Category: Lightroom

More coffee Monday

Jason2 Comments

Judging from my soreness even today after a weekend of home improvement projects, I would imagine that tomorrow morning will be even more of the same – I will definitely be partaking of more than a few cups of joe to get me on my feet and functional.

I did take some time to do some cleanup work of the weekend on the photo gallery side of things for my website and the project side of things for the blog too though. The lucky readers (lucky possibly being a subjective term in this case) will get a sneak preview of my latest gallery addition as I ran out of time and do not have a link on the site to this yet (or the thumbnail for that matter).

On the blog maintenance, I’ve changed the notice for comments – apparently the spam flag was set a little too severely as people were making comments and it was taking up to a month in some cases before those got discovered and re-tagged. So, your comments should become visible much more quickly now. With that in mind, I thought I’d also share the latest photo gallery that I am putting up on my website with those of you who are tuning in, so now you can comment more easily! Last but not least, I had mentioned an article that was forthcoming both in the video tutorial last week, and in another one of the posts. Well, after going through several re-writes and different takes on it, I’ve decided not to publish that, as it’s just to dense of a topic for a short listen or read. If anyone is interested in it though, the subject is creative development.

I looked at an essay that came out in the most recent issue of Shutterbug Magazine, where Jack Hollingsworth looks at how photographers develop their in the essay The Ladder: In Defense of Imitation . He defines 3 stages or phases of development: imaginative, adaptive, and innovative. While both interesting and logical, it raises more questions than it answers. I found myself in similar shoes when trying to address just a few of those questions ir raised in my mind – more questions, practically all of which were subjective in nature. So, the article will likely not see the light of day here at CB. If anyone is interested in a heavy read, let me know via email and I’ll be happy to forward a copy of that article to whomever requests it directly.

That said, the blog was not a good place for it, so I discarded the idea for CB and went with the photo montage. A sneak peak was done a few weeks ago, and it’s now complete. Visit my photo site for the full gallery here

Hope everyone’s weekends were good ones. Here’s to a new week – happy shooting, and watch that ISO!

Back to Basics – Rule of Thirds Grid

Jason3 Comments

After I recorded and started production on this tutorial my mind began to remember that perhaps I had covered this subject before. I reviewed the subjects I have posted over at the Tutorial Resource Center and did not see it covered there, so figure I am not repeating some tutorial I have already done. Having said that, this is kind of a return to the basics. Continue reading “Back to Basics – Rule of Thirds Grid” →

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Geographic Composition

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Jason Moore has a weekly feature on his blog, titled Geographic Composition. I was invited to join in that weekly activity, and am honored to do so. This week, my first in participating, the theme is “Yellow.” Stop over to Jason’s blog to see the entire grouping of shots…

Triumph Motorcycle

In other news, the TOP test will be officially moving to within the domain for Canon Blogger this evening. With the migration comes a new portal so you can take tests of different difficulties. The Basic Photography test is the one that has been out and in place for about a month now. The next test, nearing completion, is the Intermediate Test. Questions are more difficult, and should challenge you in new ways, including evaluating actual pictures! I am still working on some questions for it, so it’s not completely finished, but I will likely have at least a partial version available for beta testing, so more on that tomorrow once the migration is done (including a link to the new URL).

Finally, the photo shoot from last week has been assembled into a gallery of images and published on my photography site. Stop over there to take a look at the featured pictures. It was a lot of fun and the kids were really great to work with!

Not much other news, so until tomorrow, happy shooting and watch those apertures! 🙂

Workflow – ACR vs DNG which way to go?

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Recently two of the blogs that I read brought some meaningful insight on individual work flow perspectives. The first was Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider, where he had a few people criticize his critique of camera raw in Photoshop CS3, Lightroom, and Bridge. It was a pretty good and informative post, but a select few saw that as an opportunity to say that he was not giving Apple’s Aperture a fair shake. He actually replied to the comments (which he normally doesn’t do), and with quite an effective argument. This was quite the departure from his normal style, where he has just a few things to say and they are punctuated by pictures, as he likes the visual aids. The ultimate point though, was that Scott is very much a fan of the Adobe Camera Raw in his work flow and post processing of prints.

The other was Mike Johnston’s The Online Photographer. TOP is a great blog if you like to read, but is not very often written with the visual learner or “reader” in mind. The post that struck me was Mike’s Friday post, where he espouses “What to Buy” and his thoughts on the DNG format. While quite interesting, it’s not exactly in keeping with my thoughts on post processing.

Since I am more of an ACR guy than a DNG guy, it’s really going to be beside the point to discuss my feelings on work flow and post processing. Instead I am goig to take a different tack here and say that work flow is really up o whatever works best for the individual. I know some people that go with open sourced options like GIMP, and that is equally viable if the results are acceptable to the photographer. It’s ultimately a matter of this – opinion!

All of this brings me to my final point, and that is really about the nature of blogging itself. Blogging, as much as we like to think otherwise at times, is just our personal opinions. I think sometimes we get wrapped up in promoting certain ends, and I am equally guilty of that here at CB – I promote my own photography, ideals that I believe in, and software and hardware that I use. Nevertheless, it is, after all, just my opinion.

So, partly in response to those that started giving Scott K. a hard time, and in defense of Mike’s DNG work flow with the Pentax – lest we begin to take ourselves or others begin to take us too seriously, we are all just promoting our own opinions on subjects related to photography. It’s definitely useful though as different thoughts and opinions and ideas are what inspires each and every one of us to new levels of creativity and original thoughts. So, my hats off to all the blogging world, but this weekend, most especially to Scott K. and Mike J. for being on the leading edge of the topical content for photography.

In closing, I’d like to open the comment section up for others to share their thoughts and opinions on work flow, and blogging in general if you like. What work flow style do you prefer? Do you act on the recommendations of fellow bloggers, fellow photographers, or on other resources? Don’t forget to get out and shoot too though, so happy shooting and watch those apertures!

In the spirit of keeping things light-heartedly, and as a “make-up” for the short post yesterday, here’s the weekly best from What the Duck!

What the DUck - Friday, April 25th

A marriage made in Heaven – FTP and Raw

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Yes, that’s right, I am taking a pretty drastic departure from the alliterative titles for posts, but today the two topical subjects are so widely divergent, the title seemed rather amusing. As most of my readership knows, I have been working for some time no on a variety of articles discussing how to create and publish your photos in an online web gallery. For those of you that missed the first few articles, check out the first two articles here and here. Well, today is the unveiling of the 3rd chapter – FTP software. I give a short comparative explanation of a few interface options for both Mac and Windows. That article will be downloadable at the end of the post.

For the other half of the post today, I’d actually like to give some kudos to Scott Kelby over on his blog Photoshop Insider, where he gives an excellent summary of the differences between how Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) functions in Photoshop versus Bridge and versus Lightroom. I know quite a few people (myself included at least initially when LR first came out) had some trouble grasping the differences between each of these uses, and Scott really gives an good post on clarifying this. Plus, it’s Scott Kelby, so there’s always some humor thrown in for good measure! Check it out when you have a minute.

We’re probably not going to get the needed count of 100 votes in the poll for this cycle, but if you haven’t yet, register your category today (see right hand panel for options). I’ll hopefully have a more thought-provoking poll available in May. I’m sure there’s more news to report, but what with getting the photo site (www.jasons-photography.com) more inline and presentable, as well as getting some actual business cards made up and starting to advertise and promote things, I’ve not read much on the web lately. For a good web resource on many of the latest happenings, stop over at Jason D. Moore’s site. He gives an excellent wrap-up every Monday, and has links to a lot of the more popular blogs and photo outlets on the net. He’s linked on the side panel too as I am a member of his blogroll (I actually had the honor of helping out and sitting in on a weekly P&P a week or so ago… *waves to Jason in case he’s reading*…)

Finally today, an amusing shot of the dog from messing around with ambient light earlier today on our afternoon walk (and I am starting to include larger sized images to share so if you click on the pic, be prepared for a pretty large image (1023×646):

maggie.jpg

So, with an article, a web link and a potd, I bid all the reading and viewing audience a good evening and wish you happy shooting tomorrow. Remember to watch those apertures! 😉

Wednesday’s Webinar

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Okay, it’s not really a webinar, it’s a tutorial, but since I usually publish the tuts on Tuesdays, I had to come up with a clever name for the post title, and webinar was the best I could think of…it’s corny, but what the heck.

This week, the final installment of creating web galleries using different applications. Previously, I had looked at how to create web galleries using both Photoshop and Lightroom, and discussed some of the basics involved there, as well as some of the pros and cons of each. In this third and final segment, I look at an open-sourced option called Jalbum. This actually turned out to be a really cool application with some features built in that just made me say “Now hey, that’s cool!” For starters, you can add a comments section for your photos – great if you want to get a dialog going. You can also include a shopping cart and a link to a paypal site for people to not only check off what they want to purchase, but also complete the transaction. Very slick and clever implementation here. I wish the folks at Adobe had thought to incorporate this sort of feature in Lightroom – I can’t imagine a professional photographer not wanting to sell their work, so am wondering why Adobe seems to have missed the boat on this one. Perhaps when LR 2.0 comes out of beta, this will be an incorporated feature. (Is anyone at Adobe watching?)

After watching the video, you should bounce back here to the blog, so please feel free to share your comments on the video. Did you like it? Was there anything I missed that you would like to see? Too much material, not enough? Did I talk too fast? Let me know if you have software or applications you would like to see featured as I can usually find a trial version or something to go over some of the basics. Comments section or email, as always are encouraged. We’ve also only got two weeks left in the camera quantity poll, so don’t forget to vote!

Anyway, enough teasing and hinting of what’s to come…I bid you adieu and happy shooting until next week as I give you the full tutorial on creating web galleries with JAlbum! (don’t forget to watch those apertures…)

View Jalbum tutorial online (flash-based)

Creating Web Galleries using Lightroom

Jason2 Comments

As Photoshop World is starting tomorrow, I imagine most are watching the pros blogs to see what news, events, and info is forthcoming from that semi-annual event. Something tells me I will be ponying up the $500 to go to the September one in Vegas. (Benefits of NAPP membership notwithstanding…) In looking at the classes that they are offering for this Spring I guess two things caught me as surprising – first that there are so MANY classes to choose from. In a way a lot of options is a good thing, but it also has downsides. The upside is there are lots of choices. The downside is that sometimes the subject matter is so compartmentalized, you really have to pick a path and stick with it. In other words, if you pick one subject, you are also conversely choosing not to go to other subject matter. Case in point, I would like to have seen Painting With Photoshop by Bert Monroy on day one, but that conflicted with the Top 10 Photoshop Techniques by Matt K. – and since very few classes are repeated, there’s no chance to catch the other class later during the event.

In light of that – one small suggestion for future shows (like anyone is even listening to me)… offer fewer classes but repeat them more – that way you give everyone a chance to see everything. I realize it sounds kinda cheap, but for the price tag of entry, I really would rather get to learn from everyone rather than 3 or 4 instructors only.

The other thing that surprised me is that the head honcho himself, Scott Kelby, is teaching very little this go around. One of the things that has made Scott so endearing to so many is his supremely effective teaching style. yet for this Spring ’08 show, he’s only teaching three classes (and one of them is basically his 7-point system which can be gotten from Amazon for a mere fraction of the cost for Photoshop World entry. I’d rather spend my time learning stuff I can’t get from a book. As kind of the “front man” for NAPP, Photoshop World, and leading pitchman for Adobe products, it would have been nicer to see more classes with him up front. Maybe that will change for Fall ’08.

Although I should also note that Scott just busted up his leg the other day, so is heading out on crutches, and that may have mandated some scheduling changes. He is also delivering the keynote speech, which I am sure took a great deal of time to prepare, so there are possible mitigating circumstances involved with his decreased participation in the instruction. Since I hopefully will have saved enough to go to the Fall ’08 one in Vegas, I’ll look forward to seeing if he’s doing more instruction.

In other, more directly related news to Canon Blogger, I’ve finished the tutorial for this week a little early, so will post it here now. Last week I went over some of the basics of how to create a web gallery using teh automated feature of Photoshop CS3. This week, I look at another product in the Adobe family – Lightroom. Setup and generation is pretty quick and easy, just a couple pointers on what to avoid and precautions to take in putting everything together, from both the perspective of the photographer and the viewer. A little shorter than last weeks tutorial, but still hopefully useful. The flash version is linked, and the Quicktime version is attached for those tuning in via feeds, iTunes, and with iPods.

Web Galleries II (Lightroom)

Happy shooting and watch those apertures! For those going to Photoshop World, have a blast!