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 -  24 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

Lightroom web galleries from the ground up

One reason why I still use iView rather than switching completely to Lightroom is because I prefer its HTML web gallery templates. iView takes about a third of Lightroom's time to output a big contact sheet style web gallery of say 100-300 pictures because it uses my DNG files' embedded previews, while Lightroom seems to insist on re-rendering the raw files when you're previewing the gallery in Web, again each time you change an output setting, and then again when it actually starts generating them.

A second reason is because I can edit iView's HTML-based templates much more easily. Going back to Lightroom 1.0, the original XML and XSLT templates appealed to the geek in me, but I always felt they were misguided, a developer's solution which demanded a far higher level of skill than even the IT-minded photographer was likely to possess. While you can inch up the HTML learning curve, tweaking templates in small yet rewarding steps, XML and XSLT customization require much more experience. That aspect didn't worry me too much because I used to implement XML and XSLT solutions professionally, but iView works perfectly for my contact sheet galleries and my main site is powered by an online database and some iView scripts. So I never felt customizing the Lightroom XML and XSLT templates was worth the effort. I was rather surprised, impressed, that anyone else bothered.

That thunderous lack of interest cascaded over to the Lua-based templates or "engines" which arrived with Lightroom 1.3. And at the time I was much more enthusiastic about learning Flash and ActionScript. In fact I still am - once I actually launch the Flash site, I'll update it via SlideShowPro's excellent Lightroom-SSP Director export plug-in. That's one click to run the Lightroom export, one click to activate the new web gallery. Beat that, Lua.

Still, I'm really glad to see Sean McCormack is doing a bite-sized series on writing Lightroom web engines, starting with Anatomy of a Lightroom HTML Gallery:

Lightroom HTML galleries used to be written in a mix of XSLT and XML. The simpler coding in Lua makes it a pleasure to create HTML galleries with. You can write Flash galleries in Lua, but because IE doesn't allow plugin loading on PC Lightroom, you can't see them in the preview window. Hence 3rd party Flash galleries use the old method for cross platform compatibility.

Lua galleries were introduced in Version 1.3 and have matured somewhat with V2.0. The new syntax is much tidier and more compact. In fact Matthew Campagna shaved 500 lines off one of his galleries for version 2, and my new website in a gallery LRB Portfolio managed close to that also.

So what comprises a Lua Gallery? Well the absolute minimum a gallery can contain is 3 files: galleryInfo.lrweb, manifest.lrweb and a HTML file. Let's look at them in a little more detail....

And part 2 is over here. You never know, now I've cracked Flash and ActionScript, this might even encourage me to learn Lua at long last.

Other resources for Lightroom Web:

• Lightroom 2 SDK now includes the web engine, as well as export and the beginnings of custom metadata
• SlideShowPro Director is an online management system for web photo galleries and powers my new site
• SSP-Director plug-in for Lightroom makes updating it a dream
• SSP for Lightroom is their standalone web gallery engine
• GalleryMerger is a tool for hassle-free maintenance of standalone SSP multi-album galleries
• The Turning Gate
• Lightroom galleries (with added exclamation marks)

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  8 comments

Plug-ins (Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy)

It's easy to see real positives in Aperture's announcement of plug-in architecture. Taking advantage of existing third party tools can quickly flesh out its features, while positioning it at the centre of a viable "ecosystem". Meanwhile third party developers can be working on fully-integrated solutions.

On the other hand, it's a long way short of the original concept of the one ring to rule them all, and might even be seen as defining limits on what's going to appear in the core product.

In any case, even if that fear's untrue, it seems pretty obvious that people don't really want to pay for a range of plug-ins for essential tasks like noise reduction or lens distortion - they will do so, but reluctantly, as a distress purchase. Then there's the hassle each time the host or the plug-in upgrades, or the palaver of tracking down licence numbers when you get a new computer (I'd love to know how many Mac users actually use the automated transfer processes). And when your chosen plug-in developer vanishes? Hopefully the plug-in works in the host's next version, and in cases like noise reduction, there'll always be a replacement, at a price. But will any of your settings transfer? Should you welcome plug-ins so uncritically, forgetting that you have grudgingly accepted you'll always be shelling out for them? Or should you demand the functionality in the box?

It's for reasons like this that I've never been particularly enamoured of plug-ins for Photoshop - only NoiseWare and PTLens have ever made it past an upgrade or change of computer - and I have the same doubts about them in Aperture and Lightroom. Still, it is the accepted wisdom that plug-ins played a seminal role in Photoshop's early history and so they have acquired a semi-mythical status. Questioning their virtue seems as heretical as doubting the Founding Fathers or Good Queen Bess, or Ivan the Terrible if you're Russian.

Just as these personalities can symbolize their nations, and embody certain values, so in the field of digital imaging the term plug-in has a history and a special meaning. It's certainly great PR to announce Aperture has plug-ins, but we're talking about a program whose raison d'etre is non-destructive editing and non-modality. So how can the current crop of external TIF editors in modal windows really be dignified with the term "plug-ins"? Fundamentally that's the question Lightroom product manger Tom Hogarty asks in Plug-in or External Editor? when he explains why we haven't seen image processing plug-ins for Lightroom is because of the:

incredibly powerful link between the raw and rendered workflow, and half measures (my emphasis) with marketing spin labeled as "plug-ins" are not the highest priority for the Lightroom team.

Not surprisingly, that touched a raw nerve, so over at AUPN Micah Walter has a crack at gerrymandering the term plug-in by including batch processing (by which criterion a command line program might qualify as a Lightroom plug-in, let alone Noise Ninja's new standalone) and tries to shift attention to what the plug-in specification allows. Derrick Story makes the same point:

Some of the advantages of the plug-in architecture include: access to metadata, batch processing, Raw processing, and control over Aperture objects.

Surely that's a bit like saying you're already a Latter Day Saint because one day your unborn grandchildren are going to become Mormons? If the host program's essence is as a non-destructive editor, a true plug-in operates within that concept. Until then, all you've got is an external editor strapped on in a modal window.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  1 comments

My not quite famous enough 5 - #3

The third feature in this little list is something which I won't swear is new, but which if it was there in version 1 is something I never noticed and can't get working now - autocomplete drop down lists.

Previously Lightroom remembered whatever you'd entered in the Metadata panel, and would then autocomplete your entry the next time you started off typing something similar in the same box. That could be both helpful and an irritant, especially when a few of the most recent entries began similarly. Still, I liked the feature.

What LR2 does is take the 12 most-recent entries and displays them in a list when you click the field's name. So here I clicked Title and LR shows me the most recent entries in that field, and it's the same for most other items in the panel. It's a real time saver, and makes me wonder if there's anything I can hack which will make LR remember many more of recent entries....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

My not quite famous enough 5 - #2

Another change I particularly like in Lightroom 2 is being able to add multiple external editors (via Preferences). OK, not everyone likes to have multiple versions of Photoshop installed, but it's incredibly handy to have other external editors just a click away - here for example you see that Noiseware's standalone application, my preferred noise reduction program, and PT Lens are just a right click away.

I never really used Noiseware standalone very often before Lightroom 2 - the Photoshop plug-in was a better fit for me. But I can now do most dodging and burning work in Lightroom, so it's no coincidence that I've found I am now using the Noiseware standalone more frequently and the plug-in correspondingly less. That may change back as I play with Imagenomic's new droplets for Lightroom (they also include ones for their Portraiture plug-in which I don't have). You place this set of Photoshop droplets in Lightroom's Export Actions folder and apply the chosen Noiseware treatment to batches of files exported from Lightroom. Here I've taken it a bit further by setting up some of these droplets as additional external editors, which lets me apply them directly to existing images via Edit With. Of course, this technique is not restricted to Noiseware - you can set up any droplet as both an Export Action for export batches and as an additional external editor for existing images. Neat, eh?

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  5 comments

SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom - update

OK, I tried it out. After my little joke about Ahmedinejad and his centrifuges, I should say that this little toy didn't work 100% properly first time.... The Lightroom side of it worked perfectly, and the plug-in also created a new album (a grouping of pictures) on my server, but it didn't send the payload - no pictures were uploaded. OK, so I hadn't bothered updating Director 1.20 beforehand, but it should still have worked.

Once I'd updated Director to the latest 1.22, the process was as slick as can be. You select your images, begin an Export using the SSP export plug-in, and press Export. A few minutes later and it uploads your files to the server and takes you to Director's control panel in your default browser. You're ready to go. Very neat.

The one thing I don't like is not having control over the sizes of file that are uploaded. I would prefer to upload at the size at which I anticipate and set the sharpening option accordingly. Instead it uploads full size files, making the upload slower, taking up more disc space, and invalidating your sharpening choices.

UPDATE - It's easy to edit the plug-in and gain access to the file sizes and quality settings.
UPDATE 2 - Now you don't have to do so because a bug fix for the plug-in also restores your control over file sizes and quality settings.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

SlideShowPro Director and Lightroom

While the existing SlideShowPro for Lightroom generates individual web galleries, when your site consists of multiple galleries you have to do some manual editing of xml files which (a) not everyone can do (b) is still manual work for those who can do it. It's much more efficient to power a site with an online database.

That's where SlideShowPro Director comes in - it's a database which supplies the data to SlideShowPro. Previously Director let you import Lightroom's SlideShowPro web galleries, which worked but was still a bit of an effort, but now SlideShowPro has released a Lightroom export plug-in for SlideShowPro Director. This is an export plugin that allows you to upload pictures directly from your Lightroom library to an existing or new album inside SlideShowPro Director. It works with both the self-install version of Director 1.2, as well as their hosted subscription accounts (more here).

Just like President Ahmedinejad unwrapping a shiny new delivery of centrifuges, I can't wait to try it on my still-hidden Flash-based site.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

My Hot 5 - #1

I've never used the word "cool" in the American sense. I remember hearing it as a teenager, but then 1976 and punk reached Bolton and swept away all such hippy Americanisms along with all the rock dinosaurs (for some reason it's always Rush who spring to mind) we'd previously admired as the height of musical dexterity. I don't recall hearing the word again until my first business trip to Dayton Ohio in the mid 1990s and at the time I put it down to being in the backwoods with pickup trucks everywhere, the odd Confederate flag, and no doubt with Rush on the stereo. Much as "cool" is now commonplace again in British usage, it's still a word I don't think my age group could use, Still, it is on the borderline of acceptability, while firmly on the wrong side lie "hot" or "awesome" or "killer"....

Whether or not I find that sort of language foreign or juvenile, or both, it's not me, is it? Much as I might enthuse about Lightroom 2's most obvious new features, such as non-destructive dodging and burning and gradient tools, I could never call them "awesome", superb though they are. So more like the Housemartins, whose hype was to call themselves the 4th best band in Hull, here is the first of my "not quite famous enough 5" - Keywords are metadata again!

I never liked how Lightroom 1 treated keywords as if they weren't metadata like any other descriptive metadata. After all, if you photograph the same subject more than once, there's a fair chance those pictures will share the same title, caption, locations, and many if not all of the same keywords. Bridge metadata templates let you apply all that information in one fell swoop, but in Lightroom 1 keywords were excluded from its Metadata Presets. And if you wanted to copy metadata from one image to another, Sync Metadata also failed to copy the keywords. You were back to cut and paste.

But next time you cut and paste keywords from one picture to another, take a quick look at Metadata Presets and Sync Metadata. They now include keywords too. Isn't that awesome? Hm - not quite me. Bravo!

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  2 comments

5 new ways to while away the summer

A not altogether random selection of blogs:

• John Paul Caponigro now has a blog and mentions he has written 3 new artist's statements this summer alone (each a classic of its type). Interestingly, he has also used Blurb for a new book of photos and had a good experience. Interesting as I've been also looking at it instead of Lulu. Shame I can't do it from Lightroom....
• Lightroom engineer Eric Scouten has also written this week about using smart collections to manage workflow.
• Photo Attorney is a US lawyer who works for photographers and covers issues both sides of the pond. After all, we're in the same mess....
• War on Photography is about how (some) police and (most) security guards fight the good war against Osama bin Laden
• Edward Vallance is an academic historian who writes on 17th century history or as he puts it "Radicalism, history and occasional pop culture references"

Permalink - General -  1 comments

Smart collections for controlling your workflow

When you have a library of many thousands of pictures, querying or searching is clearly a very important feature. And you've got to be able to save those search criteria - after all, each time you narrow down your catalogue to find certain pictures, it's a fair bet that you may want to find the same pictures again before too long. The more efficiently you find those pictures, the more time you'll have for perfecting them. So two of the biggest and most welcome changes in Lightroom 2's Library are the iTunes-style Filter panel (below), which replaces the old disc-thrashing Metadata Browser, and the introduction of Smart Collections.

Both the Filter panel and Smart Collections let you filter down the catalogue to find a selection of pictures, and each lets you save and recall the criteria you used to find them. What's less clear is which you should use and when. The answer, well my answer, might be a bit controversial.... Use Filters when you don't know what you're doing, use Smart Collections when you do.

Having been lucky enough to have been using both for a few months, I've happily settled down to using Smart Collections almost all the time, and visit the Filter panel only for quick filtering by star rating, flag, coloured label, or master/virtual (though more often than not, I'll apply these quick filters through the Filmstrip). I do use the Filter panel's Text section, but just once in a blue moon, and use its iTunes Metadata section so rarely I really wouldn't miss it.

• While the Filter panel menu does let you save a preset including your criteria, after you've added a few presets you soon have a long and unhelpful list. On the other hand, you can work easily with a large number of Smart Collections, group them in multi-level families, and mix them with Dumb Collections too. A filter doesn't remember any output settings, while a Collection stores the last Print, Slideshow or Web settings applied to it. Smart Collections let you organize and add structure to your catalogue.
• The Filter panel's iTunes-style columns hang around when they're no longer wanted. I'm always going back to folders and wondering why some pictures seem to be missing - and then realize it's because the folder has remembered some filter applied last time I visited it (which might be months ago). Clearing filters each time you change folder is about as practical as locking interior house doors every time you change room. It's a lot easier not to use them.
• I find Filter panel's iTunes-style columns of more interest when you're exploring a catalogue, hacking your way into unknown territory and discovering the way it's laid out. You don't have a clear aim in mind, and your search criteria are changing as you discover how you previously tagged your pictures (like slicing and dicing with Excel pivot tables or Cognos). But the thing is, I don't normally need to explore my catalogue - I know, pretty well, what I want to find.

So while the Filter panel is fine for temporary filtering, chopping and change what rating or flag values are visible, Smart Collections are much better for ongoing needs to manage a catalogue and it makes sense to invest time learning their nuances and then applying them as ingeniously as possible.

The Workflow Smart Collection

As an example, here's how I now manage new work. My objective is to see at a glance what's been done and what I've got to do next. For instance, I want to be confident every picture has my copyright and know that I've added descriptive metadata like keywords. Likewise I want to be sure I've adjusted all the pictures without eyeballing the badges on a few hundred thumbnails, and I want the catalogue to help point out pictures which need special attention. In other words, I want to introduce some quality control.

• The key is a single Dumb Collection, called "0.00 Current work" into which I drag the pictures I want to process (the 0.00 is there to assist sorting).


• I then have a series of Smart Collections which mostly check for images containing "Current work" in the Collection name, and then target specific criteria. So 1.30 No Captions checks that those pictures in "Current work" have something in the caption field - here it's zero so I'm happy. On the other hand, 1.40 No Copyright shows me that for some reason I've overlooked two pictures in "Current work". I can see straight away if there's any missing metadata in my shoot.


• You can, to a certain extent, apply the same technique to Develop adjustments too. The caveat's because, unlike Aperture 2, unfortunately Lightroom 2 doesn't let you target individual adjustments so a Smart Collection can't identify for you any ISO1000+ images where the Luminance and Color Noise settings are less than certain values. But what you can do is what I've done - identify high ISO images and remind yourself that you might want to treat those pictures as a group. Anyway I'm sure we'll catch up, probably before most Aperture users realize they have the feature.

That's how it works. In practice, it's very simple - after a weekend away, I clear out any existing items from this Collection and drag in the newest pictures. The Smart Collections recalculate automatically and I always can see what's done and what needs attention.

If "Current work" has existing items which still need work, I can move them to another Dumb Collection "Last week's work" so that my Smart Collections don't pick them up.

If you want to try this out, you can build up such a Smart Collection structure yourself. Alternatively, save yourself a load of time by going to my Lightroom downloads section where you'll find a small "Workflow" catalogue which you can import directly into your own. Use File > Import as Catalog, point to my Workflow.lrcat file, and Import the single JPEG file (delete it afterwards). This should import the Smart Collections in their groupings. They obviously took me a bit of time to get right, so you can always say "thanks" or "grazie" or "yeah buddy that's f***ing cool" via my Amazon wish list.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  35 comments

Leon Taylor

Leon Taylor has a small but excellent set of black and white pictures including this gloomy North of England landscape - you know how much I like those. A few more of his pictures are at Filmwasters.

Via Arena.

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments

Choice cuts

A few other Lightroom links... Product manager Tom Hogarty writes about what's really a plug-in and how so-called plug-ins (Aperture's and others) are really external editors. Tom and marketing manager Frederick Johnson are interviewed about LR2 in this new O'Reilly podcast, and Adobe Camera Raw engineer Eric Chan writes about the Adobe profiles. The whole lot's worth reading:

We have a new set of camera profiles called the Adobe Standard profiles. Our goal in designing these profiles is to give photographers a better default color: that is, a better starting point for making image adjustments. With the new profiles, the main improvement is in the warm colors: reds, oranges, and yellows. Deep saturated reds should indeed appear red, without messing up skin tones. Saturation is better maintained in warm highlights, and warm colors are easier to distinguish. There are also improvements in other colors, but the changes in warm colors are the most noticeable.

I've never felt strongly about Adobe Camera Raw colour, though generally prefer it to the look from Nikon Capture or other converters. But as shown here in Lightroom 2's calibration panel, these new roll-your-own profiles should keep the pixel peepers and colour charters happy.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Stripping while exporting from Lightroom

Jeffrey Friedl has released a set of Lightroom 2 export plug-ins including one feature which really caught my eye - his "Metadata Wrangler" which:

allows you to strip selected metadata components from images as they are exported. You can use it, for example, to remove the embedded thumbnail and any Lightroom "develop" metadata, while retaining other metadata, such as the exposure settings, lens information, copyright, etc.

While this filter can be used with Jeffrey's plug-ins, you can download and install it on its own and use it as part of Lightroom's standard export dialog. And apart from what it does, it's also interesting for how it does it - using the Exiftool tool to post process the exports. Nice work.

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  0 comments

Five for Three

Somewhere in one of the Lightroom 2 Is Out articles I saw someone mention the 5 features he'd most like to see in Lightroom 3. So, based on a view that Develop now needs incremental changes, deeper picture management capabilities, and more output possibilities, here are mine:

1. Books - for now, just match Aperture for "good enough" functionality
2. Manage in Library any file type including CMYK, sound, Word etc - allow assignment of keywords and other metadata, exporting copies and file movements, but no processing
3. Let Smart Collections target all the metadata in the catalogue including individual Develop values
4. Backup data validation - disks show signs of going bad, DNGs have hashes, backups need reconnecting with catalogues based on GUIDs and not on mere filenames, let along someone writing SQL
5. Make soft proofing something people don't need to worry about. Maybe I'm a dreamer but I'm not actually proposing Soft Proofing. I'm pretty convinced that fewer photographers use it in Photoshop than you might think, and that most LR users don't actually want Soft Proofing as such - they just their prints to come out right. Hiding complexity is supposed to be the Lightroom design, and Soft Proofing if it ever comes has got to be no more scary, and as routinely used, as Print Preview.
   

I would include one other wish - correcting all the text that reads "grayscale" so it is the more photographic "black and white". But until I can persuade Adobe, or finally give up, you can fool Lightroom's multilingual translation engine by placing my LR2 TranslatedStrings.txt file in Lightroom 2's program folder, in the subfolder \Resources\en\ . Now, what about changing Clarity to Punch....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  2 comments

AutoSync, Gradient Presets, and wet haddock

Yes, I do throw up my hands in despair every time I read some Lightroom user saying he has hundreds of Develop Presets. It's the same personality type who will trumpet the hundreds of Velvia-effect Photoshop actions he's collected, who'll leap for his wallet every time another newly-released plug-in promises black and white conversion just like Ansel Adams, and who worst of all has an unshakeable belief in the accuracy of his digital HP5+ effect despite never having touched the real stuff or seen the warm orange light of a darkroom. These religiously-gullible folk need a firm slap around the jaws with the proverbial wet haddock.

That's not to say I don't use any Lightroom Develop Presets (currently 20), Photoshop plug-ins (just NoiseWare), or that I have never touted my own Photoshop actions to mimic albumen or palladium prints (after spending days in the V&A print room, I should add). But you've got to use these things sparingly. That's partly a creative thing, but it's also because the actual range of HP5+ prints or palladium print tones varies much more widely than the gullible victim of Presetitis will ever see - for all his unconvincing talk of using Presets or actions as a starting point.

Now, that said, you might now expect my fire's going to turn towards Sean McCormack's graduated filter Presets for Lightroom 2 - after all, I might ask if we're talking B+W neutral grads, Lee, or some other filter maker. But while I might question the need for as many as 70 variations, Sean and I seem to have been working on similar lines. After all, a tobacco filter for example can contain a range of slightly-fiddly settings, and Presets let you store and visualize a range of subtly-different results.

But the other big reason for changing my tune - at least in this case - is because of AutoSync, which as you know is the most efficient way to work in Lightroom. Although the Gradient filter is very elegantly implemented, sadly Adobe haven't let the time-poor snapper use AutoSync to apply the Gradient to multiple images at once. So instead of Shift dragging the same Gradient onto a series of frames needing the same grad effect , such as the elements of a panorama, instead you're forced to do the Copy and Paste Two Step (the same inefficient process you have to follow in Aperture).

All is not lost however - you can apply a Gradient Preset to multiple images at once (and as an aside, the Gradient's Reset button works in AutoSync mode too).

My little group of Gradient Presets are similar in concept to Sean's, though I hadn’t thought of charging for them. That's an interesting toe in the water and I’m sure he’ll tell me quietly if it makes him rich. I’m not sure if he did the same with his Presets, but I've biased mine to a rule of thirds approach to composition.

So, work in AutoSync mode, use it with Gradient Presets, and remember to use them only as a starting point – my haddock’s within easy reach!

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  6 comments

On target

Lightroom 2's out, and there are comprehensive lists of its new features at Lightroom Team Journal, by Victoria Bampton, and Ian Lyons. Here, like I did after Lightroom 1, I'm going to stay away from the detail of how features work and focus on the whys and what fors, and on best practice.

I'm going to start by drawing attention to a small feature which could easily be overlooked but which I find unbelievably useful - the Target collection. When you're racing through lots of pictures, it's pretty common to want to mark up certain images so it's easy to return to them later - for example, I've recently been shortlisting pictures for a number of new web galleries. Previously you'd hit B which added pictures to the Quick Collection, and then you might save the Quick Collection as a regular, Dumb Collection.

The change in LR2 is that you can right click any Dumb Collection and set it as the Target Collection, which means that hitting B will now send the current picture(s) directly to it, not to the Quick Collection. This keyboard shortcut is most useful when you're reviewing images full screen, but when you're running through a big grid of thumbnails it's faster to use the Painter - Target Collection has been added to the list of metadata it can paint. So it's B when you're reviewing images full screen, and the Painter in grid view.

As an aside, this use of the Painter is one way in which Adobe can make a somewhat-maligned tool really punch its weight. Another would be to let you copy and paste adjustments from one image to another, just like the Format Painter in Microsoft Office. While to some extent you can do this already - it's Settings in this screenshot - this is limited to Develop presets. If you've got the brains to use the Painter, you've got the brains to have pushed your adjustments beyond Develop presets....

Also, for those who want to catalogue CMYK images in Lightroom, see Ian Lyons' Trojan Horse workaround. It's the first Lightroom article I've seen with allusions to Hellenic mythology, but his choice of pictures makes me think it can't be long before we see allusions to the Icelandic sagas too....

Permalink - Lightroom 2 -  4 comments

New stuff

Just refreshed the site with a few new pictures - the new gallery is again all new stuff, as it should be, while the wedding gallery includes newer work as well as some old favourites.

Both galleries are Flash-based and use the excellent SlideShowPro. I'm using the SSP for Lightroom web engine purely to generate the content, the jpegs and the xml file with all the filenames and captions. But they're displayed via my own Flash movie which is based on an SSP for Flash component. This approach means I can quickly create new galleries to add to existing pages, while the power of ActionScript lets me show extra information like the gallery's name and description. As my long-threatened Flash-based site uses the same SSP galleries, the transition - if it ever happens - should be painless....

Permalink - My photography -  0 comments

A true story

I was going to reply to Sean's comments on filenaming conventions in this Lightroom forum thread:

Nothing wrong with using yymmdd-camera sequence, lots of people do.

I generally just use Custom Name_YYMMDD_3 dig Seq (or 4 for larger shoots)

It's not a pedantic point either - I'll assume his "generally" using a filenaming convention was a slip of the tongue - but I'm more interested in the two conventions he contrasts.

Either method satisfies the basic principle of no two pictures sharing the same file name, and I happen to follow something similar to the first - YYMMDD_A081234.nef where the "1234" came from the camera-generated "DCS_1234.nef". The additional letter is "A" or "B" and allows for the chance of two camera bodies shooting a DCS_1234.nef on the same day. Yet I often wish I'd gone Sean's way from the start as it results in a shorter unique file ID and gives you the possibility to check you've not accidentally deleted any items - in accountancy (eek) we used to call this a "sequential continuity" control. However, Lightroom users who renumber the files in this way have a problem if their hard drive crashes. Here's a true story....

A couple of weeks back, a friend/client had a hard drive crash. He shoots 6-900 pictures a day, 4-5 days a week, and had just lost 2-3 weeks' worth of client pictures. But his Lightroom catalogue was safely backed up, and he restored the originals Lightroom had backed up as part of its import process. Sounds wonderful? Well, not quite.

The problem was that after editing down each shoot to around 300 pictures, he renames them YYMMDD-0001.cr2 through YYMMDD-0300.cr2. His newly-restored Lightroom catalogue was looking for those file names, but his restored originals still had the original camera-generated names like KLKJ1244.cr2.

Now in my case, my filenaming convention is repeatable and I could have renamed the restored originals - DCS_1234.nef would again become YYMMDD_A081234.nef. LR would then have had no trouble remarrying its thumbnails to the renamed backup files, and the whole job would have taken a few minutes (I'd have done it in Bridge or in a new, temporary Lightroom catalogue).

But in his case, he had deleted hundreds of rejects before he had renamed the keepers. To reconnect Lightroom's thumbnails to the originals, he would have needed to examine each thumbnail in turn, allow for tiny variations between frames (he uses two Canon 1D Mk III tripod mounted-bodies), and then rename the original file so it matched the new 001-300 name in Lightroom. For one or two images that might be acceptable - but for thousands?

This is clearly a downfall of Lightroom's backup upon import feature - as a minimum it needs a corresponding feature that switches its thumbnails back to the original file names. As it stands, with this unrepeatable filenaming convention you need to back up the images again immediately after renaming them. In my friend's case, he happened to know someone who knew the original filename was stored in Lightroom's catalogue and who could also write the SQL to restore it and overwrite the current filenames....

Permalink - Lightroom -  9 comments

Cold places

Bruce Percy's colour landscape work is rather lovely, and I'm sure I've seen his Iceland pictures somewhere before. He's got a blog with an excellent podcast on a Patagonia trip, and I do also like his attitude:

I doubt that most people could tell what equipment was used to create any of the images on my own site. Sure some would have a good idea if the image was:

1. digital (lack of grain)
2. film (grain)
3. medium format (tonality)
4. large format (smoother tonality)

But that’s just the technical aspect of photography. Photography is about the ‘art’ or ’soul’. The technical side is valid, but only as a means to an end. Having a super duper mega expensive camera is not going to make you a better photographer. I know that in my work, my style has not changed when I’ve changed to different camera’s.[sic]

Permalink - Photo links -  0 comments