s because I reverted to an earlier restore point because of the Blackberry-induced-crash. Hours. My internal body clock is all screwed up from these 3am days. I guess that’s why I’m writing this at 1:00am!

Lightroom

To top it all off, I decided to switch to Lightroom. I admit arguing strenuously against it and even ribbing Jim about it (the word “proselytize” comes to mind. He’s so committed to the program!). It’s a change in my workflow and, I hate to admit it, it’s better. But I’m on a learning curve into which I have to invest some time (better grammar?).

I installed the trial version when I set up the new machine. I argued that I could do the exact same functions using Bridge/CS4 and Camera Raw. I could – to an individual photo – but not to a batch of them, at least not with the ease that Lightroom does it. I have not installed the new LR3 Beta – too many bugs for now, I’m told – I’m running LR2.6. What really convinced me was a plug-in that allowed me to seamlessly upload a bunch of images to my Smugmug gallery.

Smugmug deserves a mention here. It’s where I host my galleries. It’s unlimited, loaded with features, and there are real live people behind it you can talk to if you have questions. It’s not free, but it’s very reasonable for what you get. If you look at it and decide you want to have your own Smugmug gallery, please paste this into the “referred by” field on the signup form: 16NrueyZ8KPmc. Or my email address (glenn dot springer at faczen dot com – you know what to replace!) and you’ll get a $5 discount on your membership and I’ll get a credit for my renewal too. Go to http://www.smugmug.com/ to see what it’s about, or check out my galleries at http://www.faczen.smugmug.com/ (badly in need of reorganization!).

One of the biggest Lightroom revelations for me was the concept that you don’t actually have to generate a .jpg for an image until you’re ready to. And you can change some parameters, like size and resolution, etc on a whole batch of images all at once.

Lightroom, like Photoshop, is a very deep program. I don’t know how to use it properly yet. Nor will I ever, I expect. It will take some time, but the workflow and organization of my images is vastly improved over what I’ve been doing up to now. I recommend it. I went back into my Photoshop User magazine archives (which you get if you’re a NAPP member (a hint you might give someone looking to get you a useful Christmas present!) and I’m re-reading the articles that I skipped in the past because I wasn’t a LR user. The first one I came to, oddly, posed exactly the same question that I had: “where’d all my pictures go?”. Unfortunately, it didn’t answer it: you open a folder and it says there are 50 pictures in it but it won’t show any of them to you. I’ll figure it out eventually! (Got it! Turn off the filters!)

The “Adjustment Brush” in LR is excellent. Non-destructive dodging and burning and clarity and saturation and sharpness and… all adjustable on specific areas of an image. Again, there are complexities in the tool I haven’t got to yet. I’m used to the concept from Camera Raw but this seems to work better. The cropping tool works like the one in PS except that when you drag, you’re dragging the image not the cropping rectangle! Takes a moment to figure out why it won’t move! I like to crop my images: there’s often stuff in a corner I don’t want, or I want to reframe an image to focus on something, and I don’t believe that everything has to follow rules, like be 8x10 proportion, etc. Non-conformist, that’s me!

Anyway, I can’t make this into a LR tutorial, it’s too long already. Just admitting that the millions of photographers out there who are committed to LR are not wrong. See? I can admit when I'm wrong!

The wondrous human eye (just musings)

I went out late one afternoon last week to talk with my neighbor (about my recalcitrant snowblower!). As I trudged home along the snowy road, I was greeted by a magically saturated dark blue sky with a few stars poking through, as the day faded into true night. It was incredibly beautiful, but I knew I couldn't capture it. Again, I stepped outside a few nights ago to enjoy some fresh air and I looked up at the stars, one of my favourite things to do. After a couple of minutes, my eyes adjusted to the light and I could see the millions of stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy painting a swath across the heavens. OK, I couldn’t see millions of them, but there were a LOT.

You can’t capture this on film, or in digital form. The camera does not have the dynamic range or the sensitivity to do it. There was too much ambient light that late afternoon to get a still image that would include the stars; the dark night scene can be done but not with pin-point sharpness – last post I showed a star shot but it was 10 seconds long at f/1.8 so there was some movement. You can turn up the ISO but then you get a grainy, noisy image. But your eyes can do it.

As I sit here writing this, my reflection in the HP monitor caught my eye. Can I capture this? Judge for yourself. But can I also include the nuances of shadows on the brightly sunlit snow outside the window at the same time? I think not. But I can see it.

I have lousy eyes. Astigmatic, needing several diopters of correction, I have floaters from a retina problem some years ago, my night vision sucks… and yet I can see so much better than my camera can. I have infinite depth of field – I can look at the hairs on my arm then pick out a small bird in a tree with no effort or noticeable time lag.

I think the HDR concept addresses some of those differences. HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range” (sorry for the basic level tutorial here) and essentially what you’re doing is making a composite image that reveals a much larger than normal range of light levels, more than the four octaves your camera can see, and closer to the seven your eyes can do (I hope I got those numbers right, it’s from memory).

I’m not very good at doing HDR’s but this image should give you some idea of what I’m talking about. A normal photo would either pick up the detail in the trees or the rich colours in the sky. You can pick out details in the bright sky and clouds lit by the sun, and at the same time see the nuances of the greys in the water and pick out the detail in the snow-covered trees by sandwiching exposures shot at different shutter speeds. That's what an HDR is. I also admit to some additional manipulation where I painted colour in the water and removed colour from the trees, but that’s not what this is about.

The depth of field issue is being newly addressed by a technique called “Focus Stacking” where images taken by focusing at different distances are combined so that everything is in focus.

I think that an upcoming generation of high end cameras will have both of these features built in. I don’t know how, or whether it will be soon, but I think that future photographers will be able to create incredible images that might approach how we actually see things. I hope I will still be around to see these advancements.

But I wrote this piece because I marvel at what the human eye can see and how powerful that built-in computer we call a brain really is.

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In the spirit of not letting you go away without seeing some images, here are a few.

The following three images are terrible, technically. It was snowing fairly heavily and the subject was at least 300m away. I include them, though, for the purpose of considering how tightly to crop a subject.

The first image was shot with my 120mm lens. Notice how it tells the story about what’s going on – they’re clearing the snow off a cabin roof, the snow is deep and the roof is steep.

This is with the 400mm lens – or my 200mm with the Kenko 2x teleconverter (buy it here) It doesn’t really say that much, it’s an interesting composition but because of the quality due to the snow coming down, it doesn’t stand out.

This is a tighter crop and is compositionally more interesting but you lose the story. Sometimes you lose too much by trying to isolate the subject.

These two demonstrate a bit of what the camera can do, and are just images I enjoy.

This is exactly how my eye remembers seeing it. And for once, I didn’t do any fancy photoshop – the only thing I did in CS4 was to remove a couple of pieces of dirty snow that had fallen off a car and were in the frame on the right. Believe it or not, I shot this through my front windshield, while moving!

Here I wanted to convey the feeling of the deep snowfall we had had, but in order to show some detail in the snow I had to increase the contrast of the image and change the exposure. So I created a second layer of the wall and door, and changed its exposure values, then added considerable saturation. I used a layer mask to make those effects apply only to that part of the image.

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Next time, I'm going to say a few words about the judges course I attended, and about how we set up and lit the "Santa Claus" shoot that I helped Jim with.