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 what wide really means).

These blokes, some young and others in their 70s, race up to the top of Borrowdale‘s 750m / 2500ft Dale Head fell and the fastest ones are back in Rosthwaite village in just about 45 minutes. A “fell”, if you’re wondering is the Lake District word for the hills, and is of Norwegian Viking origin. So, like the word “dale” for a valley or “thwaite” for a clearing, the names reveal the region’s settlement history – nearby Keswick’s kaese is from the Norse for cheese and the wick indicating a farm.

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”, says the manual. The D200 had a similar feature which I never found very effective, but during the battle I let the D700 identify a fast-moving subject and track it across the frame. It was one of those bloody hell, it’s really doing it, road-to-Damascus moments. 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.

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….

Now what were the points I made yesterday? Well, this is an HDR image showing the Castelrigg stone circle near Keswick, Cumbria.

Preparing it made me check how many frames I shot in the Lake District were intended for multiframe applications, in particular for HDR and panorama. The answer - 20% - was surprisingly high but illustrates how easy I think it now is to do this.

It also illustrates my point about the need for types of stacks if this feature is to help us with the multiframe work as well as best-of-burst identification. Looking for a picture in Lightroom's Library grid, I only knew the stack was intended as HDR because it was incredibly underexposed (said without irony - I would have deleted it earlier if the underexposure had been accidental).

Got back from the Lake District last night. I was staying in the village of Rosthwaite where my brother and his wife have bought a holiday house and it’s great to report that this little country still has places with no internet, no mobile phone coverage, and almost no radio reception. So nothing else to do except go walking and snapping – this is Derwentwater from Friars Crag, Keswick and is stitched in Photoshop CS3 from 9 originals. But before I disappear to Lausanne for a couple of weeks, another rant….

Improved stitching is one of the top reasons I offer when people ask about upgrading to CS3 (the other is the black and white adjustment) and I’ve certainly been doing many more panoramas in the last year. But managing all these component images is going to need some work. One way is to use Lightroom’s stacking feature – I’d put the stitched image at the top of the stack. But I file my derivatives separately from the original raw files, and stacking is only really helpful once you’ve actually stitched the final masterpiece. Before that point, the stack will only be represented by one of the panorama’s component shots, and there’s also the danger of accidentally deleting one of these badly-composed components. The same argument applies to other multi frame techniques like HDR or the newer idea of registering multiple frames and using median blending to eliminate anything moving through the scene. As these methods become more popular, we’re going to need more help grouping, representing, and protecting the component images.

Right now, what I do is use a custom field in iView and record the first file’s name against each component and the derivative. I can cope, but I’d like to see better.

What I’d love to see is Lightroom, xMedia, Aperture etc introduce “stack types”. Currently we only have the “best of” method which you see in Lightroom and Aperture and where one image is chosen as the best or representative thumbnail. I’d also like to see “strip” where the representative thumbnail is a line of small thumbnails, showing you that this stack is a series of components for a panorama. Another would be “grid”, for stitches in more than one direction. “Blend” would be another type, where the thumbnail might have a gap across the middle to indicate the components are part of an HDR. I’m even less sure about the representative thumbnail for register blends, but by now I hope you see the direction I’d like software to follow – make the stack’s representative thumbnail indicate what type of usage is intended for the component images.

As well as grouping and representing, another need is adding a greater level of protection against deletion. This is less relevant for “best of” stacks, but for other stack types the user should be warned before a component is deleted. After all, a panorama without one of the component frames would be a rather toothless creature, don’t you think?

In Lightroom Journal, Adobe developer Eric Scouten shows a Mac-limited application that accesses a GPS device's log file and writes the metadata to raw files.

That's a coincidence. I've had a Garmin Foretrex 101 for a month or two and had previously failed to get it to talk to my D200 (method here and using the GXGND2 cable), but I'm off to the Lake District next week and for two weeks in Switzerland soon afterwards, so a couple of days ago I had another go at setting them up. And of course, the solution was as high tech as pushing in a cable a little bit harder - doh - and so yesterday morning I tried it out in Nunhead cemetery. It wrote stunningly-precise locations directly into my raw files' EXIF, but at the end of my walk the unit must have powered down and a couple of pictures had no coordinates.

I don't plan to get anal about GPS, and I don't want to buy Garmin's serial connector (!) to connect the device to my PC or their serial-USB converter for my Mac laptop. But I am curious enough to have spent a chunk of yesterday evening investigating how to complete the missing info from a log file. After all, surely one could write the track log, which is just xml, in Notepad? Not quite finished yet, but I was using ImageIngesterPro - specifically its forthcoming 2.3 which is in late beta. IIP does a whole lot more than write GPS (via exiftool) and the application is cross platform.

Apart from Eric's post, I recently read two articles about drag and drop from Lightroom, which Adobe haven't implemented on Windows. It might be a good idea for Adobe and other Lightroom writers to take a self-denying ordinance not to write about platform-limited solutions, or at the very least to complain rather than apologise (feebly) for doing so. Adobe should be providing an identical experience for most of their users, not just those on the Mac, so if a feature doesn't work on both platforms, shouldn't they disable it on both? That would put the pressure on, don't you think?

Saga Photography is the site of Sandra Schaenzer and Gerhard Schoening, a German couple who:

… spend our spare time experiencing the World's nature and landscapes, trying to capture their beauty in our photographs. We are fascinated by the wonders of this planet but the ongoing destruction of nature and wildlife habitats is distressing and leaves us with concerns about the future.
Being 'Slow Travellers', we take the time we need to experience a landscape, an animal or a plant. Thus we look into a subject thoroughly and would like to inspire you through our photographs for nature and wildlife as well as make you marvel at its variety.

I particularly like the shots of Iceland and volcanoes in Indonesia but we also share a lot of favourite places such as the Lake District and stone circles.

I finished a book last weekend, put the discs in the post and disappeared for a week in the Lake District at Lakeland Photographic Holidays. It was my third time there and in spite of 4 days of rain I had a great time.

This shot of Thirlmere was one of the more interesting photos, a true infra red image taken with my Nikon D100. I didn't realize quite how well Nikon SLRs handle IR (apparently Canons' sensors filter out IR), so thanks to John Gravett for showing me this method:

• Infra red filter over the lens
• Create a Preset White Balance
• Increase image contrast setting
• ISO 200 plus 1.3 stops

The result is a black and white image, actually slightly blue, and seems to be a true IR. It isn't grainy like Kodak IR film but that and the contrast can be fine tuned in Photoshop.

Alan Sislen seems to like many of the same places as me, and his site has fine shots from Tuscany, the Lake District, New York and the US Southwest and includes this one of the Twin Towers light memorial. I share his principles too:

Although I take advantage of state-of-the-art equipment, digital manipulation is kept to a minimum. I confine the boundaries of my digital processing to the highly creative techniques of a true master of the conventional darkroom, Ansel Adams.

I have no doubt Adams would have been a digital enthusiast. In his 1981 book The Negative, he wrote

I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable strucural characteristics, and the artis and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.

I also tend to restrict digital work to what I know I could do in a darkroom. But it's a pretty artificial limitation and much of Adams' darkroom technique would be derided as “manipulation”.

In March at Lakeland Photographic Holidays I saw other guests’ pictures of an old truck at Threlkeld Mining Museum. I particularly liked the look of its radiator fan and tried photographing it close up, spinning it round or doing multiple exposures, moving it a little for each shot. It’s a great feeling when you know instantly that you’ll be chuffed with the pictures.

This is a multiple exposure with, I think, 8 or 16 shots: