Kittitas Sunset Over the Oats

Here is a series of photos I shot in Kittitas this summer. Kittitas is the epitome of rolling hills and wind-swept prairie. I shot it with a slower shutter speed and from a tripod to emphasize the movement. My Nikon D60 captured the oats as they flowed in the breeze. In Lightroom I did something I seldom do which is to reduce the Clarity of an image below a value of 0. Clarity values below 0 create an edge softening effect reminiscent of old large format board cameras.

Fall EWU Photo Walk

I shot this on a photo walk last week. It is of an architectural element of the University Recreation Center at EWU. I used Lightroom 2 to pull out a more punchy, dynamic exposure. The cranked Saturation and Vibrance make this pop.



Here's a shot of Showalter Hall. I love the way a 17mm lens distorts the perspective.



Here's a shot of Patterson Hall. The oak trees turn a nice orange color in the fall. The 80mm lens setting forces the background nicely out of focus.

FamCam

Here is my favorite frame from I shoot I had today at the University. It was titled "FamCam" and is intended to be a photo message home to family and friends of students living at EWU. I used my favorite Balcar Mini Z1 with and umbrella until the wind knocked the thing over and damaged the brella. Hence this was shot with a bare bulb. I processed it in Lightroom 2. I didn't have to do much editing as the exposure was pretty decent from the camera.

Fitness Center

This is one of my favorite frames from a recent shoot I did at the Fitness Center at EWU. Using Lightroom 2, I color balanced the light and reshaped the tone curve to give it a more industrial look.

Turkeys

Here's a shot I took in the spring of 2008. The exposure was terrible. The white balance was shifted extremely pink. I used Lightroom 2 to pull a reasonable exposure. I cranked the vibrance up to pull some richness in the colors. I love what vibrance does to polarized windows, it turns them a beautiful shade of teal blue. It was exciting seeing wild turkeys foraging around on the front lawn of Showalter Hall.

From Lightroom to flickr by Magic

I was given a link to this great Lightroom 2 plugin by a good friend that throws me tidbits of social networking goodness occasionally. This plugin allows you to export directly to your authenticated flickr account. It is truly a timesaver.



This talented programmer is living in Japan. His name is Jeffrey Friedl. After downloading and installing the plugin I was having trouble with it enabling. I sent him a bug alert and he emailed me with a fix within a few hours. Great customer service for a guy that was just demo'ing his plugin.

The plugin basically puts the functionality of flickr into the export section of Lightroom. You can not only upload the exported media to flickr but you can click about a million option boxes to totally optimize the way your media is handled by flickr. You can put your photo in a preexisting set or create a new one. You can send the photo to a group photo pool. You can specify the level of permission the photo gets and then send a tweet about it.

I love it when software goes above and beyond by not only giving me what I want, but giving me 100 extra things that will give me new ideas for working. That's what makes great software. Check him out .

The Two Towers

Here's another frame from my winter vacation to Cannon Beach. Check out my Landscapes set to see other shots like these.

Metadata in Bridge

Adobe Bridge CS3 is a great tool for browsing photos, videos, and documents, but it really excels at is metadata editing. Metadata is the extra stuff, besides actual picture data, that can accompany a digital photograph. There are two classes of metadata within Bridge: EXIF and IPTC Core.

EXIF is fixed, uneditable data that comes directly from your camera. It contains a host of cool information about the focal length of the lens, the shutter speed, the ISO and metering amongst others. One of the more Big Brother-esque bits of data is that it records the camera's serial number, so if you sent your product registration into Nikon, they now know every time you post a picture to flickr. Spooky.

IPTC Core are editable values that can contain information about the photographer, the copyright status and location of the shoot. The most interesting values that can be input are the title, description and tags. When you information in these fields magic happens when you upload them to flickr. These metadadata fields propagate themselves to the same fields in flickr. So by entering this important data in Bridge, you have the information for your own back up plus you don't have to reenter it when you post it to flickr. The data is pretty durable also. I uploaded a photo to flickr, downloaded it to another computer, uploaded it to Picasa and all the metadata came with it. It was awesome.

Careful Browsing: Finder vs. Bridge

Attention graphic designers! All is not what it appears to be. I had this problem come up yesterday at work. A designer in my department came into my office to see a preview of the latest photos I shot for a new marketing campaign. I put the images in the photo archive on the shared server and he went back to his cubicle. He IM'ed me a few moments later stating that he didn't see the color correction to the DNG files on his machine.

It turns out that he was using the Finder in MacOSX Jaguar to browse the photos. Apple has done some pretty good work in enabling their Finder to view camera RAW files, which is far better than Microsoft. But it doesn't apply the Develop settings embedded in the metadata to the preview. Hence when he views the files with the Finder the photos don't look color corrected. After I told him to try Adobe Bridge the color corrections showed on his previews.

The moral of this story is to always browse photos in Bridge and not the Finder.

Saving Lightroom Edits to Metadata

Lightroom is a great tool for digitally developing photos. It does what Adobe Bridge, DNG Convertor and Camera Raw 4.0 do in one easy package. The problem is that it doesn't do what Bridge does well... namely working with metadata. When you change metadata in Bridge such as a keyword or a develop setting the changes are saved to the DNG file automatically. In Light room the metadata may be saved to the Library, but not to the metadata. So when you make the perfect crop and white balance adjustment in Lightroom those changes will not appear in Bridge. You have to save the settings in Lightroom manually using the ctrl-s keystroke as it does not exist in the Edit tab.

Also another note: if you are in the Develop module you can only save the metadata of one file at a time, even if you select all. I found that if you jump back to the Library module, select all then save, all of your files will be updated.