Category Archives: Photography

Posts regarding photography and related topics.

Collections in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

I’ve done a few tutorials on what I consider to be among the most important of Lightroom’s features – digital asset management (DAM), and how you can use the various options to help you organize your images.  Among the benefits are being able to find ONE image out of 10,000 or 100,000 or… Lightroom allows several different ways of classifying your images – folder structure (on your hard drive), keywords, colour labels, pick flags, metadata (capture date or camera serial number for example) and more, and the filter bar at the top of the Library module allows you to quickly highlight specific images based on these criteria.  However, there are times when one wants to create a, well, a ‘collection’ of images that share some theme or purpose from across different folders, either temporarily or permanently.  This is where Collections come in.  Lightroom works with two types of Collections – Standard Collections and Smart Collections, although the Standard Collections include one special variant called a ‘Quick Collection’ or ‘Target Collection’.  Because this post is going to be long I’ve broken it into three parts. One can read down or click on a specific section. Continue Reading →

100 Photos

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Hi Folks:

Rather than doing a ‘Photo of the Month’ post for May, I thought I’d profile someone else’s work instead.  Actually, a lot of someones.  A non-profit group in Sweden called ‘ADay.org‘ asked photographers around the world to make photographs on one day – May 15, 2012 – and upload them to the group’s website. Although a day is 24 hours, because of international time zones it actually worked out to a 48-hour period.  Each image had to fit into one of three categories: home, work or connections, and there were various sub-categories for each.  Each photographer was allowed to upload up to 10 images of his/her work.  All of the images will eventually be displayed on the group’s website, and selected images will be put together into a book.

All of the images are currently being gathered, organized, etc. and they’re expecting to launch their full website in June.  In the interim they’ve provided two links: 100 photos and 100 profiles.  The first link shows a selection of 100 images made that day and the second shows profiles of 100 of the photographers who submitted their work.  Clicking on an image will show a larger version, as well as the categories and description of the images (in one of a number of languages!)  Clicking on a profile will show the image(s) uploaded by that photographer and other relevant information.  Those who submitted work run the gamut from the very old to the very young, of every ethnicity, income bracket, etc.  And their images are all personal glimpses into the lives of these people.  People made photographs and described moments of birth, life, death, joy, sadness, work, play, religion, the environment, concerns… the entire panopoly of events, all happening (in the annals of time) more or less simultaneously.

We’ve looked at a number of the images and several of the profiles so far, and we’re amazed both at the diversity and the closeness of the subjects.  A little girl having breakfast in Portugal could be seated in the United States, and grandparents giving their grandson a bath in Japan could be doing the same in England.  It shows us how incredibly diverse we are, and also how much we all share the same hopes and dreams, the same caring for each other.

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. You can see our May 15th contributions here:

Marcia
Mike

Photography Apps for Android

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Hi Folks:

There are probably enough apps in the world today that if one were to compile a list it would rival the average encyclopaedia for size.  You do remember what an encyclopaedia looks like, don’t you?

I honestly have no idea how many Android apps are available for photographers, and I admit to using only a few of them myself, but I thought I’d start with a couple of suggestions and those who are interested can add their own recommendations in the comments.  I  prefer my digital images ‘uncooked’ so to speak so that I can use the processing power of my computer to tweak them rather than the processing power of my camera (or phone).  Even .jpg images can be processed better in Lightroom, so I tend to start with as few processing options in the camera as possible.  Making images with a cell phone camera poses its own challenges, in part because the files tend to be small, flat and low resolution.  Still, it’s the one ‘camera’ I have with me almost all the time, even when my camera is at home.  So, here are a few of the apps I appreciate (all available from the Google Play Store).  Some are free, and some are a few dollars.  Some offer both versions (with and without advertising). Continue Reading →

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 →