A Lightroom podcast

A quick pointer to Image Doctors podcast for November 13th which is on Lightroom 2.0 and is essentially a 45 minute interview with Tom Hogarty, Lightroom's Product Manager.

You can see one of the presenter's Yosemite pictures here - most aren't as artificial-looking as this one though.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

Old jokes

Next time you hear a joke you think you've heard before, he's the ultimate in recycled humour:

An ancestor of Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot comedy sketch has been found in a joke book dating back to Greece in the 4th Century.

Philogelos: The Laugh Addict, which has been translated from Greek manuscripts, contains a joke where a man complains that a slave he was sold had died.

"When he was with me, he never did any such thing!" is the reply.

Big Picture has a great series of pictures of US soldiers in action in Afghanistan and the one of a howitzer shell exiting the barrel would be worth a link on its own. I just wonder, though, whether this photo isn't proof that the Pentagon has a joke so deadly it can kill....

Permalink - General -  1 comments

Frank Grisdale

Following a few links from William Neill's blog, looking for examples of in-camera blurs, Frank Grisdale has the kind of northern English surname that I just had to click, even if he is somewhere in N America. Once I'd silenced the music, I then found how to stop the pictures advancing automatically - too much like a moving walkway rushing you through a major art exhibition. And then I could enjoy the pictures at my own pace.

They're an intriguing selection of soft painterly effects, many sharing an earthy or autumnal palette. Some seem to have camera blur or soft focus, while others look like they're been distressed or sandwiched with various textures. Lovely stuff - and his aim is to reach his artistic peak around the age of 90.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

ProShow and Lightroom

I've had ProShow Producer for a year and intended to use it to prepare a multimedia slide show of a wedding I recently shot at Cliveden. And just in the nick of time, there's now a ProShow Plug-in for Lightroom. It's another export plug-in - these things are beginning to pile up, aren't they?

As Proshow is still Windows-only, surprisingly, here's a screenshot so Mac users know roughly what the plug-in does (I often hear Mac converts who miss ProShow). You set a range of ProShow parameters such as transition style, and titles, captions and copyright information from the catalogue's metadata. Lightroom then generates JPEGs, and starts up ProShow with the slideshow built. You can then add other features and edit the show before burning it to DVD, Blu-ray, Flash, YouTube, iPod, Blackberry....

It seems pretty neat. As I'd like to do something fancy for the wedding, I'll be giving it a severe test over the next week or so.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  1 comments

CS4 feature? Or bug?

On a related subject, there's a very important gotcha in Bridge/Photoshop CS4's File Info dialog.

Essentially, within File Info, ACR settings are no longer protected, and appending or replacing metadata can also erase or replace existing ACR settings. It happens when you use File Info's Import button to select a metadata template, and the user is not specifically warned that this will happen - the first sign can be when your adjusted thumbnails start to update with new ACR settings.

For details of how the dialog is designed to work, see Gunar Penikis. Fortunately, in Bridge's main window, the Append and Replace Metadata menu commands work as before and do respect existing ACR settings.

I find it hard to see this as a feature, and I've no doubt it will catch out some people. Then again, when was the last time you used File Info in Photoshop, or even in Bridge, to apply metadata? And, for all its big improvements in CS4, when was the last time you used Bridge?

Permalink - Photoshop -  2 comments

CS4 File Info panels

One annoyance of Photoshop/Bridge CS4 is that it won't read any existing custom File Info panels. These let File Info display XMP metadata from other applications such as iView or Expression Media, and they were written in a text file format which was reasonably easy to create and edit. In CS4 though, the panels are Flash-based and at first glance it looks like you would need to buy Flex Builder for the job. Uh-oh, not another solution for developers who need paying, rather than users who know what they need and might hack their way there?

I don't really have the energy or interest to learn Flex, certainly not ahead of current efforts to learn ActionScript 3 for my Flash site, Lua for some Lightroom ideas, or ahead of getting my beauty sleep (I don't need too much of that). But look at Gunar Penikis's last paragraph here:

Hey guys relax. CS4 does not support reading CS3 panels - the reason for this is that the old format is pretty crufty and the energy would be better spent on building a really flexible UI. So we chose Flex (Flash) to base the panels on. The SDK is available at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/xmp/

Note that you don't have to buy Flex Builder but it does make life easier.

Most importantly there is a sample in the SDK call "Generic Panel". This is a panel designed specifically to read an external XML file of properties and display them - similar to the way the old File Info worked. Since it is XML based you can use your favourite freeware XML editor to build your panel with. The XML format is pretty simple, especially if you are used to the old panel layout language.

Adobe have been very smart with this Generic Panel. It's a compiled SWF file, so you don't need Flash or Flex, and you just have to know your way around XMP namespaces and be happy editing XML. It's not a lot more than copying namespaces and field names from File Info's Advanced panel, and pasting them into the properties.xml file using an XML editor such as something like MS XML Notepad:



In the above example I'm calling Expression Media's namespace, and then defining a File Info text box which displays the Catalog Sets metadata. If you're familiar with this type of thing, it's pretty easy stuff, and you'll just need the File Info SDK at the bottom of this page.

I've put online my CS4 File Info panel for Expression Media metadata (donationware). And here it is, showing a panel which combines metadata which one would typically add in Lightroom, such as the keywords, and Expression Media metadata such as the Catalog Sets or custom fields.



One last thought is that Flash/Flex does enable much fancier and more powerful panels. I can imagine it's possible, for example, to access the Google Maps API and display a map inside the Bridge or Photoshop File Info panel (update: yes we can). Whether anyone will take advantage of this change, only time will tell.

Permalink - Photoshop -  2 comments

Yes he did

At first it was I'll come to bed at 1, then 2, and by 3 the insomniac in me had kicked in and come what may I was staying up for the result and Obama's speech. I'd just forget about sleep and roll straight on to breakfast. As much as great oratory has its elements of guff, for better or worse it's the great orators who you know at the time are destined to go down in history. Blair caught the moment in 1997, as had the dreadful Margaret Thatcher, Reagan too, but you don't recall a word of Bush's acceptance speech, Brown's or Major's either, do you? But this speech (worth reading as well) was bound to be one of those moments you always remember.

Shame McCain wasn't as civilized throughout the campaign as in his concession speech – all his "fight fight" stuff only seemed to make him look even more like a get-your-ball-off-my-lawn angry grandpa, while all his "I know how to (fill in blanks)" only made you wonder why the old bloke didn't just help everyone out and say exactly where Bin Laden's hiding or how to fix the world economy.

Anyway, finally went to bed at 6 and woke up at 9 - might make this evening a write off! Watching much of the night flicking over to Fox somehow reminds me of John Terry and his Moscow tears - what a year, Obama wins the presidency and United do a league and European Cup double. Not very conciliatory, I know, but that's footy.

Permalink - General -  10 comments

Reds and blues

There's been so much multi-channel 24 hour news coverage of today's US elections that I'm almost surprised we in the 51st state aren't voting too. One thing that worries me is the long lines outside polling stations. I can't remember ever queuing to vote in one of our elections, even those which seemed momentous like Blair-Major in 1997. So why so many reports of 4 hour waits? Is that considered normal over there, and is it merely a case people being so determined to make their votes count this year? Or are there simply not enough voting places in certain parts of town? And why should that be? Certainly it would seem one heck of a deterrent. Let's hope it's just enthusiasm - at least this time there are two candidates both intellectually up to the job.

The worst bits seem to have been exclusively Palin-related. While one hears about Biden gaffes, you can dismiss them as coming from a VP candidate, but I've always thought that Palin made McCain look aging and more vulnerable. That's much scarier when - regardless of my not agreeing with her conservative Christian anti-abortion politics - it's pretty obvious she knows far too little about world affairs to be that close to power. Add to that the tenuous, at best, linking of Obama to 1960s terrorism, and the shameful insinuations that some parts of America are un-American. Let's hope for a Dante-esque punishment for her sins and that Father Time puts a few pounds on her hips and makes her look like a proper pitbull.

By contrast the highpoints for me have been McCain dealing with the woman who objected to Obama as an Arab, and the charity dinner. Apart from showing the two candidates' had a good measure of mutual respect, isn't humour - rather than the soporific play-safe presidential debates - a much cleverer way to make a political point?

And from a purely graphical point of view, another highpoint has got to be the Obama logo? Sun rise over the ploughed fields or stars and stripes. Stand up and take a bow, Sol Sender.

So vote - whichever way, but hopefully for Obama.

Permalink - General -  4 comments

Percentage shares

Tom Hogarty updates the what pros use for raw file conversion comparison. Both Lightroom and Aperture increase their share, Lightroom leaping 50% on 2007 and Aperture a respectable 36%. Among Mac users only, Aperture's share is static though, indicating the overall increase is due to people shifting to the Mac.

Of course, using one of the newer generation tools doesn't mean you don't use Photoshop as well, and there's only a small drop there. These stats, though don't reflect how much people are using each application, and wouldn't it be interesting if one could gather similar stats which reflected time spent working with each program, or even the numbers or proportion of images? You'd have to expect Photoshop usage would be impacted much more. So, just after the release of CS4, I'm sure a lot of people are wondering CS4: What's in it for Photographers?.

One CS4 feature I really like is content aware scaling. It's a thing of genius, letting you squeeze an image into a layout, squashing the image areas with less detail and yet protecting those where there is important detail. I've slightly overdone this example, but you can see how the car is barely affected by compressing the image into a more square format. The feature's very easy to use, and perhaps some would find it hard to imagine when they would use it, but for others it's going to be a very popular feature indeed.

The picture's from Sunday's London Brighton Veteran Car Run. Taken at 7am on a dark, wet November morning, it was shot on the Nikon D700, handheld, and with the ISO set to Auto. In this case, ISO 1800 gave me 1/200 second at f7.1 - I've plenty of usable images at ISO 3200 too.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

Why iView, still?

I was asked recently for a few reasons why I still use Expression Media (I still call it iView) rather than depending entirely on Lightroom, so in descending order, here goes:

• By far the biggest reason is to manage in a single place all files related to photographic projects. For me, like very many photographers, that isn't just photos, but might easily include sound clips from wedding shoots, PDF contact sheets, the odd ProShow presentation, as well as any correspondence. Ideally Lightroom should control all these file types, but it doesn't, yet.
• iView's very much faster generating large numbers of JPEGs for emailing or for making a web gallery of a whole shoot. This is because it uses the Lightroom-adjusted preview in the DNG, while Lightroom needlessly reprocesses the raw data.
• I depend on custom fields for recording who's featured in my re-enactment pictures and finding them quickly, and for grouping frames shot for stitching or HDR. While the LR2 SDK does now let you add custom fields, it's too new and undeveloped, and you can't read/write the metadata to/from images. iView does this, so any TIF made from a DNG automatically inherits the original's custom metadata, making it easy to marry up a stitched panorama to the component frames, for example.
• I greatly prefer the flexibility of iView's low tech HTML templates to Lightroom's Lua-based ones.
• iView has scripting using widely-known languages which I can quickly use to copy IPTC location information over to keywords, for example, or to search and replace within captions (eg for typos). It gives me the flexibility to write a simple script in a text editor, or in a well-established development and debugging tool such as Microsoft's VB editors or Apple's Script Editor. Lightroom's comparatively-obscure Lua is an inhuman programmer's language wrapped in layers of nested functions, has little documentation written for non-programmers, gives indecipherable error messages, has no development tool more helpful than a text editor - and in any case has restricted access to metadata. For me, end user access to scripting is one badge which makes a program a professional tool, and it should be present from day 1.
• Using beta versions of Lightroom, and testing them more brutally than may be wise, I want a rock solid DAM base.

There is a huge value in one application combining file management, adjustment, and output. I'm a big user of LR2's smart collections which can automatically group new pictures meeting a wide range of criteria. Migrating to a wholly Flash-based web site, I'm using Lightroom's SlideShowPro export. And maybe the SDK may offer a way forward for my custom metadata. Even though I'm unsure what I want to do about types of files which Lightroom can't import, the balance is certainly shifting and I'm relying more on LR as months go by.

Permalink - Photo management -  11 comments

Stefano Unterthiner

Stefano Unterthiner is an Italian woldlife photographer (his own web site here) whose almost-human image of a macaque won the animal portraits prize in Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008:

The monkey earned his nickname "trouble-maker", Stefano explained, because it was more interested in the photographer than being photographed.

After spending weeks following the monkeys in the Indonesian island's Tangkoko National Park, Stefano found that their search for food took them to the coastal edge of the park's forest. While most of the primates were busy foraging among the rocks for fallen fruits and nuts, one young adult took an interest in Stefano's activities.

"He would leap at me and kick off my back like a trampoline," he recalled. "It was part play, part confrontation, part attention-seeking, part curiosity."

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Nevada Wier

Brilliant is a nicely produced Adobe video showcase - slick is the word - and one episode features photographer Nevada Wier.

Her own site has lots of her work throughout Asia, mainly portraits, though this one from Burma is easily my favourite. Her blog's here and explains what's partly behind her success:

I personally think I do very well as a travel photographer because I can eat anything and never get stomach problems — and I can hold quite a few drinks. I can also sleep anywhere, on any surface. And, I do not have a very good sense of smell, but I like to think I have a good sense of humor.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

On the bendy buses

These bendy bus ads are just the sort of thing I like about England:

Bendy-buses with the slogan "There's probably no God" could soon be running on the streets of London.

The atheist posters are the idea of the British Humanist Association (BHA) and have been supported by prominent atheist Professor Richard Dawkins. The BHA planned only to raise £5,500, which was to be matched by Professor Dawkins, but it has now raised more than £36,000 of its own accord.

It aims to have two sets of 30 buses carrying the signs for four weeks. The complete slogan reads: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

By coincidence, I was at the supermarket this morning, the big Sainsbury's in Vauxhall, and next to me at the scan-your-own check out was a tall Muslim woman. Covered from head-to-toe, like a big black tent, she had just a slit for the eyes. For what it's worth, which isn't much, I find such dress disgusting, obscene, but Sainsbury's checkout didn't seem the place to educate her, if I even cared that much. In any case, she had (another) problem - the check out process is initiated by pressing a touch screen, which didn't seem to work. The check out girl replied "take your glove off", perfectly sensible advice, and I could have easily reached over and pressed the screen on her behalf. But if someone wants to make life harder for themselves.... So instead the woman moved away and joined the line at a "traditional" check out. One day, I hope, she'll get on the bendy bus.

Permalink - General -  11 comments

Metadata from Lightroom to InDesign

I recently saw a wedding book some friends had created using Photobox. They wouldn't claim to be computer-savvy, but they'd done a great job and were able to give copies to close family. It should be just that easy, shouldn't it, and I am more than a little frustrated that Lightroom still doesn't have a book layout tool. No doubt it will come, even if only via an Export plug-in.

Anyway, putting together a book of my Sealed Knot pictures earlier this year in InDesign, one big irritant was displaying text next to the pictures. I couldn't bring myself to retype or cut and paste the captions, knowing the images contained the metadata added in iView, Lightroom or Photoshop, and I don't think it was my inexperience with InDesign. As it was, I got distracted, but next time I have a crack at it, here's an InDesign script which pulls XMP metadata from an image and places it below the picture. Now I wonder if that could be launched from an Export plug-in....

Also a little link to Gunar Penikis's blog and a post on the new XMP SDK. There seems to be more scripting access to XMP, and also the latest way to customize the File Info panels.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  2 comments

If you're not in London, you're not close enough?

I'll apologize for another posting about an exhibition in London - I'd still hate anyone to think I'm a Londoner after 25 years here - but London's Barbican has a big Robert Capa exhibition accompanied by pictures by Gerda Taro, "artistic responses" (eek) to Iraq & Afghanistan, and a series of films on war photography. It runs until the end of January, and for me it's a must-see, maybe more than once.

I'm always quoting Capa's "if it's not good enough" line (while pointing out he eventually got too close to a landmine) and in the Guardian there's a wide-ranging discussion - everything from Roger Fenton to Abu Ghraib, large format to camera phones - of technical accuracy versus being there:

John Moore won a 2007 World Press Photo award for his picture of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Moore was in the jostling crowd. As soon as he heard the gun, just as the suicide bomber detonated himself, he held up his camera and hit autowind, shooting blind. The prizewinning image is a swirl of blurred figures and exploded light. Capa said that if your pictures weren't good enough, that's because you weren't close enough. Get this close to the epicentre of history and your pictures are bound to look pretty bad, as if they're being blown apart. The irrefutable truth of the image - I was there - overrides all aesthetic and technical concerns.

Even when I'm playing at being a war photographer at my re-enactments, there's a constant tension between one's technical pride and the need to capture the action, and I'm sure it's true with most other fast moving action. In moments of calm, or afterwards when I see the image isn't sharp, I'm cursing myself for not having adjusted the ISO or aperture and shutter speed. Yet in the heat of the moment, there's no choice to be made between tweaking the exposure settings and getting close to the action, composing, shooting - these are all you have time to think about, if you're even thinking. And is there anything wrong with that?

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Strange (and missing) words

Over at the Aperture Users Network (anyone seen the word Professional recently?) John Omvik does a lengthy comparison of Aperture 2.1 vs Lightroom 2.0 - Different Approaches to Local Image Corrections:

So Which Method is Best?

Both methods offer advantages and disadvantages for local corrections. After working with both I have to say that I am very impressed with the speed and flexibility the Adobe solution offers. I like the open plug-in concept from Apple, but feel that the implementation leaves much to be desired, especially as it relates to the rest of the non-destructive workflow.

My ideal solution would be a plug-in architecture that would allow for 3rd party plug-ins to be integrated in the processing pipeline offering the extensibility of Aperture with the speed and non-destructive functionality of Lightroom.

Pravda extolling the virtues of capitalism? But these are days when the Russkies are oil rich capitalists and the Yanks are merrily nationalizing the banking system....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  1 comments

Amit Pasricha

Amit Pasricha is an Indian photographer who currently has an exhibition in London.

His own web site is a bit gimmicky but covers a very varied range of Indian subjects. I found his panoramas particularly interesting, and there are lots of standard Indian themes like religion and poverty, but also look at his Dance Worx set.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Strong coffee?

Lavazza's 2009 calendar web site gives the coffee drinker a great insight into La Vita Italiana.

One of Annie Leibowitz's big budget shoots, there's the subtle allusion of the she-wolf in the Colosseum, some babe in the Trevi fountain, a quick grope on the Ponte Umberto I, and a naked blonde adorning your spaghetti. As well as the photos, check out the backstage area.

And I thought the Stadio dei Marmi was overblown.

Permalink - Photo links -  5 comments

Souvenirs

Michael Hughes has done a great series of kitsch souvenirs held in front of world landmarks.

Perhaps ironically, I'll link to his Flickr account rather than his own web site - I simply couldn't be bothered reading his inept bio page as it's a JPEG of tiny text.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Sound and light - and free tickets20

If you're near Chichester, the Cathedral's 900th anniversary is being celebrated next month with a son et lumiere, and the Norman and English Civil War segments are my photographs:

A landmark event for a landmark year. Twelve performances of a spectacular son et lumière, A Story Set in Stone, using state of the art audiovisual technology. The voices of Patricia Routledge, June Whitfield, Michael Jayston and Nickolas Grace will tell the story of the Cathedral's 900 years.

Surround sound and lasers will project the Cathedral's story onto its very own architecture. An epic journey through 900 years of history, including the Romans, the Normans, the Reformation, the Civil War, 20th Century Wars, and ending up in the present day. Especially written for the Cathedral by the famous writer Simon Brett.

Projection onto the side of a 900 year old cathedral should be pretty amazing to see, and apart from the glory and a double page ad, I'm going to get more free tickets than I can use.... Anyone within range of Chichester on Thursday 19th November?

Permalink - My photography -  2 comments

A couple of Lightroom pointers

Lightroom 2 lets you send a panorama's component frames directly to Photoshop, but they're sent full size. Unless you really want a massive full size stitch, that slows down Photoshop's panorama processing. Instead, Martin Evening has done a video showing a method which gets round this. Initially Lightroom sends the files to Photoshop as layers of a single document. You resize this document to the size you want, and then run the panorama stitching on the smaller file.

While Martin emphasizes its value for matching processing time to your intended output size, the technique should be most valuable when you're simply proofing a panorama. After all, sometimes you need to test with a different panorama rendering method, or in other cases the panorama just doesn't turn out as well as you had hoped. This technique means you can simply reduce the image size, maybe even the bit depth, and can always Undo and try an alternative rendering method.

The second tip is equally ingenious and a far more intelligent use of Develop Presets than all those canned looks that some people love to collect. If you are experimenting with LR2's alternative Camera Profiles, Sean McCormack suggests "you want to preview them to see what suits. Well, changing them in Camera Calibration will let you see them, but it's a bit tedious. The obvious answer is much easier than you might expect: Create a batch of Presets!" Read more

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Patrick Ward

In the post on the Borrowdale Fell Run, I linked to Patrick Ward's photo which inspired my pictures. He obviously deserves his own link as his site contains so many excellent pictures from a 40+ year career. I particularly enjoyed his Essentially English gallery, even though his definition of English strikes me as too Southern and upper middle class. Still, his pictures of Henley and Ascot are great, and the series includes events commemorating the Tolpuddle martyrs and sheep farming shows up North.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Borrowdale Fell Run (replacement)

This replaces the earlier rushed post on the Borrowdale fell run. As an aside, "fell" is the local Norwegian-derived word for the Lake District's hills, and like the word "dale" reveals the region's settlement history. Anyway, it was a 12 mile round trip into Keswick - meaning kaese or cheese farm - where I could get groceries and then pick up email over a coffee and cake at the super Cafe Bar 26.

Although Sunday's annual Borrowdale Shepherd's Meet had been cancelled, I knew the fell run was still happening. A book I'd been given last Christmas contained Patrick Ward's great wide-angle photo of the nearby Wasdale fell run, and I wanted to exploit the combination of the D700 and my 17-35mm f2.8 lens in a similar way. Wide angle shooting is the D700's biggest plus for me so far (funny how easily you can forget).

These blokes, some young and others in their 70s, race up to the top of the 750m / 2500ft Dale Head fell and the fastest ones are back in Rosthwaite village in just 45 minutes. I already knew the route and chose a spot just above a gate where I knew the runners would have to pass - it took us 45 minutes to get up there - and where I would be able to scoop up the runners and the valley.

The previous day, at a Sealed Knot battle, I had played with the D700's focus tracking, leaving the focus mode on Continuous and the focus area on Auto - "the camera automatically detects the subject". The D200 had a similar feature which I never thought was really effective, but with the D700 I had been one of those road-to-Damascus moments - bloody hell, it's really identifying the fast-moving subject and tracking it across the frame. So I decided to try it for real with the fell run, and it worked like a dream, snapping focus onto the runner and tracking him perfectly. Previously I would have worked in 3 phases - focus, recompose, shoot - but now the camera was allowing me to compose and shoot when the subject had reached where I wanted him to be in the frame. As a result, I got loads of these shots of the runners on the way up and then leaping over a gully on the way down.

Another D700 aspect is that I think the camera has an Auto ISO mode somewhere. If so, I didn't use it, and these pictures were mostly taken at ISO 800, with some at 400, and others at 500 or 640. In other words I was always thinking about the ISO as well as the aperture/shutter speed combination for enough depth of field to show where they were running while also freezing the action (in this case generally f7.1 and speeds over 1/500). Just as the D700 handled the focussing and let me concentrate on composition and timing my shot, the quality of the D700's higher ISO captures make me wonder if I should have chosen Auto ISO and eliminated one leg of the ISO/aperture/speed triangle. Scary perhaps, but certainly not absurd.

As an experiment, I'm displaying the pictures here using SlideShowPro. As usual, they were processed in Lightroom and I then used File > Export and the Lightroom to SlideShowPro Director plug-in to upload them directly to a new SSP Director album. The beauty of this solution is that it's quick, a few clicks, and I can use the images for multiple purposes - SSP Director holds the images at full size and generates the output size on demand. Here I display the pictures in this post, inserting an IFRAME with a web page which calls up that album in a Flash movie (that page is PHP and accepts the album code as a variable). Alternatively, SSP Director could supply different-sized images for my existing web galleries and also for my Flash site. If my Flash site scaled images to fit the user's screen size, SSP Director would automatically handle that for me, caching the pictures on the server via ImageMagick or GD. Hopefully that's an interesting detail - at least for some of this blog's readers! In short, it's a very efficient Lightroom-web workflow and not as complex as it might sound.

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments

Miss Aniela

Miss Aniela has a pretty wonderful collection of self portraits at her main site and also at Flickr.

All I need for a self portrait is one spark of inspiration: a beam of light, an interesting garment, a few appealing kinks in my hair after it's been in bunches. I might spy myself in the mirror across the room and have a voyeuristic urge to capture myself on camera, to produce a movie-still from a movie that never existed. It's more than being a convenient model; it is the fascination with being able to become part of a different mise-en-scéne every time, placing lips and limbs and locks within the frame which all belong to me, and yet with manipulation, become almost those of someone else, a higher self, a multiplicity of different 'selves'.

Via Jeff Greene's Photokina post.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Beyond the Jaws of Borrowdale

And after that rant on hierarchical keywords, my Nikon D700 and I are disappearing to the said Lake District for a week or so. A Sealed Knot re-enactment at Chirk Castle in N Wales is vaguely on the way, so tomorrow will be its first proper outing. I did some some test shots from ISO 400 up to 25600 and felt the picture held together at least as far as 4000, so I'm going to whack the ISO up and see the results. I don't feel the loss of the 1.6x crop factor will be too big a worry, and it's easily outweighed by my 17-35mm becoming spectacularly wideangle again. That will obviously be great with close action and then with the Lake District landscape. The other nice detail I've already noticed is the Virtual Horizon, like a spirit level on the LCD panel.

I had planned to get to Sunday's annual Borrowdale Shepherds Meet which is held in the village where I stay. I'm sure I would have found some great subjects, and you never know, it might have brought out my hitherto dormant interest in sheepdog trials, shearing, and Cumbrian wrestling. Hm. But that's been cancelled - apparently, in one of the rainiest places in England, there has been too much rain....

Permalink - General -  3 comments

A rant about hierarchical keywords

It's not specifically a Lightroom thing, and I say the same about Aperture and Expression Media 2. And I am a bit out on a limb here in holding these opinions, but I find hierarchical keywords to be an utter pain, and keep getting into a mess with them. No matter how much I try, I always end up with the child keywords also appearing again at root level, eg when I re-import an exported file. Or the same child keyword will find itself in more than one hierarchy, usually because I've changed the hierarchy at some point and done Save As in Photoshop, or changed it on my laptop and then brought files over to the main PC.

The trouble is that I think we’re trying to make HKs do two things, boost keyword data entry, and speed up finding your pictures. Deep down I’m not convinced data entry belongs with what is essentially a reporting function.

So I've gone back to a flat structure, and make keyword entry as efficient as I can by having many more keywords sets and metadata presets - in 2 the latter also include keywords so I can target all sorts of IPTC fields in one hit.

As far as finding is concerned, I don’t see a hierarchy as helpful enough to overcome the inconsistencies I described earlier, so I do focus on smart collections.

For example, I might have a Collection Set for weddings, which contains a two line SC for "keywords contains weddings" and "keywords contains candid", and similar ones for other aspects of the wedding. My flat "candid" keyword therefore exists once in my catalogue and independently of the HK parent (in this case "weddings") which first caused me to add it to the catalogue - if I subsequently add "candid" to a bit of street photography, that picture won’t find itself grouped with weddings and I won’t need “candid” under two HK parents.

It’s worth saying I only build these SCs for groupings when I do actually need them, but I find this a better use of time than building a hierarchical structure in mer expectation of needing the grouping. I also build SCs rather than using the Filter Panel because I feel that I have needed to look up a particular combination of keywords and other metadata, there’s a fair chance I’ll want to look them up again. So I may as well save the query as an SC and save myself time in future, and I can group SCs with any dumb collections which might relate to the pictures.

Another aspect is that your catalogue is rarely keyworded perfectly. In my own catalogue for example, older pictures of the Castlerigg stone circle in the Lake District might just have a single keyword "Lake District" and other info in the caption or title, while more recent pictures of the same subject would have many more keywords. Let’s say I then have a need to find these pictures. Searching in keywords for "Castlerigg stone circle" doesn’t give me all the pictures, while "Lake District" gives me too many. Using a SC means I can look for "keywords contains Castlerigg stone circle" or "caption contains Castlerigg" or "title contains Castlerigg". So a SC returns more accurate results in many real world situations.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  7 comments

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools v2

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools v2 includes:

• Support for reading & writing XMP side car metadata enabling interoperability with Adobe products.
• Viewing actual RAW images, in addition to thumbnails
• Conversion of RAW files to JPEG, TIFF, and HD Photo using “As Shot” camera settings.
• The ability to resize RAW images.
• Support for 64-bit Windows
• Support for geotagging international locales
• Improved functionality for geotagging images.

I do like what this team keeps producing - I just wish they'd put it all together in a single product that makes everyone take notice.

Permalink - Digital photography -  1 comments

Mileage varies

Ben Long reviews Silver Efex Pro and correctly points out one of its best features

The Black and White adjustment in Photoshop is very good because it allows you to make changes to specific color values in your image. The problem is that if you tell it to darken the blue tones in an image, every blue tone will be altered. Silver Efex scores over Photoshop’s built-in Black and White [JB: or Lightroom or Aperture] because it can alter tone and contrast of specific areas, based on color, but constrain the alteration using an automatically created mask.

You could achieve the same effects in Photoshop using multiple Black and White adjustment layers, each configured differently and constrained using hand-built masks.

That's what I do, and I don't find it too troublesome.

At the moment Silver Efex Pro's probably the best b&w conversion and grain utility around, though its film & grain recipes don't take account of differences resulting from choice of developer or your agitation method (you can create your own recipes if you're really anal). It also costs $199 - even as someone who does a lot of b&w, I don't think it's good value for money. And if I wanted to emulate film, I've still got my old film camera (as well as a brand new toy).

Permalink - Digital photography -  1 comments

Lightroom architecture

One of the Lightroom developers, Troy Gaul, has put online the slides from a presentation he did on Lightroom's architecture. It has odd nuggets of info - for me the mention of a possible IDE written in Lua was most interesting. So if you're writing scripts or web engines, there's the promise of a debugging environment that's a bit more sophisticated than Windows Notepad....

Via

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

All at sea

Tim Mitchard has been photographing these "sea forts" for 20 years. They are at the wonderfully-named Shivering Sands in the Thames estuary and he's written an article on their history and put a great set of photos at Flickr. Apparently there are regular boat trips....

Via Diamond Geezer.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Wanna be in a book?

I'm looking for pictures (any types from pro to flickr) for a proposed book on photography. The idea is that a critic (guess who) explains what makes them work, and sometimes the photographer responds.

Right now, all I need is your name/site, and that in principle you might be willing to let me use a couple of pictures in the book. If the proposal turns into a real book, there's no money in it, just love and admiration (for what it's worth, I wrote my first book as the result of such a thing).

If you're interested, just add a comment either here, or via email if you wish. At this stage all you're saying is "in theory I might let you use a pic and you can mention my name in the draft table of contents".

Permalink - General -  26 comments

Patrick Lavoie

I'm not really into navel-gazing descriptions of workflow, or into fashion photography, but here's a pointer to Patrick Lavoie's thorough description of Digital Photography Workflow: Fashion Photography:

As a professional photo retoucher and digi-tech (digital assistant), my job is fairly simple yet stressful during a photo shoot. My job is to make sure everything is under control, backed up, and retouched before delivery. I work with many different fashion photographers, and all of them during the day rely on my expertise to create a workflow that works for them and for me - a workflow that is easy, reliable, and effective so the photographer can quickly see anything he needs to approve over my shoulder. The following is my workflow, the one that work for me and my client.

He's French-Canadian, so one's got to excuse the appearance of Lightroom being described as its "apparition".... I don't think that's a comment on the ghost folder issue though.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  1 comments

Wild wonders

Orsolya and Erland Haarberg are a couple of photographers who seem to specialize in northern Europe and wildlife.

It was one of Orsolya's pictures that I noticed first, the waterfall here, but their own site seems to contain a ton of pictures, so to speak, and so far I've only looked at some of Orsolya's images. Like this glacier and the waterfall, she seems to have a great eye for the abstract in landscape.

Via Wild Wonders blog.

Permalink - Photo links -  2 comments

Bret Edge

Must be coming from England, and the North West in particular, and today being wet and cold (where did summer go this year?), but I could look all day at Bret Edge's colour pictures of Utah's canyons and deserts - and my favourite would still be a b&w on a wet and stormy day. Wouldn't envy him living in Utah, either. Well, maybe now and then.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

I kid you not

• Asian elephant cured of heroin addiction
• 'Cremated' father turns up on TV - probably while the family was watching Ashes to Ashes
• Servant kept in cupboard
• Gingerfest and here
• Man City to be a massive club
• Balls found inside rattling dog
• MP tells of gunpoint ordeal over coffee whitener cocaine mix-up (never trust a Tory)

Permalink - General -  3 comments

Rust never sleeps

It's great Google have released this Chrome browser on Windows, if only to wind up Mac and Linux users.

I did download it, like its home page feature, and love their comic way of launching it, but I don't know how anyone can get excited by another bloody browser, especially one designed for the developer's advertizing revenue.

Until there is an equivalent to the Firefox Adblock extension, Chrome's simply not for me (I only upgraded to IE7 a couple of weeks back). But until then, at least there's the Google Content Blocker....

Permalink - General -  8 comments

Oliver's Army

Today's the 350th anniversary of the death of Oliver Cromwell and over at the historian Edward Vallance's blog is a great guide to the various Cromwell-related events happening around the country and puts the question Just how evil was Oliver Cromwell?:

my wife, who I was boring with all this, pointed out that I was really saying that Cromwell was probably only responsible for 10000s of deaths rather than 100,000s, which didn't really make him a swell all-round guy.

Which got me thinking. Leaving aside the good or bad taste of basing a card game on historical mass-murderers, how do we assess "evil" historically? For many English people, Cromwell remains a "Great Briton." For many Irish people, he's the Devil in human form and synonymous with everything bad about British rule. What, if anything, distinguishes Cromwell from Mussolini? Were the deaths Cromwell was responsible for acceptable because they were mostly armed combatants? (What successful general won't be responsible for the deaths of many people in some way?) Or is it just a question of which side of the Irish sea you are looking at him from?

It's a lot easier to decide if you were once a history student, and Cromwell played a starring role in many of your essays thanks to winning one decisive battle, Naseby, on your brother's birthday, chopped the King's head off on your best friend's birthday, and not only died today, but won three major battles and opened his Parliaments on the same day. Naturally my school and college essays were packed with such stellar detail. I was a Cromwell fan in any case, but it's sure easy to decide when it's your own birthday too.

Permalink - History -  6 comments

Coming home

Well, on Saturday I was pretty chuffed to get an Italian edition of my Advanced B&W book and joked about how "for English readers, the first one who asks me to do the same for the Russian or Dutch editions will get a virtual whack around the ears."

What I didn't imagine was that two days later DHL would arrive with a bundle of Polish, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Korean! The Polish is best, published under the National Geographic imprint and making it look like I'm one of theirs.... Just kidding.

One great thing about writing is that every so often something like this pops up, you come across a review, or you might get a nice email from a reader who has really got what you were trying to convey. And I've said before that when you first see a new book it’s like holding a newborn child – this lot is almost like all your sperm bank children suddenly turning up on your doorstep!

Permalink - My photography -  5 comments

My not quite famous enough 5 - #4

I'm not that keen on Lightroom 2's new Filter Panel, as I said here. When I do use it, it's usually because I want to temporarily filter the visible items down by key such as rating or sometimes by masters or virtual copies - ie by one of the old Lightroom 1.4 filters.

Display the Filter panel for this purpose and you lose a very prominent chunk of screen space, where your pictures belong. Then you'll eyeball which iTunes-style columns are already visible, perhaps wait while Lightroom starts chugging through populating and counting them up. Clear whatever filter is already present (not an issue for me as I never use the Panel) and then click "Attributes" to set your filter on rating, colour or whatever. Now that's a bit of a palaver, isn't it?

So the fourth little gem is that you can save these Filter Settings. I'm currently running with about a dozen of these, and always access them through the Filmstrip. Some will actually configure the Filter Panel as I might want, but mostly they're for those important things like ratings. If I want anything fancier, it's Smart Collections.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Pubblicato in italiano

Normalmente, non sento niente quando uno dei i miei libri e tradutto - al massimo, ci sara due o tre email di un lettore ollandese o tedesco. Questo mi piace, ma stamattina ho ricevuto una copia di "Il digitale in bianco e nero", il mio "Advanced Digital Black and White" in italiano. E per qualcuno che parla l'italiano, era un piacere particolare! In questo caso, ho scritto 20% del libro a Tropea in Calabria, e ci sono tanti foto del paese li. Fortunamente, non ho fatto la traduzione!

And for English readers, the first one who asks me to do the same for the Russian or Dutch editions will get a virtual whack around the ears.

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments