Tag Archives: Lightroom

Snapseed for Cell Phone Photography

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Hi Folks:

There’s a saying among photographers that the best camera is the one you have with you in the moment.  To that end, both Marcia and I prize our Android-based cell phones, and Marcia especially has a certain notoriety among our photo group for her landscape and macro cell phone photography.  We’re not personally fans of the ‘retro’ look offered by programs like Instagram, and although we do use Camera360 Ultimate on both of our phones, most of the time we shoot the images as ‘unprocessed’ as possible and do post-processing work in Lightroom.  There are times, however, when one simply wants to be able to make and share an image without having to run it through a computer first.  Enter ‘Snapseed‘, from Nik Software. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – Ocean Waves

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Hi Folks:

I didn’t do a lot of photography this past month, but did escape down to the shore for a bit one afternoon. I love the endless patterns in the way the water meets the shore, and have photographed it with varying degrees of success. Today’s ‘photo of the month’ is one of these but processed a bit differently. Rather than trying to illustrate the water itself I played with the colours and contrast in Lightroom, adding a blue split tone value to the highlights to render an abstract image of swirls and shapes. Could be water… could be marble… could be…? I trust you’ll enjoy it.

Swirls

Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

S.O.O.C. (straight out of camera)

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Hi Folks:

This is a short (for me) and somewhat tongue-in-cheek rant because I always find it amusing when I see people post images they’ve made on the various social networking sites, along with comments that say, “No Lightroom!  No Aperture!  No Photoshop!  No iPhoto! No _____!” as if it’s a badge of honour they THEY do not stoop to post-processing their images.  I find it funny because it’s also completely false.

“The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth” ~ Richard Avedon

Continue Reading →

2013 Photo Calendars

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Hi Folks:

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

If you’re looking for templates for Lightroom/Photoshop, please see the bottom of this post.

As I’ve done for the past two years, I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars.  There are usually a number of people who generate templates for Lightroom/ Photoshop as well, and while I haven’t yet encountered any this year, I’ll add them to this post when I find some.  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 →

Photo of the Month – A Return to Film

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Hi Folks:  According to Wikipedia, it was 120 years ago (1892) that George Eastman first began supplying Thomas Edison and William Dickson with 35mm film for their movie projectors.  Film was around before that, of course, but in a variety of sizes and feeding systems; 35mm film became a standard in 1909, and in 1934 the 35mm film cassette for still photography was introduced.

So, in honour of 120 years a group of us met on a rainy afternoon in November at Ross Bay Cemetery to celebrate a (temporary?) return to film and to the days of B&W.  Some had never shot film before, for some it took a while to remember how to work a film-advance lever, and for others film is still in daily use.  For the most part there was no autofocus, no LCD screens (“you have to look through the little viewfinder there”), and no ‘instant’ results.  Those who had film cameras brought them, and those who didn’t were welcome to bring some film and borrow a camera from someone else.  I brought six cameras (five 35mm and one double lens reflex) and loaned out three.  For those who just can’t get into film, they were welcome to bring their digital cameras and there wasn’t a bucket of tar nor a bag of feathers anywhere about.  More on that in a bit.  Overall it was a lot of fun.  Continue Reading →

More on Lightroom and Metadata

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Hi Folks:

Someone on Twitter recently asked about understanding Lightroom’s various metadata fields.  I responded by providing a link to our Lightroom, File Management and Metadata post.  She wrote back and basically said, ‘Thanks for the information, but what I really want to know is what all of those fields are for…”  So I wrote the following.  She seemed to appreciate it, and I thought it might be of use to you as well. Continue Reading →

The ‘Orton Effect’ in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

As with many photographers, almost from the time I started making photographs I also began playing with them.  For negatives this involved darkroom work, with slide film I would try mounting two images in the same frame, but all of this became a lot easier when I got into digital processing.

In Lightroom 2 (I think), Adobe introduced the ‘negative clarity’ slider, and while it was fun to use on its own, one day I wondered what would happen if I made a virtual copy of an image, overexposed both the original and the VC slightly (dual mounting slides in the same frame holder made the overall image darker), and applied negative clarity to one, then combined them using the LR/Enfuse plugin.  The result was this: Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – July

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Hi Folks:

End of the month again, and that means it’s time for my favourite image made in the past month.  This month is a little different because the image of choice was sort of a collaborative effort between three people: Marcia, Freeman Patterson, and me.  Granted, my input was limited and Freeman Patterson’s was purely inspirational, because this is Marcia’s image, made with her cell phone camera.  For some inexplicable reason Marcia doesn’t share my fascination with f/stops, ISO and shutter speeds, but she has a very good eye.  To that end, I borrowed a copy of Freeman Patterson’s “Photography and the Art of Seeing” from the library for her.  It remains one of my favourite photography books of all time, and it’s now one Marcia appreciates too.  It’s changed the way she looks at the image in her viewfinder.  As I said, she has a good eye.

This image was taken at the rose garden at the Empress Hotel here in Victoria.  You can see some more images of Marcia’s, made the same day, here: Empress Rose Garden.

Ladybug

Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

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 →

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 →