Category: Photography

Adobe Lightroom

Adobe has released it’s new application Lightroom today. In their own words:

New Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is the perfect complement to Adobe Photoshop. Use Lightroom to import, manage, adjust, and present large volumes of digital photographs, and use Photoshop to more thoroughly refine individual images.

Together, Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop work the way the digital photographer works, letting you efficiently and seamlessly process all of your digital images. The picture is complete.

I’m definitely looking forward to this once I can squeeze it into the budget. This looks like “the” application for processing workflow for me, sort of a unification of all the types of tools that I would use in any normal circumstance. All else, I would defer to Laura’s exceptional Photoshop skills.

And I’m Cold Again

After returning from our vacation where it was 85 to 90 degrees all week long, we are now back in Virginia. This morning, I was anxious to ride my bike into work… that is until I realized it was 37 degrees outside.

Well, I still got on the bike and the ride was mostly pleasant. Of course, my fingers began to freeze about 30 minutes into the ride, but that’s normal for this temperature. This evening, though, the ride home should be much warmer – more like 60 degrees. PERFECT riding weather.

And now that I’m back, I have a lot of photo processing to do… again.

Happy Thanksgiving from Curaçao

Laura and I have “finished” our scheduled dives in our package, but I think I’ll be headed to the shore for another this morning. We were able to sleep a little later than ususal this morning and I’m feeling well-rested.

I’ve been having trouble with the camera [the Canon S80] working as I had intended. It has trouble focusing – or I have trouble getting it to stay in focus while drifing around underwater. We have a few pictures, but not as many as I would like. I realize now that if I intend to get serious about underwater photography, I will have to go with an underwater SLR housing and strobe kit – to the tune of many thousands of dollars. Maybe that will have to wait. The least that I’ll have to do to get things to where I want them is get a large external srobe for the S80. That will help things a little, but not too terribly much. I’ll just have to buy with “upgrade” capabilities in mind, so that if I get a housing for one of the digital SLRs, I can use the strobe on it and not have to buy a new one. Looks like I’ll be saving for a couple more years…

Impending Diving

Soon, Laura and I will embark on the fifth sort-of-annual Thanksgiving day dive trip known to the world as Dive Turkey V. This year’s festivities will take place on the island of Curaçao. We had hoped that this year’s trip would include a broad range of friends and associates, but the attendance of this monuments event has dropped down to just two: Laura and I. This will be the last of the Dive Turkey events we take the onus to plan.

We have made our preparations and checked out our gear [in a swimming pool no less] and we have some new additions. First and foremost, we upgraded our previous underwater-capable camera from a 2mpx Canon A20 to a spiffy new 8mpx Canon S80. Now, we have two cameras [with underwater cases] that we can take down. That makes for a good backup. Second and … well, for me it is a tie on which is cooler… I got a new BC – a DiveRite TransPac harness with a RecWing bladder and other various and sundry accessories. This is a much more capable BC that will allow me to float in a different orientation than my previous one [and it won’t squeeze my chest when inflated]. I’m hoping it will be better for photography. It will certainly be better when I do more technical diving, such as caving [which is a long way off, probably] since I would only need to buy a few parts to make it capable of such things. Maybe I need to make another trip to that pool and check it out…

Laura has also had an upgrade with the purchase of a new dive travel bag. She can now spread out her gear into her own bag [which will ease the problem of weight restrictions that may occur on some trips – we had been sharing a single dive bag].

Organization!

While Laura is upstairs learning how best to organize her scrapbook supplies and such, I’m taking yet another stab at finishing organizing my pictures. I have still so many more to go, but I will eventually get them all in the proper place so that I can begin to tag and burn them to DVD. Yes, I actually already have them in two places, so they are backed-up to a point. But, I want an off-computer backup. That’s where the DVDs come in.

What I am doing with the pictures, though, is organizing by shoot. There are several rules I have come to apply to this process. 1) A shoot cannot be more than one day long. Say you have a trip and you take several days worth of photos. Each day would be at least its own shoot. 2) A shoot must have a common theme or location. So, in the trip example above, you went to Paris. You would have a “shoot” of the Eifel tower, and a “shoot” of the Louvre. 3) Sometimes, a shoot consists of one photo.

So, I am breaking up my shoots into years: 1998, 1999, etc. on up through 2006 so far [duh]. The most space is taken up by 2006 since I have the 5D pictures in there [13MB a piece]. New shoots are easier to organize. What’s taking so long are the old shoots. I had previously taken over 6,000 pictures. Most, I had organized into trips, some into days. However, I had another copy of these pictures organized by category: flowers, mountains, people, etc. These are taking quite a while to go through.

Back to work I go…

Deep Diving

Today we went diving… in a swimming pool! Yes, I know I said “Deep Diving” for the title, but this is in preparation for our dive trip to Curacao for Thanksgiving. The water was 69 degrees, but our gear all checked out and we felt comfortable, if not entirely warm. When we go, we’ll do the same thing again, but from the shore.

Now, we’ll have to start thinking about anything we need for the trip and might need to plan to buy… such as an underwater housing for our new [newish?] Canon S80. I’m so spoiled on my 5D, that going back to a pocket camera will be quite a stretch, even if only for underwater pictures.

More Photography

Today, Laura and I drove out to Richmond to take pictures of our friends’ daughter’s birthday party. It was our first “official” birthday party gig that we were asked to take pictures at – and we even brought some business cards so that the other parents could order prints of the pictures. I don’t expect to make money off this engagement really, but I wanted to build some solid experience. Plus, it helps build the portfolio.

The wedding we did last weekend really prepared me for this party – which was much easier. For our first time, I think we did great on the wedding and I have about 1000 or so pictures from that event to turn over to the main photographer [after I do my tweaks, of course…]