Category Archives: Photography

Posts regarding photography and related topics.

Photo of the Month – April

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Hi Folks:

Something a little different for April’s photo of the month post.  We’ve had this little cough syrup bottle kicking around for a while now – after it had been emptied I washed it out, removed the label and started using it to grow a stem of bamboo.  Since the bottle had water in it and was sitting on a sunny windowsill I became intrigued by the raised Chinese characters on the side of the bottle so I invested a little time one afternoon making some exposures of the jar.  This one’s my favourite:

Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa cough syrup bottle

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Minimum Handheld Shutter Speed

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Hi Folks:

A friend recently asked me about the minimum handheld shutter speed for cropped sensor cameras; the old adage for 35mm cameras was known as ‘1/focal length’ and he was wondering if he should apply a 1.6 crop factor for a cropped sensor.  I saved my reply and thought I’d post it here… Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – Fun With Mirrors

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Hi Folks:

This being April 1, I thought the image below would be appropriate for the photo of the month for March.  Back in the film days I used to do things like create photo montages by sandwiching two slides together into a single frame, but when I first got into graphics programs (CorelDraw 3) I started being more creative with a few of my images.  One technique is to take an image, cut it in half either horizontally or vertically, take one half and mirror it, then stick the two halves together again.  The results are always unknown and often unexpected.  I did a blog post a while back on ‘Making Mirror Images With Lightroom‘ that showed one way of making such images while making them look realistic at the same time but ‘realism’ isn’t always a necessary goal. Continue Reading →

Lightroom’s Crop Tool: Aspect Ratio and Image Size

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Hi Folks:

I recently answered a question for someone on Twitter about using the Crop Tool in Lightroom so I thought I’d embellish that a little bit and post it here as well…

There are two related issues here, so let’s forget about computers for a moment and deal with paper. If you have a sheet of paper that 1″x1″, that’s a specific size. A sheet of paper that’s 4″x4″ is also a specific size, but they both have the same aspect ratio (1:1). Similarly, a sheet that’s 4″x5″ and a sheet that’s 8″x10″ have the same aspect ratio but obviously one is four times the size of the other. Now, if you have a print that’s 8″x12″ and you cut two inches off the long edge to create an 8×10 you’ve both created a specific size and cropped it to a specific aspect ratio. Continue Reading →

Lightroom, Geolocation and .GPX files

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UPDATE: December 12, 2018:

As of November 30, if you have any version of Lr older than Lr 8 CC, the Maps module will no longer work. As I understand it, Google updated their API key and Adobe had already claimed it would no longer support older versions. So, if you’re renting Lr via subscription, run the updater and it should be all good. If you have a standalone version of Lr, all is not lost. Jeffrey Friedl has a plugin for Lr that enables geolocation support and is much more powerful than the Lr Map module was anyway. More here:

Jeffrey’s “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

Welcome to our first blog post about Lightroom 4! (LR 4 Beta at this point).  A number of tutorials and videos are already available about the new features of LR 4; you can find several of them on our ‘Lightroom Links‘ page.  One of the new features in Lightroom 4 is the ‘Map’ module, and if your computer is connected to the internet the Map module will connect with Google Earth, read each image’s metadata and overlay a map of the earth (or portion thereof) with the location where your images were made.  It’s not a feature I’ll likely use much, but I can see its use in certain applications. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – January

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Hi Folks:

Well, my first photo of the month post for 2012, and also my first image posted here that was processed with Lightroom 4 Beta.  Marcia and I were ‘up island’ briefly in Campbell River this past month, and took the opportunity to go for a short walk along the shore at Willow Point.  The tide was out and some of the rocks that were revealed were incredible.  I liked this one in particular.  This is an HDR image, 3 exposures at -1/0/+1, shot hand-held and joined together with Autopano Pro then finished off in Lightroom.  I trust you like it!!

Rocky Shore

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Lightroom, File Management and Metadata

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Hi Folks:

This has been covered before on other sites (and to some extent on ours), but since I recently explained all of this to someone on Twitter I thought I’d take what I wrote then and massage it into some form of post for our blog.

To begin with we need to cover a few terms. One is that, as I mentioned in our Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…? post, a digital image isn’t really an ‘image’ in the traditional sense. It starts as light, gets converted into electrical impulses by the camera’s sensor, and is then translated into binary code – 1s and 0s – as a digital file. Be that as it may, there are two aspects to each digital image. One is the image information itself – the code that is assembled to create the image on your computer screen or as a print, and the other is information about the image. This starts in the camera and can include the camera make/model/serial number, the exposure information, date and time of the image capture, the lens, focal length (for zoom lenses), GPS information and more. When the image is transferred to the computer one can add copyright information, keywords, owner contact information… All of this is collectively called ‘metadata’. This metadata is stored in one of two ways, depending on the type of digital image you’re working with. For .TIF, .PSD, .JPG and .DNG files, the metadata is stored within the image file itself. For raw images, a second file, often called a ‘sidecar’ file is generated. Sidecar files have an .XMP extension. Therefore, for a Canon raw file for example, one would have IMG0001.cr2 for the image data, and IMG0001.xmp for the metadata information.

Continue Reading →

2012 Photo Calendars

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Hi Folks:

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

Fixed the link – December 4, 2012 – my apologies!

While there are usually several templates made every year to make photo calendars in Lightroom, (with many thanks to their respective providers, you can find one here, one here, one here, one here, a Photoshop script here, and while not a template, Matt Kloskowski has a video on using downloaded calendar images in Lightroom here (corrected the link, December 20).  NB: He begins in Photoshop, but you can do most of what he does straight in Lightroom.  I’ll add more links as I come across them)  last year I created a template in MS Word that allowed people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars.  Thought I’d do the same again this year.  I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file.  Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this: Continue Reading →

Understanding Criticism

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Hi Folks:

This is going to be a very short (for me) post, and is really just a pointer to some excellent articles written by someone else.  Photographer Alain Briot recently wrote a series of three articles for the Luminous Landscape, and while they’re primarily written for the understanding of photographers, I think the points Alain makes have a broader reference to the criticisms we all deal with in our daily life.

You can find them here:

Understanding Criticism, Part 1: The Many Faces of Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 2: Responding to Criticism
Understanding Criticism, Part 3: A few words on perseverance

Okay, that’s it for now!

Hugs,
Mike.

(See, I told you it was going to be short… 😉 )

Import/ Export Tips for Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

One thing I see frequently on Twitter is that someone has decided to import or export a large number of images and is then distraught about how long this particular process is taking.  There can be many reasons for this; some of them you can change, and some you can’t but I thought I’d put together a few tips.  These have been cobbled together from both my own experience and from a number of other sites, so my thanks to those others!

Update, February 19, 2014.  We’ve added a new post called ‘Getting Images Out of Lightroom‘ that covers exporting images in great detail.  This post is still valuable for tips for importing images.  Also, remember to check out our ‘The Many Faces of Lightroom Presets: The Import and Library Modules‘ for more tips on setting up import presets.

Continue Reading →