Greeting Cards

Hi Folks:

As often happens with our posts, this one begins with a seemingly unrelated mish-mash of ideas that will hopefully find some confluence by the time I’m finished writing (and Marcia’s had a a chance to proofread it).  We’ll see!

To start with, today is Marcia’s Dad’s birthday.  He’s 90 years young today, and although he may not be quite as spry as he was in 1933 for example, he’s still quite vivacious and certainly not done with life!

The next thread in this post is our friend Bob.  Bob is an photographer.  An analog photographer.  Yes, that means he uses film.  He’s not adverse to digital and he does scan his work when required, but he’s in love with printing, with the feel of a photographic print.  While 99% or more of images today are seen on some form of electronic device, Bob maintains that there’s there’s something lacking in not being able to hold a print in your hands, feel the texture of the paper, to hold something ‘real’.  I don’t print much of my work, but I agree with him.  I read a post recently about another photographer, David Duchemin, who makes prints of some of his recent work and then leaves them for others to find.  He leaves them in coffee shops, on benches, wherever, and he has no knowledge or control of what happens to them after he walks away.  That, however, is the whole point, and I like the idea so much I’ve been giving serious thought to adopting it. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month: Triptychs Revisited

Hi Folks:

For this month’s Photo of the Month’ post I thought I’d combine a Lightroom tutorial as well.  In the past we’d done blog posts on making diptychs and triptychs in Lightroom and on creating mirror images in Lightroom; this post combines both of those ideas.  So, we’ll start with the final image and then go back to the beginning:

Nature's Sonograph

Nature’s Sonograph

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Photo of the Month – May

Hi Folks:

We’re featuring one of Marcia’s flower images as our ‘Photo of the Month’ for May.  While Marcia doesn’t share Mike’s passion for f/stops, shutter speeds and the like, she has great fun making images with her Android-enabled cell phone camera.  We both do.  Almost all of our cell phone images are made using the Camera 360 software, as ‘undeveloped’ as possible, and then brought into Lightroom for final editing.  This is Marcia’s favourite image of those she made in May.  Victoria is known as the ‘City of Gardens’, and walking anywhere in Victoria for most of the year is an open invitation to stop and photograph the wonder! Continue Reading →

Flowers for Mother’s Day

Hi Folks:

We started this project by making a photo book for our mothers for Mother’s Day.  Marcia’s mom is no longer with us, but wherever she is now, we trust she appreciates it!  Mike’s mom is still here, so this is dedicated to her and to all of the other Mothers out there today (including Marcia!)

We made this book in Lightroom 4, using images made by both Marcia and Mike.  Thanks also to ‘The Board of Wisdom‘ for providing the quotes for us!  If you click on the image below it will open the e-book as a .pdf file.  We trust you’ll enjoy it!

Flowers for Mother's Day

Hugs,
M&M

Photo of the Month – Oncoming Storm

Hi Folks:

This image was made on April 7, down at Clover Point and looking back toward Victoria. I was out for a walk that day without my camera, but the wind was really blowing and the clouds were just incredible so I made a number of images using my cell phone camera. It was blowing so hard I had to lean against lamp posts and the like to hold the camera steady, but I think the results in this image at least were worth it. This is a six-image panorama, stitched together in Autopano Pro and pushed around some in Lightroom. This is the first image I’ve posted that was processed in Lightroom 5 Beta (some great new features, BTW – can hardly wait for the final product!).

Oncoming Storm

Oncoming Storm

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Adobe DNG Converter

Hi Folks:

This was planned as a fairly short blog post (for me), but it didn’t work out that way.  It describes an experiment that I thought would work, and it does.  Before we get started we need to iron out a few terms.  A ‘RAW’ file in the world of digital photography is essentially the raw data from the camera sensor.  In order to be able to see that raw file as an image, it needs to be run through some software called a raw converter.  Don’t worry, we’re not going to be throwing around terms like linear demosaicing here – suffice it to say that the raw converter takes the original image data and massages it into an RGB image that looks like a photograph.  Now, one of the challenges for people that make raw converter software (ACDSee, Adobe Camera Raw/ Lightroom, Apple Aperture, Bibble, Capture One from Phase One, etc) is that camera companies regularly put out new camera models and these same companies seem to take great delight in creating new, proprietary raw formats for each camera they release.  In response, the software companies need to regularly release updates to their software that include these new camera profiles.  Going from Lightroom 3.x to Lightroom 4.x for example is a software upgrade and includes a number of new features.  Going from Lightroom 4.3 to 4.4 includes some bug fixes and updates, but it also includes profiles for two dozen new cameras.

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Using Lightroom’s Filter Bar

Hi Folks:

Last month we did a series of posts on “The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets“, but there is one other area in Lightroom where you can create presets that we set aside because it deserves its own space.  That’s the Filter Bar.  As seen below, you’ll find the filter bar in the Library module at the top of the screen.  If you can’t see the filter bar, press the backspace ( \ ) key to reveal it.  One aspect of the filter bar connects to the Library module’s toolbar options; if you don’t see the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, press the ‘T’ key.  Together they look like this:

Filter Bar and Toolbar

Filter Bar and Toolbar

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Photo of the Month – Cathedral Grove

Hi Folks:

March has been a busy month for us, but we did take one day toward the end of the month and head ‘up island’ to Cathedral Grove.  A part of MacMillan Provincial Park, Cathedral Grove has been ‘gentrified’ to provide easy access to a stand of several-hudred-year-old Douglas fir and cedar trees.  Unfortunately many of the trees are suffering from root rot/fungal infection, and a heavy wind can bring down a rain of branches.  Fortunately for us, on the day we were there we had sunshine (it only rained while we were driving), little wind, and not many other people.  I made over 400 images that day, almost all of them for HDR/panoramic images, and collapsed that number down into less than fifty composites.  I’ve joined them all up but have yet to push them around in Lightroom.  I do have a couple, however, and thought I’d share them here.  Both are 3-shot bracketed exposures (HDR, at +1/0/-1) and converted to B&W in Lightroom.

The Sentinel

The Sentinel

Ancient Watchers

Ancient Watchers

Okay, that’s it.  Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Photo of the Month – February

Hi Folks:

Here we are, with the first week of March come and gone already and we have yet to do a ‘Photo of the Month’ post for February!  Egads!!  I do have something to share with you, but it has less to do with a particular photograph and more to do with the way it was processed.  The image below is one I captured using my cell phone camera – nothing new there – but it was also processed in the phone using ‘Photoshop Touch‘ software for Android phones.  There are iPhone/iPad versions of the software as well as a version for Android tablets, but since my Samsung phone is what I have and use, I figured it was worth the $5 to give it a try. Continue Reading →

The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: Export Module

Hi Folks:

This is part 5 of a 5-part series on Lightroom presets. The segments are:

Export Module

Well, we’ve come full circle. Your images have been imported, selected, keyworded, marked, processed, output, etc. and none of them have been touched by Lightroom (except if you specifically instructed to delete images from the hard drive). The most common way of showing your images – whether in an online gallery like Flickr, Smugmug or 500px, on a site like Google+ or Facebook or simply on a flash drive or by e-mail is to export them from Lightroom. When you choose to export an image, Lightroom takes the initial information from the image file, applies the Develop settings and other changes you’ve made and creates a copy of each image that is then exported to an external plugin, a publish service, website, hard drive or e-mail location. While Photoshop has a facility to export multiple sizes of an image or image simultaneously, Lightroom does not. Lightroom does however allow you to create presets with various export options. Continue Reading →