I’m just getting all 8300 photos online from the last two days of shooting. Its taken all day to get stuff off the portable hard drives & CF cards and onto my archive Drobo.

Man, those 5D MKII files are huuuuuge. At 23 MB per image, its really chewing up drive space.

And this shoot is really taxing Lightroom. And I’m on a fast quadcore with oodles of RAM. Miscellaneous file management, importing, converting to DNG and preview building has literally taken most of the day. Lots of “letting her run” for hours and coming back to see it only 1/2 done the task.

One pet peeve I’m bringing up to the boys is that if there are any issues with an import, Lightroom will stop and pop an alert dialog. And in doing so, they stop the subsequent task of building previews. So I set up an import, left to go to church and came back to an alert telling me one file was already in the catalog and it hadn’t built any previews at all.

Gee, thanks.

I could have been 2 hours into that preview building time, instead I get to start now. Ugh.

I spent some time in the backstage documenting the preparations going on. The little girls and their mothers primping is always a good subject. Here is my favorite...

And, of course, there are the costumes...

More to come, of course, as soon as those @#$@#4 previews build.

On 8300 23 MB Files.

PS. Shot some video with the 5D MKII as well. Now I gotta figure out what to actually do with it.

Tags:Emerald Ballet Theatre

I’ve often recommended Drobo RAID devices for photographers. A Drobo is that sweet looking black box above. It plugs into your computer and lets you add drives as you need, maintaining a single volume and redundancy for you. Its RAID without the mess.

Well, found a slight caveat you should be aware of.

First off, in my Adobe Lightroom 2: Workflow for Busy Photographers PDF I discuss the fact that using single drives as a backup is insanity, and I still stand by that observation.

Maintaining your archive of photos on single drives is asking for trouble - disks just fail and the eggs-in-one-basket is crazy. Trying to use syncing software to keep two separate drives up to date is almost as foolhardy. Software sync is prone to fail and you’ll be left high and dry. Trust me, I’ve had it happen.

So I was pleased as punch when Drobo came out with their “Data Robot” (cheesy) product a few years ago and have been happily using that for over a year and a half. I even upgraded to the new version with Firewire last summer. More speed. Sold.

However, I just discovered a caveat that really bears considering.

When you buy that new Drobo, and set it up for the first time, it will ask you how big you want the volume to be. A funny question, really, as you probably don’t know the answer to that. It lists 2TB, 4TB, 8TB and 16 TB, and there is a discussion of the tradeoffs in the manual. Yeah, the one still sitting in the box unread. Oh, and the marketing materials don’t really hint there might be an issue getting to that maximum size...

Anyhow, like me, when you get your Drobo, you probably have a few new drives to plug in. For me, they were three 500 GB drives. I certainly don’t recall being asked what size I should make this uber- drive (and it was Gen 1, so maybe they didn’t even give me all the options above) but apparently I chose 2 TB.

Update: I’ve been informed that early Gen 1 Drobos didn’t even ask you to choose the size! Doh! They just stick you with 2 TB. So apparently I’m not to blame for this weird artificial limit in the first place. Oh snap! That really, really sucks Drobo. Bad Robot.

Even if I had, I’m not sure how I would have answered the question - I only had 1.5 TB total at the time but knew it would grow. How big? Good question Seagate/WD etc.

Fast forward a year and a half. Needing space, I did the drive shuffle and added in three 1 TB drives. One at a time. Wait for data protection. Panicked look on my face each time.

After that, every once in a while I’d get a alert from the Drobo software about formating something when I’d startup. Egads, no thank you. To be fair, they did say my other data would be safe, but I’m not so trusting. Things were working. Ignore the buggy software.

And I just kept ignoring it. Hey, I got work to do.

Well, last week, I hit a wall with Lightroom. Importing and converting to DNG was taking forever. As in F-O-R-E-V-E-R (say that in your best Sandlot voice).

It took 8 hours to import 1400 photos. Unacceptable. I was pissed.

I tweeted about it, got lots of great advice that, being the Lightroom wizard that I am, had already done. Weirdly, nothing else was giving me problems. Nothing had changed besides the Mac OS update a few weeks back.

As I’d worked on the Lightroom team, I had resources not available to the general public. I ended up screensharing my Mac with one of the head engineers on the team to see what was going on. He popped a few magic console and terminal windows (full of gobbledygook to me) and pronounced a Drobo issue.

“Its waiting for the drive alot. Weird” said the Sage from Minneapolis.

So I started looking into it.

The Drobo Dashboard said everything was green (green=good you know) and that I had at least 300 GB left of space. I still had one 500 GB drive still in there, but things looked fine.

Oh crap, my Drobo is going to go down, I thought. 10 years worth of photos are on that freaking robot.

Ugh.

Well, it didn’t go down. One day it gave me a Red Drive alert (the 500 GB drive) and said I should replace it.

Ok, sure. I had an extra 1 TB drive for just that reason, so in it went.

Then I waited with a panicked look on my face while it took 24 hours to rework everything. Hey, its doing its job and redundantly copying everything but I get real nervous doing that.

Go Drobo! Don’t die! Get better!

It did. I had oodles of space now. Rock on.

Yesterday I shot 3500 images and came home ready to fill that up.

Nada. I couldn’t copy to the Drobo. It said I didn’t have space.

Weird. I have 800 GB of space, as reported by the Drobo Dashboard.

After some time on the Drobo Website I saw a FAQ about the format dialog I’d been seeing - don’t worry, that is a bug, it said.

Then I read the FAQ that said there was a difference in what the OS reported (67 GB free vs. what Drobo really new it had). Drobo was smarter. You’re fine.

But after some more digging, I realized something: I was bumping up against that 2 TB partition I’d setup way back when.

I would need to format a new volume to use that space that the Dashboard was telling me I already had.

Ugh.

So I guess I had to mess with that format dialog after all. I gritted my teeth and did it.

To be fair, the did a decent job of reassuring me the original partition was going to be fine. I bit the bullet, winced and formatted the second partition (I didn’t get a choice in its size either, BTW).

So now I have a second 2 TB Drobo partition sitting there. Ready to Rock. If I’d wanted to get one, I’d need to buy another Drobo, dupe it, and then format the original drives again to a larger size.

Ok, so I have space to work. I’d probably preferred to have one big drive instead of two (the 30” monitor is already full of drives). But ok.

What pisses me off is I’ve lost a lot of time dealing with the weird Lightroom slowdowns. I was supposed to get a warning from the Drobo software, but nope, I had to figure it out with Console and Mr. Lightroom donating his time to the cause (cheers Troy, BTW).

So Drobo Caveat: Choose at least 8 TB as your default. Probably a good, safe compromise with speed and capacity for the future. But, I mean, come on, this was a purchase all about the future, maybe this can be handled better.

Here is a nice blog post I found about this that finally clued me in.

PS. Do I still recommend the Drobo? Uh, thinking....

Tags:Drobo

So all 3500 images from EBT’s Mermaid Dress Rehearsal are importing into Lightroom (after a bit of an adventure - see my next blog post).

I brought the Orbis Ringlight for some informal portraits. The dancers loved it...

Lots more to come...

Tags:Emerald Ballet Theatre, Dance, Personal Work

I took my son Steen camping a few weeks back.

We didn’t go far, but it always means the world to both of us to spend some one/one time together. I have 4 kids and do it with each; honestly I can’t think of anything I enjoy more.

He’s recently got into taking pictures, and last Christmas he got his own camera. It had to be silver too, for some reason.

So I was tickled pink when he asked to go for a hike so we could shoot some pictures. Here he is, the budding photographer at work.

We ran into some fascinating stuff on the trail. Here are a few photos...

Have a great Thursday!

Here are some photos from the past week’s rehearsals at EBT.

I just sent out a MadMimi.com email promotion to the parents of the dancers. It was my first with them. Here it is for those who want to see what MadMimi can do with minimal effort).

You can even click to see the larger gallery set that goes with these photos.

Tags:Dance, Emerald Ballet Theatre

My youngest (the firecracker) ready to cheer for his older brother in the Challenge Cup Soccer final a few weeks ago.

He was proud to wear the team colors.

No Fauxhawk here. That is the real deal. Just like his dad used to have back, ahem, in the day...

Tags:Personal Work

I started taking pictures seriously about a decade ago. I immediately gravitated to film because I found a) the digital cameras largely sucked, b) the papers for printing (especially black/white) sucked and c) the low light performance wasn’t there. Things sure have changed.

But I loved the black & white process.

Shooting Tri-X and pushing it a few stops then using a custom development ritual (and it was a ritual) to get what I wanted was a known thing. Printing in the darkroom was a bit of a pain (especially with 35mm negs) but there was something to be said for that darkroom ambiance; put some good music on the ipod, turn on the safelight and lock the door. Nice. Kinda miss it sometimes until I think how much more productive I am these days.

Back then I shot 99.999% black & white film. Want color too? Carry another body. Yes, kids, you had to choose. Don’t get me started with ISO adjustments.

I still see primarily in the tonalities of black & white. It just gets burned into your vision, and that was kinda the point.

But now I have the option of either color or black & white, and sometimes I hesitate. I have grown to love color for its own idiosyncrasies - as someone famously said (and I paraphrase because the speaker/words escape me at the moment) color is for the crass. And sometimes crass is good.

So today I was editing a series of pictures shot last week and came across this image. In all honesty, I’m completely blown away. Its beautiful, even if I do say so myself.

I mucked with it in black & white and then in color. I liked both, each for slightly different reasons. Here they are...

So which do you like more?

PS. I’ll have to admit that the color version is largely a black & white presentation with some subtle color. Its all about tonalities - told you its burned into my head.

Tags:Personal Work

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday.

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, cher readers.

• Tethering? Oh yes. David Tejada talks about a tethering to Lightroom with a new piece of software from MountainStorm. Mac only AFAIK.
• Adobe’s Anita Denis has posted a link to some updated help and tutorial content for Lightroom. Is it just me or are the Adobe Lightroom blogs so freaking ugly its embarassing?
• This bears repeating: there are many great video tutorials on using Lightroom available here.
• The DNG profile editor is super cool. Here is a video from the Lightroomblog.com on how to use it to create an IR profile. (via Lightroom News)
• Matt K has a series of questions/answers on his Q&A post this past week. Zooming, Tiff vs. PSD etc. Good stuff.
• I get asked periodically about my strategy for catalogs. I tend to create one every 3 months. But there are other takes. Here is one.
• Matt K’s has reworked and reposted his Summer Haze preset, in honor of it being summer and all.
• The Auto-Write XMP setting in the Catalog Settings dialog is important. I cover this in V2 of my Adobe Lightroom 2: Workflow for Busy Photographers PDF. Note the caveats.
• New metadata plugins. Geeks rejoice! This one from the Lightroom-blog.com lets you append an image with a model or property release. Very cool.
• Preset Overload. 180 free presets would choke a horse. Take this one nice and slow. Having trouble managing all those presets? Me too. I was chatting with Troy Gaul, LR engineer extraordinaire, and this came up just yesterday. Oh, and on some of these, your milage may vary.
• Spent too much time reading Vampire books? Here is a tutorial on how to use LR’s adjustment brushes to make Creepy-Eye!
• Smart Collections are for smart people. They really are. Here is how to be Mr/Ms Smart.
• Sean McGrath at McG Studios has released a series of new presets (with examples) on his website. Nice! If you find them useful, throw a few bucks his way. Or Euros! Or Quid, as I learn on those great beat-em-up British movies.
• Eric and I worked really hard to make sure merging catalogs was easy. And it is. Here is a tutorial on how to do it.
• Another take on the Star/Rate/Flag process of culling your images. Editing is a skill. Cultivate it. For our sakes.
• Getting that “rounded corner” look from Lightroom. Should you so desire...
• Wow, a new review of Lightroom 2! Only 10 months of solid pondering! I kid.
• A new web gallery from The Turning Gate: TTG Highslide. I just don’t use web galleries like I used to, what with my affiliation with SmugMug and all.
• Wanna overcomplicate your workflow? Wanna export repeatedly and relive that great destructiveness that only non-raw workflows can give? Read this.
• A few free presets here. Mmmmm. Pastelly. Not to be ungrateful, but did I mention how much I hate these “free file sharing” sites that try to make you get a “premium membership” to download a 12 k file?
• DNG - use it. A nice treatise on said file format from X-Equals. I’ve actually used the converter this week as LR’s DNG/Import routine was bogging down on me for some reason (still troubleshooting - methinks disk issues with my Drobo).
• Camera feeling slow? Check your CF card.

Non-Lightroom, but interesting:

• 5DMark II video a bit shaky? Try this.
• Need a way to suspend that speedlight over something. Try this.
• Check out yesterday’s Inspiration Monday for some great photography and a way to help people in India get clean water.

And from the weirdy files:

• This bizarre blog popped up today. Its pretty amazing in a “word salad, multiple computer translation, inadvertent mash-up, look-at-me-i’m stealing-other-peope’s-content-and-mangling-it” kinda way. And a hint to you new pirate bloggers: you really should not run with the pre-filled hint text. isn’t a good entry for your “About Me” box.

Tags:Lightroom

Mark Wallace (of Snapfactory) just twittered about a photographer that just stunned me.

Meet Jason Wallis. Or at least a few of his images.

Lovely. Just lovely. And I especially love the attention to lighting.

image © Jason Wallis


image © Jason Wallis


image © Jason Wallis


image © Jason Wallis

Just freaking amazing. And if you buy a print, you help people get fresh drinking water.

Sold.

PS. His blog is here.

PSS. Phil, you got your work cut out for you.

Tags:Inspiration

Sometimes rehearsals last forever. After 5 hours of non-stop dancing, you gotta blow off a bit of steam. Er. Sweat. Or whatever it is that dancers blow off.

So here are the girls @ EBT doing just that (I had to promise to post these...)

You can see they’re working on their “steel blue” modeling faces. Very nice.

Tags:Dance, Emerald Ballet Theatre, Ballet

Here are a few photos from last week’s Mermaid rehearsal @ Emerald Ballet Theatre.

Tags:Emerald Ballet Theatre

Here is a picture from a few weeks back taken with Pano on my iPhone.

This is a picture of the boyz hanging in our Kamping Kabin at the KOA (note the consistency of the K in their naming conventions - very clever) in Moab during our spring mountain biking fiesta.

Glad to be home after a lot of road travel. Its sunny and warm, and I have work to do.

Oh, and for you folks from the US/Canada, have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Tags:Personal Work

Playing with a speedlight (and my PocketWizard FlexTTs) yesterday.

Gotta love night vision gear.

Tags:Personal Work

Greetings from North Dakota.

Saturday we got a call that we’d need to jump in the car and drive 22 straight hours. Family emergency type stuff. It wasn’t planned, and was quite a surprise, but we’re here. This has necessitated staying in a series of hotels with my two youngest boys. They love it. They love the pools, the weird “flat” TV and the newness that is all around. Even after 22 hours straight in a car, this has been “the awesomest trip ever” they say.

I’d beg to differ, although we’ve been successful in what we came to do. Never underestimate family support in times of challenge.

So here are a few pictures from our little world over the past few days.

Tags:Personal Work

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday.

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, cher readers.

• How to move your Lightroom world to an external hard drive. - moving beyond the default Lightroom setup and taking control of where your images are stored. I talk a lot about this in my short “Adobe Lightroom2: Workflow for Busy Photographers” PDF, but it bears repeating.
• The Lightroomblog.com has released an interesting metadata plugin that lets you tag an image with a model release.
• The Graduated Filter - a quick tutorial on using said tool.
• My buddy Eric Scouten points to an upcoming Lightroom workshop by Andrew Rodney focused on Lightroom to Photoshop printing. If you’re in the Seattle area, might be a great opportunity.
• The LightroomLab.com has posted a short, action packed video walking you thru suggestions on setting up Lightroom’s preferences for maximum goodness.
• Lightroomsecrets.com has a short look at renaming files in the Library.
• Another before and after with Matt K. A short hands-on with a portrait that gives you some ideas of the things you can do with Lightroom.
• Looking for some inexpensive yet extensive online tutorials for Lightroom 2? Kelby Training has some great stuff - and for cheap - you can subscribe and watch them all. If you’re ready to go beyond reading books, but can’t swing an expensive workshop, try these.
• The OnOne presets were released quite awhile ago, but they still bear repeating as they have some good starter presets. Here is a short video from Jack Davis on using them.
• Generating previews takes too long. I know, no thumbnailing application will ever be fast enough, but previews are the bane of my existance. But you gotta make them. Here is how to do it if you got impatient and cancelled them when importing.
• LRB Portfolio was updated. This is an all-in-one portfolio site creator for Lightroom.
• Are you a Lightroom Abuser? I sure hope not...
• Printing in the Print module? Then watch this short video on printer profiles...
• Speaking of printing, here is a short look at the guides in the Print module.
• A few interesting new plugins for Lightroom from John Beardsworth.
• Using GPS data in Lightroom is easy. If that sorta thing floats your boat, that is.
• More on GPS here. What is it this week?
• 10 easy steps to Lightroom Grunge.

That is it for this week. Have a great Tuesday.

Tags:Lightroom

My daughter has a feis tomorrow AM in Seattle.

She took up Irish dance last fall and has had a ball attending these competitions around the Pacific Northwest.

One part of the process she isn’t so happy with is the 2 hour curler ordeal to curl her hair. This is customary, but it’s a lot of work.

Personally, her hair in curls looks so much better than the crazy wigs that some buy, but it is a lengthy ordeal she’d rather avoid.

Here are a few pictures from tonight’s preparation.

The poor thing is asleep on her feet.

Good luck tomorrow sweetheart!

Tags:Dance

A few pictures from a shoot last week.

Have a great weekend. After a long rainy week, the sun showed up today in force. Thank goodness.

Tags:Personal Work, Dance, Emerald Ballet Theatre

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday.

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, my dear readers.

• Thomas Hawk has a great article on his Lightroom Workflow. Well worth a read.
• Fixing blemishes is something we all have to do at times. The spot tool is capable of quite a bit...
• The Digital Darkroom - a video tutorial for Lightroom newbies that starts at the beginning.
• 35 Lightroom Presets - adding some variation to your presets panel.
• Here is a good tutorial from Matt K on how to install presets once you litter your desktop with them.
• A split toning tutorial walks you thru the process of toning your image. No selenium poisoning for you!
• Foto-Biz.com covers my main arguments with the existing backup tools in Lightroom. Your catalog needs to be backed up, so grit your teeth and set it up to backup at least weekly. As I’ve probably mentioned before, I pushed for an overhaul to the process in 2.0, wanting a solution that was more “on demand” but we just didn’t have time given teh compressed development cycle. 3 maybe?
• If you’re in MN, the Twin Cities LR user group has some interesting programs setup. The LR team is located in the area, so you get a wealth of knowledge when you attend. I even attended a few when I was visiting.
• The Santa Fe Workshops is presenting Derrik Story’s Beginning Workflow with Adobe Lightroom in July. More here...
• A short article on Deleting Keywords. Sometimes you gotta clean house...
• Dave at the LightroomLab.com has an interesting article on how he backs up his work. He recommends a two disk setup with Carbon Copy Cloner (Mac) to keep them synced. This will work, but its extra work and in my experience, is prone to failure. A drobo or other RAID enclosure is a much better solution.
• Matt K’s weekly “Worth-a-click” list has some interesting stuff this week...
• Brandon has a great article on Camera Profiles in Lightroom you should read.
• Save $25 on Lightroom from the Adobe online store until May 31st.
• LIghtroom Q&A from Mr. Prolific (AKA Matt K) is also worth a read.
• A quick rundown on Virtual Copies. VC’s are super cool and I prefer them over Snapshots because they create another item in the filmstrip/grid so I won’t forget about it.

Not Lightroom related, but cool:

• Stephen Zeller is making/selling a gel kit for your speedlight. I’ve been meaning to buy, but have been put off by prices on the other options. This is 1/2 the cost. Just ordered mine.
• Want to learn to integrate video and stills together to put you above your competition. Robert Evans and Curt Apanovitch will teach you how to do this in their 2 day PhotoFusion Tour currently traveling around the country. Check it out.
• Mad Mimi for email marketing. Pretty darn cool.
• Fashion retouching tips from The Fashion Photography blog. Good stuff.
• Have a SmugMug site but don’t like the default look (me neither). SmugMug just released the Easy Customizer that lets you point and click your way to a custom SmugMug site - build it the way you would like. The Easy Customizer is available in your Tools menu as well as the Control Panel > Customize tab. I demand awesomeness!

Thats it for this week. Have a great Tuesday!

Tags:Lightroom

A few photos from last week’s photo shoot at Oly’s Dance this past saturday...

Tags:Dance, Ballroom, Oly's Dance

This guy is blowing my socks off.

Ok, let me take a step back and explain.

For the past year, I’ve been really tuning into the wedding market. First at Adobe and now SmugMug. You see, the wedding market is an interesting island in the midst of a larger photographic landscape. I’ve never felt such enthusiasm for life, for love and for photography as I see from those shooting the special events in one’s life. I mean, that is what photography is all about - capturing, documenting and preserving life. I blame WPPI.

As someone who began his photographic journey in the documentary and fine art world, the wedding photographer was the crass, creepy guy in an old tux with a flash bracket on camera. He wore a fanny pack, had cheap lines and shot things vignettes in a wine glass. Worse, he was doing it for the mony. And then there were the bridezillas to deal with. *That* was not the market you wanted to be in.

Or so I thought.

Come to find out, that dude in the old tux is mostly history. The new wedding photographer is very different than the stereotype some photographers hold. They are hip, fashionable and some of them are truly amazing photographers. Like me, they love shooting pictures and they relish their role in documenting life’s special moments. In fact, they are doing it in ways and with such style that its hard to miss. There are some real stars out there in the wedding world, and my connections at Adobe/SmugMug have led me to meet many of these great photographers. Robert Evans, Jasmine Star, Bob Davis, David Jay, Mike Larsen, Dane Sanders. Their enthusiasm for the art, for life and for photography is infectious.

As I mentioned, I’ve been tracking some of these guys/gals and one has recently really been killing me with his work.

So, meet Jeff Jewsom.

images © jeff newsom


images © jeff newsom


images © jeff newsom


images © jeff newsom


images © jeff newsom

Just swimmingly spectacular, n’est-ce pas? I’d recommend you put his blog in your RSS reader. And maybe follow him on twitter.

Finally, read this interview here...

Here is a great quote from Crash Taylor’s interview pretty much sums up why I like wedding photographers:

“What do you think of the wedding photography industry at the moment and where do you see it in 5 years from now?
I think it is an incredible industry.  People are getting so good so fast!  The over all quality of work gets better every single year.  There seems to be a rise of an extremely anti competitive attitude and willingness to help colleagues improve and grow.  I hope in five years to get my mind blown more often, and I really hope to keep up!”

I also loved this:

“How important is Photoshop in your final images?
Very unimportant.  In fact, I barely touch it.
What is your most used Photoshop tool, plug-in, action set etc.?
I process everything in lightroom, so, I can’t say I have a favorite PS tool.”

Thats what I’m talking ‘bout.

I’ve got a huge set of ballroom pictures on tap for later this week. I’m still giddy over how much fun it was to shoot this great set of dancers...

Stay tuned...

Tags:Inspiration

I had the pleasure of taking some time this week to shoot pictures of a wonderful young family living in the Bay Area.

Here are a few of my favorite photos from our session...

What a bunch of cuties.

Have a great day.

Tags:Personal Work

A few pictures from tonight’s photo shoot with a talented young dancer. She ballrooms. She ballets. She’s just 6. You go Dascha!

Hoping on plane in the next few hours to SmugHQ in Mountain View, CA. Looking forward to getting out of the rain.

Tags:Personal Work

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday.

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, my dear readers.

• First off, its “Relaunch and Optimize your Lightroom Catalog” week. Hot on the heels of my twitter post about squeezing some performance out of lightroom, Matt K reminds people to Optimize every once in a while. Sage advice. Matt also does a before/after video to show his editing prowess. You go Matt!
• Speaking of sage advice, Brandon over at X= has a few gems for us today - Sharpening Tutorial from Mike Gray and points us to a great article on using a second monitor in Lightroom.
• Before & After. See how far you’ve come. Or how screwed up you just got. Meet the \ key. This keyboard shortcut will display a “before” state so you can see the effects of your work. Hit it again to go back to your changes. Then, maybe Revert to start again?
• Remember taking Art History as an undergrad? Remember all those tri-panelled paeans from the 15th century extolling some saint’s achievements. Time to use that same presentation with your photographs. Triptych’s are very cool. Choose wisely. Didn’t take Art History? Really? Shame on you. I sure hope that weight lifting class and booze-filled stupor was worth it. I kid, I kid.
• I’m quite fond of ye olde vignette. Like visual crack, I love using this tool to direct the viewer’s attention. I remember doing it in the darkroom, but it was a bit of work there. In Lightroom its easy.
• OCD got you in its cold, calculating hands? You’re not alone. The first step is to admit you have a problem. The second is to buy Peter Krogh’s ode to the fussy control freaks everywhere, The DAM book. Also, forgive him for the obvious pun, but you’d do it to. Third step, stop washing your hands so much, its damaging your skin. Seriously, if you really want some great advice on how to structure your workflow to the nth degree, this is where you get it.
• Speaking of control freak. Are you a keyword, ahem, afficionado? Then mosey on over to LightroomNews.com to read up on how you can edit your keyword lists more efficiently outside Lightroom.
• Watermarking is a must if you don’t want your photos splashed all over Myspace without reference. Lightroomers.com covers the same tool I use to watermark my photos. Its as powerful or as simple as you want it. Perfect.
• Keyboard Shortcuts are cool. They’re a pain to design into a product sometimes (especially legacy software with history) but there is no arguing that they can speed you up. Well, research has show that sometimes the gain is imaginary, but that is good enough for me. So learn from Lightroom-Blog.com how to White Balance via the keyboard for that 1/200th of a second boost you may or may not get.
• Stephen Zeller has a nice video on how all the new Nik softaware plugins for Lightroom work. Good to see how the interaction model works.
• A little Lightroom Web module love from the Lightroom Journal - covers web galleries and paypal integration among other things.
• Nik updated Sharpener Pro for Lightroom. Never found this necessary, as I think the sharpening controls in LR 2 are more than adequate, personally.
• RAM or CPU to make Lightroom faster. Some data...
• A newbie question I see all over the place - why do my photos look good, then after a second they go all blah?
• Smart Collections are cool. I pushed for these in LR 2 because they have some great uses. Here is a short blurb on them.
• Some more performance tips from the Queen of Lightroom. I didn’t vote for her (insert rest of Monty Python peasant skit here)
• I mentioned Terry White’s “My Photoshop Lightroom Workflow” webcast last week. If you missed the live performance, they have this great technology that actually “preserved” it somehow for later use. Very cool.
• Lots of people know about Develop Presets. Not so many know about Local Adjustment brush presets. They exist and they are cool. Read more from Kelly Castro, Lightroom team QA guy.
• Finally, a shout out to a few Lightroom Twitterers - LR_Melissa, lightroomblog, Scouten and the Big Dirty of Lightroom LR_Phil

Well, that is it for today. A lot of great stuff to keep your head spinning for at least a few days.

Have a great Tuesday.

Tags:Lightroom

I didn’t used to think much about beauty/fashion photography. It just wasn’t my thing. I was Mr. Artsy Street Photographer. It was my grumpy duty to give a big ‘pppfhhhht’ to the crass world of commercial photography.

Then I decided to learn lighting and began extending my portrait business. All of a sudden I had all these tools at hand to shape, modify and extend light. Lighting became very cool and I threw myself at it.

And now I love analyzing beauty/fashion photography. In fact, I subscribed to Vanity Fair mostly for the pictures (truth be told, I like the articles as well) and even endured the articles in Esquire for the photography before realizing they were the same photos as in Vanity Fair (let it expire).

One photographer who consistently delivers lovely work in this genre is Zhang Jingna. A freelance photographer in Singapore, I first ran into her work as a desktop pattern delivered to my Mac one day via Desktopia. It was beautiful...

image © Zhang Jingna

Then I saw another article referencing this work and pointed me to the rest of Zhang’s portfolio. Some lovely stuff there.

images © Zhang Jingna


images © Zhang Jingna

I find it quite interesting to explore different types of photography, and Zhang’s work certainly inspires me. Her lovely use of color, precise control, and perfect lighting techniques have certainly given me some ideas...

Peruse more of her portfolio here... and here...

Have a great Monday.

Tags:Inspiration

I spent some time in the studio this week with the Ballet II/III class yesterday and came away with a few photos that I really liked.

This is a large class with several exceptional young dancers, and its always a pleasure to document their dedication and hard work. If they could only stop jabbering and listen to Ms. Meghan.

In other news, the sun is out big time in Seattle today! W00t! Looks like a great day to get on the bike and enjoy a sunny May Day.

Thanks to all who downloaded my Adobe Lightroom 2: Workflow for Busy Photographers PDF tutorial yesterday (missed it? See here) I’m happy to hear that people are finding it valuable.

Tags:Emerald Ballet Theatre, Dance