At work we have this little costume contest. But I work at SmugMug, so its not like your average episode of the “The Office”. The prize is worth $500, which ups the motivational factor over the conventional bag of Twizzlers in my book.

Last year I rushed it. This year I rushed it less. Alot less.

Yes, that is me in both roles: Francis from Left 4 Dead (a zombie game) and the zombie. Add a little Photoshop wizardry and wrap it all up in a motivational poster format.

I got this one nailed, yo!

PS. My 4 year old is wigged out of the Zombie Me. He keeps getting the packaging the scar pieces came in to show my wife that it isn’t real.

Here are a few recent pictures from a recent senior shoot I had.

Maddy used to dance at EBT, so I’ve shot pictures of her before. But this time it was all about her. And she was very explicit that she didn’t want the normal old senior treatment. No giggly girl sitting on some stairs. No spinning teeny bopper with graffiti backdrops. Nope. Maddy dances to the beat of her own drum and she wanted that in her pictures. I said that wouldn’t be a problem as I’m not much into the glamor shots thing myself...

So we packed a few changes of clothes in a backpack and hit a local hiking trail. Maddy likes to hike, take pictures and even brought along a friend who was immediately elected to carry some of my crap. Friends are good for that.

So we fired up the speedlights, PocketWizards and off we went.

I’m tickled pink on how these turned out. Lots of fun, very different, and really capture the essence of a wonderful young lass.

I don’t shoot many landscape pictures. At least going out specifically to shoot landscapes.

I do end up hiking in some lovely areas, and I’ve always got my camera with me, so I take some pictures along the way. Here is a panorama shot this August in the Goat Rocks Wilderness. The spectacular thing is that you can see three volcanoes as you sweep left to right - Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier respectively.

That is pretty darn cool.

This was taken on the Pacific Crest Trail with my Canon 5D MK II with some exposure or other. The image comes from 9 separate images stitched together in Photoshop. You’ll really need to look at this on SmugMug to get a bit of the overwhelming coolness that is seeing a sight like this at 8 or 9 thousand feet above sea level. Make that window big too.

The wildflowers were out and you could see for miles. Lovely.

Click on the image to embiggen it.

Jeffery Friedl just pinged me to mention that I’d missed a couple of new Lightroom plugins released in the past few weeks. Not intended as a diss, I figured a nice payback gesture was to have their own post.

Now, first off, these plugins are just for card carrying turbo nerds - I kid, I kid - but they do offer some interesting enhancements on Lightroom’s dataset.

• Extended Search - this plugin extends Lightroom’s image search capabilities. Take it away Jeff...
• Data Plot - This plugin does some metadata analysis to look at what focal lengths were used on a selection and graphs it for you. More here...

Such exquisite geekiness!

He also informed me that he’s hard at work on a plugin for the LR3Beta’s publish feature that will give you Smuggers some love. Watch for it here...

Tags:Lightrooom

Tags:Personal Work

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday. W00t!

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, meus queridos.

• Well the surprise of the week was the release of the Lightroom 3 Beta. Get it here. Big deal: Speed! New Noise Reduction, New Import dialog, New Post-Crop.
• Learn more about the beta from a post last Thursday here.
• A look at the new Noise Reduction defaults.
• A nice poster template for those awesome landscape shots you should have taken.
• Another video look at the beta. And another here...
• Victoria Brampton looks at the new features. She’s also got a new book on the app that I’m looking at this week.
• Another “Moving from Aperture” article...
• Lightroom makes this author happy.
• Lightroom-blog.com has a nice “Alphabetic LIghtroom” look at keyboard shortcuts.
• Free cinematic presets (whatever that means to you) for Lightroom.
• Utah Valley photogs note: Scott Jarvie has a few Lightroom workshops going down
• A few more presets to make your Tuesday...
• Lexar & Adobe offer discounts on Lightroom.
• How to install presets.
• David Ziser has an interesting take on how to make Lightroom studio friendly

As you can see, its mostly LR3 Beta stuff. I’ve seen a few issues with the new app - mostly around importing files from a card with other files included in the mix (read movie files). So be careful. This is beta software.

Have a great Tuesday.

PS. Most of the PPE pictures shot in NY this week were run thru the beta, problems not withstanding.

Tags:Lightroom

PhotoPlus East, 2009 is history.

We had a great 3 days in the Smugbooth. I swear I talked non-stop for the entire time in the booth; I'm certainly capable of it, even if I grow increasingly less apt to do it. We met a billion people and had alot of fun chatting them up, talking about the biz and the things we can help them do. Overall, it was a great show and a wonderful event for SmugMug.

And, then it came to an end, so Chloe and I headed for the Metropolitain museum to have some fun.

Here are a few photos from our adventures...

Tags:Personal Work

A few issues I'm seeing with the Lightroom 3 Beta:

• Stalled imports. Sources tell me it might be tied to having .mov files from my 5D MKII on the card. Sometimes it stalls in the copy from card portion, sometimes in the render preview part. I end up having to do the copy to the HD first and then import as a work around.
• Some odd behavior with files just kinda dissapearing. Case in point:

Just a reminder that this is beta software people. Treat accordingly.

And if you do run into something, make sure Adobe knows about it.

The new Lighroom Beta 3 import dialog has a few improvements over the last.

The concept is something that I worked up a year or two ago for Lightroom 2 - the jist was that users were confused about the import process and to lay it out visually would improve the "big bump" in the learning curve for the product.

The big bump is the issue of people not groking where thier photos are being saved to. I've seen people save their imports to all manner of weird locations, and then get mad because they don't know where things are. I've seen people claim Lightroom is obfuscating stuff. I've even seen people claim LR imported stuff right to the trash and they've been the victim of a poorly designed product. I kid you not.

So the idea was to provide a nice overlay that would show point A (the CF card for exapmle), the process (copy, move, convert to DNG) and point B (the save location - i.e. my Drobo). This new dialog does this quite well - its much more explicit about where things are going if you are cognizant about things.

I'm iffy on the the tree explorer on the left - it just seems a bit overwhelming compared to the "choose" dialog we just had, but it does help visualize the where from a local drive. Jury out.

I do like that they do a better job of visualizing what won't be imported (a nice vignette gray out effect) on stuff that won't come over. And the coolest thing I've found so far is that LR will now move your .mov files from your video-enhanced camera, which rocks. One had to be very on top of moving video files because LR 2 just ignores them and you'd have to manually grab them yourself. That meant reinserting the card if it had been ejected and canceling the import dialog again in LR before digging them out of the CF card. Many a movie has probably been deleted when the photog forgot.

One minor nit: the "No preview available" tag for videos is hopefully a beta-isim - it needs a keyframe image of the video and some graphics to make sure people realize its a video.

I have not had time to see if the backup feature is the same, or if the've improved on it to mirror your choices for the primary import.

Finally, I'm also kinda confused why it has my local hard drive and my user directory listed out as peers in the destination tab when they're not. I'm assuming its for convieniece but it could be confusing.

The import presets feature? Not sure yet. Might be really useful, might never get used. Time will tell on this one.

PhotoPlus East Day 2 was just like day one. Our booth was mobbed. We gave out all our SmugMugPro bags and had to turn away quite a few dissapointed people. What I like about working in the SmugBooth is that one in 15 people are already customers who come to us and just say how happy they are to be our customers. Very few have complaints or requests - most just want to say Hi and that they love us. Its weird after fielding odd Acrobat complaints for years in the Adobe booth. And funnier yet, if someone asks what SmugMug is while our happy customer is there, they'll usually just jump in with praise and encouragment. I just have to stand their and smile.

Didn't get a chance to look around much yesterday. And our biggest diversion of the day was to get a 10 minute massage before heading back to the booth.

That was sure nice.

Tags:Lightroom

Today was day one of the big PhotoPlus East conference in the Javits Center. I walked the show floor for a few minutes, and here are a few observations...

• Overall the show floor is much smaller than in years past (expected), but there was a lot of people about. I wonder how attendance is going to compare.
• No Adobe booth. Weird. They had a tweet up this AM, but I didn't go. Ran into Melissa Gaul (nice seeing you!) and Kevin Connor at our booth though.
• Apple is again a no-show. Aperture certainly isn't the product Lightroom is, but it has some pluses and its sad to see it abandoned by Steve and Company. We did have one guy from Apple swing by today - someone from the video world. We're big on video these days, you know.
• The Oly Pen is kinda cool. I still need a point/shoot replacement for my Lumix LX-2.
• No Panasonic booth to oogle their new 4/3rds camera.
• I visited the Leica booth to manhandle the new M9. It was just as awesome as I'd expected and the new shutter is beyond heavenly. A slight click vs. the growl it is on the M8. Everything the original should have been. And full frame is nice. Lots to like here. But spendy. And the buffer is no better than the M8, which is a slight drag if you are used to a Canon DSLR with oodles.
• One lady came to the booth to complain about how Lightroom had "deleted her files". It was pretty annoying to sit there for 10 minutes while she told me all kinds of nonsense about what Lightroom did to her files from her Stockholm trip. What was I going to do besides say, "no, it isn't designed to import your files to the trash can" and "I recommend you don't import there". And I don't work for them anymore anyhow. Maybe the new import dialog will help her realize where her files are headed before she hits go.
• Less of those cheesy background vendors to kick around.
• We had some very chatty guy make us a sandwich today - it was actually not half bad.
• No really silly schwag so far - I was half expecting some "The Office" esque kleenex box shoes. ha ha. That would be cool.

So I was all excited to play with the LR3 beta, but had to run off to the Javits Center to do a day in the SmugMug booth.

The booth was mobbed. We gave out a heap of SmugMug bags, flyers and fielded a host of questions. The buzz on SmugMug is much higher this year, with most people having heard of us (having a silly name helps) even if they were unsure as to what we could do for them. So we gave them the 2 minute schpiel and sent them off happy.

We've partnered with Animoto, an online fusion/slideshow service that takes your photos/videos and makes them into a video presentation. Think slideshows plus some. Much like David Jay's Showit Web (anthother great SmugMug partner).

So when I got back to the hotel after a walk thru Times Square, I threw 9 images from today at both the LR3's slideshow and Animoto's tools. Exporting from LR and building an Animoto slideshow online take awhile to render, although I think Animoto was faster - and since it was already online - it skipped the "gotta upload it now" step I had to do with the LR sample. Oh, and LR had a Tango Uniform moment during the export. Doh! Repeat after me: Beta. Beta. Beta.

Here are the two, side by side:

Lightroom 3 Beta

Animoto

Verdict?

I think the LR3 beta has promise, but its really just a simple slideshow, which was fine, but somehow it really mangled the images. They are all unacceptably blurry, and I can assure you, they didn't start out that way. Hmmm. Odd. And playing on my machine, the Gradient BG wash was really blocky as well - it does not look as bad on the web - go figure. But it is free, and maybe it looks better at bigger sizes?

Animoto' s slideshow was more pizzazy, with lots of interesting transitions and the like. Its pretty cool for the minimal work that goes into it. Note: their default settings pace things ridiculously fast and you never get a real look at the pictures - a Ken Burns effect at warp speed isn't that useful. I ended up having to pay to get an extended credit (time to hit up the guys for a promo code). I didn't see a way to control which animations the use either. The second one I created did some that I'd probably opt out of. Seems a bit spendy for the commercial license too at $250 for a year. Ouch.

Tags:Personal Work

Adobe has released a Lightroom 3 beta this morning.

Here are some links:

• The official scoop.
• Where to get it.
• Terry White has a quick overview, with video.
• Matt K's coverage.
• NAPP has a new Learning Center for the beta.
• Sean McCormak has some coverage on the Lightroom-Blog.com
• Julianne Kost has some words on AdobeTV.
• Kelby Training has a course online already...
• Ian Lyons covers the new stuff.

Looks like they trimmed the names from 2 too...

Steen came home from bagpipe lessons last week pretty excited.

He had graduated to his first song. No more n00b stuff for him, now it was the real thing. His first song? Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Here he is playing said song (reluctantly I might add) the night before I hopped a plane to NY.

PS. Scales are for suckaz.

I'm always suprised at two things:

1) How much time traveling to the east coast eats up.
2) How runover I feel after sitting on an airplane for 5 hours.

I swear I feel like I didn't just arbitrarily jump those three hours and that I lived them in fast forward. Honestly, I think driving for 13 hours is less wearing on me (and I know, I do road trips of that distance all the time).

Anyhow, Chloe and I arrived in New York for PhotoPlus East tonight after an uneventful flight to Newark.

We endured the 50 min cab ride into the city and checked in and went out for a good meal. Feeling better.

To say my daughter is excited to be in New York is an understatement. She's tried to convince us that a performing arts school in NY would be the ultimate. Sorry, I'm not giving up this sweetheart for anything.

My daughter has been pining for a cello for at least a year. Yes, a cello.

Not sure how this became important, but once she gets a bug in her ear, it usually happens. That she gets from me.

Well, the waiting is over, and after going thru a roller-coaster trying to find a local store to rent one, we succeeded. Now it means we get to drive her and her massive cello to school at 6:30 several times a week.

Go Chloe!

Thank goodness it comes with rental insurance.

On another note, I’m getting on a plane for New York this AM. If you’re going to PhotoPlus East, drop by the SmugMug booth and say hello.

Tags:Personal Work

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday. W00t!

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, meus queridos.

• An older, but very useful look at Lightroom Catalogs.
• Rob Sylvan has a great article over at PhotoFocus.com entitled “10 Things I wish I could tell Every New Lightroom User”. Worth a read.
• This is one for the noobs: how to pull detail out of them thar shadows.
• Noob2:
• Just a reminder: Adobe’s Lightroom Help/Support pages have some good stuff
• Transferring projects from Aperture to Lightroom. (heh heh)
• A nice treatise on workflow from Eivind Birkedal over at Posterous.
• Vibrance is the new black. Yehaw!
• Itching to learn more about color? X-Rite has a free webinar for you...
• Matt K’s Lightroom Tip of the Day: The Missing Filter Options.
• Camera profiles can save beaucoup time. Here is a short screed on one photographer’s quest for Nikon camera profiles.
• Add drama with the Graduated Filter.
• Configuring external editors. There’s an increasing number of third party editors out there. Learn more.
• Exporting multiple photos directly to an email attachment is easy.
• Lightroom changed my photos on import and they now look blah! I get his question all the time. Here is how to address this.
• I found a nice sharpening tip for Canon 5D series cameras here in this discussion of post-processing workflow.
• X-Equals has posed some Lightroom speed tips. Open up that throttle!
• Scott Bourne, poster child for Aperture, has inflated the escape raft and is pointing it toward HMS Lightroom.
• Limping by with the trial version. Cheapest place to get the full version is Adorama at $250. Cheap for how much time it saves you.
• Untwisted Camera profiles. Not sure what that means? Then by the heavens, go educate yourself.
• More Lightroom Q&A from Matt K.
• Lightroom and pie charts? Yeah really. You know that metadata nerd in you is just dying for it.

Not Lightroom related, but worth a look...

• Vincent Laforet goes into some detail about his hands on with the new Canon 1D MK IV camera. With some video. And he hosts his good stuff on SmugMug.
• Run & Gun kit for your video DSLR.
• The Panasonic GF1 camera reviewed on TOP. Sweet pocket camera.
• New Canon 5D MKII firmware in the works...
• Chase Jarvis, seattle photog and guy behind the Best Camera iPhone app has a new book and contest.

Tags:Lightroom

Denver is high up there.

I spent a few days there and it was like fast forwarding my seasonal clock by a month or so.

When I left Washington, it was warm and sunny. The leaves had not even changed yet.

I get to Denver and it snows on us. Lots of cold and snow. I like a crisp morning as much as the next guy, but I have a hard time letting go of summer. Something about the warm sun on your face and all that...

So as I was leaving Denver last Sunday, I stopped to snap a few pictures of the fields near my friends place. It captured beautifully how it was feeling...

Here is a panorama of the same thing...

Love those wonky power lines...

Have a great day.


PS. Speaking of elevation, I was in Moab last weekend and did the trail enthusiastically called “The Whole Enchilada”. We started at 11,200 feet and rode 30 some miles back to the Colorado river at about 4200 feet. Hows that for elevation loss.

Tags:Personal Work

I was in Denver this past weekend visiting a friend.

As part of the festivities, we went up into the Ramparts and tried out his ghillie suit. What a hoot. I swear it took us like 20 minutes to find him on this round - and all this in less than a quarter acre of woods. You go Sean. Or should I say, Seal Team Six Sean.

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday. W00t!

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, meus queridos.

• Presets, Defaults and how to manage the two.
• SimpleScrapper talks presets. And provides some linky to some free/for pay presets.
• LR/Mogrify has been updated. Lots of cool new features methinks...
• Why is the histogram not the same in LR and PS?
• Stop mailing me full res images from your camera Uncle Bob. Seriously. Please. Or better yet, SmugMug them.
• High Key is Super Key in my book. Learn more...
• Got multiple catalogs that need some quality time together. Merge em...
• X-Equals has some great stuff on Best Practices for LR. Get all read-y with them...
• Image sequencing isn’t just for Nerdy McNerdison anymore.
• Watch an image unfold in LR with Tony Eckersley.
• Laura Shoe teaches you how to xxport to shiny, round discs.
• A review of LRKeys from LightroomSecrets.com. Some schwanky thing or other for speeding your KBSC-mojo.
• Vignettes (pronounced like Vigh-nettes, thankyouvermucy) are very cool.
• Lightroom Painter has some tricks up its, uh, not-real cannister of pressurized gas?

Not LR related, but cool...

• Nat Geo photog and friend Ira Block does some looking at the 7D. I chatted with him this past week and he was pretty excited about this new camera after hating on his 50D.

Thats it folks. Have a great Tuesday!

Tags:Lightroom

After sucessfully restoring my Drobo and all my files, I’m now going thru and cleaning up. Cruft happens, especially over years of archiving photos. It seems that no matter how methodological you are, you still end up with photos from December 12th, 2008 in the 2009 folder. A few here misplaced, a few there duplicated.

And it adds up to thousands of files, each taking 12-25 MB a pop, with the resulting crowding. Crowding isn’t good.

Oddly, I’ve also found a few .CR2 files with zero K sitting next to perfectly good DNG files in several folders. Not sure how that happened, but it looks like the DNG conversion didn’t chuck the CR2 files when done. Certainly makes clean up a bit harder than it needs to be.

I’m going thru each of my catalogs and making sure everything is organized properly. This means lots of “Find Missing Folder” and “Synchronize Folder” commands, but things are going well. Making that Folders pane look like it should takes a bit of work, but its worth it.

Finally, once that is all done, I’ll make sure that everything is converted to DNG, both to save space and be more archival for the long term.

So, in celebration of my house cleaning, here are a few tips/tutorials on how to do likewise:

• Synchronize Folders - The basics from Adobe, more detail from image-space.com
• Find Missing Folder - The basics from Adobe, more detail from PeachPit

So spend some time cleaning up your catalogs and archives. Backup, organize, connect missing stuff, convert to DNG, throw the bad away. Your hard drive will thank you.

My niece came to visit us yesterday morning. Her mom had put a bit of effort into her hair, and she was pretty proud of it.

Tags:Personal Work

Made it to the studio earlier this week to shoot some photographs of the dancers, so its time for Dance Friday.

Tags:Dance, Emerald Ballet Theatre

Welcome to October.

And what is on tap for this fine first day of October? I’m finally getting around to restoring my Drobo after a few weeks of limbo. Previously I’d talked about how my Snow Leopard install went Tango Uniform (yes, with capitals) and mucked up the permissions on all my drives. Yes, all of them. As in, no access for me. Not even if I said please.

The only way to get back was to back everything up and reformat each drive. Harrowing to say the least. Thank goodness ChronoSync was up to the job of getting stuff off the permissions-hobbled drives.

Last to get this treatment was my Drobo (which I often extoll in posts here) and it was mostly because its hard to find 4 TB of random space to backup onto. Well I finally did the shuffling necessary and now its restoring to its previous state. The one upside is that I could reformat the Drobo for 16 TB of potential storage instead of 2 TB (the previous limit) which was a real pain in the rear when adding bigger drives.

Whew. ChronoSync back on the job as we speak...

PS. Just took delivery of a new Macbook 15”. MobileMe and Time Machine sure take the chore out of introducing a new machine into your computo-ecosystem.

Tags:Nerdy