Photo of the Month – August

Hi Folks:

I’m still editing the images I made in August, but I’m far enough along now to pick a favourite.  This image actually relates to another blog post we have coming up called ‘Walking Victoria‘, but as I haven’t written it yet I thought I’d talk a bit about Lightroom presets instead.  There are presets in a number of different areas in Lightroom: import presets, metadata presets, print, slideshow and web templates for example, but for most people the word ‘preset’ in Lightroom refers to Develop presets.  Some people love them and others say they wouldn’t deign to use them, insisting that each image is unique and should be treated as such.  To each his or her own, as the case may be.  My position lies somewhere in the middle.  There are a number of websites that have presets for sale; personally I haven’t found the need to buy any.  There are other sites that offer presets for free, and I have downloaded and installed some of those.  I’ve also made some of my own.  Mostly I use presets as starting points for creative ideas, or for suggestions when I’m not sure how to present an image.  I almost never leave the image ‘as is’ when using a preset, but continue to build onto what the preset has to offer. Continue Reading →

2011 Photo Calendars

Hi Folks:

Update: If you’re looking for 2014 calendars, please click here.

As one year closes and another begins, a popular present this time of year is a calendar for the coming year.  One of the things on my ‘to do’ list this year was to create a set of background calendar templates that I could use with Lightroom to create a 2011 calendar.  Before I could get to them, however, John Murray was kind enough to create a set of .png files of his own and to make them available for download: 2011 calendar templates.  Thanks, John!  On his website, John suggests using the .png files with Lightroom’s ‘watermark’ feature in the Print module; I’ve always used them as a graphical identity plate, but either way works.

That done, I got to thinking about people who don’t have (gasp!) Lightroom or Photoshop or another equivalent software package, and that got me thinking about Microsoft Word.  I started with a letter-sized (8½” x 11″) page and set the margins to ½”, then created a table with 10 rows and 8 columns and added in the dates, like this (the outlines are there only to show the borders in this example):

Word table Continue Reading →