‘photography’ Category
National Zoo
Yesterday we spent the day at the National Zoo. It was a hotter day than expected, but we made it through almost all of the zoo. Most of the animals were pretty inactive because of the heat (can you blame them?) but we still got to see a wide variety of creatures, from the traditional lions, tigers, and bears, to aquatic life such as a large octopus, to small mammals, snakes, and lizards. Of course we also saw the Zoo’s main attraction, the two giant pandas on loan from China for 10 years, and their two year old son. It was nice to get out, see something new, and take some pictures for the day.
Managing photos with Lightroom
I’ve been using and writing computer software for 28 years, since I got my TRS-80 Model 1 in 6th grade, 1979. In all that time I don’t think I’ve ever been as impressed with a piece of software as I currently am with Adobe’s Lightroom.
What is Lightroom? Well, summarizing everything it does would probably take a week, but the short answer is that it’s a digital photo management system. It stores, organizes, and enables advanced editing of massive photo libraries.
When we got back from our recent cruise, I imported the 1,500 photos from the trip and Lightroom automatically organized them by date/time taken, lens used, focal length, f-stop, shutter speed, and every other setting recorded in the file by the camera. The “Library” module let me quickly scan through the pictures giving a 1-5 star rating to pictures I wanted to keep, and marking for deletion the ones that were no good. I could easily compare two similar pictures side-by-side to see which was better. It was trivial for me to add additional meta-data, such as the country, city, and location each photo was taken in, a caption describing the shot, and keywords identifying the contents of the picture (such as “Kathie”, “church”, “sunset”, etc.). Once the keywords are entered, I can just type “sunset” into the “Find” box and every sunset photo I’ve ever taken will show up.
Next I used the “Develop” module to make adjustments to many of the pictures. Typically I’d rotate the picture if it’s crooked, crop it to focus more on my subject, add sharpening, adjust the white balance, exposure, contrast, brightness, and similar settings. For some photos I created a black and white version of the original, and for good photos where something inappropriate snuck into the background (like another tourist, or a trashcan), I clicked on the offending object and Lightroom removed it for me. The most important aspect of developing digital photos in Lightroom is that the original photos are never modified. Instead, Lightroom creates a list of changes to apply to the original. After some simple developing, the list may read something like this: “Brightness +22; White Balance: 6500 degrees; Rotate 2.8 degrees clockwise.” You can even make multiple develop rulesets for each photo, perhaps one that turns the photo into a black and white, and one that crops close to one person in the photo. Since the original photos aren’t modified, when you are ready to print or upload (such as to this blog), you just “export” the photos you want. The selected develop settings are applied to a copy of the photo which is saved in your specified location. After printing or uploading, just delete the exported photo.
Since we’re talking about photography, and a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a few pictures demonstrating what I mean. Click on any picture for a larger version:
The “Develop” module is very powerful, and has saved some pictures I would have otherwise found to be useless. Here’s a couple before and after examples. The first is the inside of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. When I saw how dark the photo was, my first instinct was to delete it. However, a few exposure adjustments in Lightroom, and a beautiful picture emerged:
Another example is Michelangelo’s Pieta. Flash photography was not permitted inside St. Peter’s Basilica, and the statue was behind plexiglass due to a recent vandalism so a flash would not have helped anyway. I forgot to adjust my white-balance for the dim incandescent lighting in the church, so my original picture came out all yellow. After adjusting the white-balance and a few other settings, the statue in the picture looked just like it did in person. I also cropped off the sides of the picture, making the marble statue much more the focus of the photo:
After all that, the reason I’m so impressed with Lightroom isn’t because of what it does. It’s because of how easy it makes it. I’ve played with programs like Photoshop, which can be so intimidating that users get discouraged by it. Or programs that are over-simplified and don’t have the power needed to make them useful. Lightroom just works. Its user-interface is probably the smoothest, cleanest I’ve used, and it’s easy to start using the software without having to know how to use all the advanced features. The only downside is that it’s a fairly expensive purchase, unless you happen to qualify for the 66% educational discount. But when considered alongside other camera add-ons (lenses, flashes, etc.), I’d say this adds at least as much value to my growing “photography kit” and I am glad I chose to buy Lightroom instead of an external flash or wide-angle lens.
The rest of the photos
Well, if you’re still here, congratulations for making it through (or deleting without reading) our little vacation story! It was a great trip, and writing about it helped us appreciate it even more.
I’ve finally finished going through the 1,500 pictures we took on vacation, touching up a lot of them to improve the color balance or exposure, or to edit out an offending light pole. I was able to throw away almost half, leaving around 800 photos in my album. A sampling of the better photos was included in the blog, but the rest of the pictures are now in our gallery. Check ’em out!
Deported
Got my port removed yesterday — woo hoo! Have a bunch of stitches and a big nasty tender bruise where it used to be, but it’s a small price to pay to be rid of it. Since there’s not much more to say about it than that, instead here’s a recent photo of our front garden. I’m still enjoying the new camera, but have a lot more to learn about photography and taking good photos.
Photography fun
Last week I bought a new camera, a Nikon D40 digital SLR. I’ve been interested in photography for a while, and was hoping that our fairly new point-n-shoot Panasonic DMC-FX01 would satisfy my needs, but an SLR has a lot more to offer. This is a pretty entry-level and low-cost SLR but has earned some extremely good reviews. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it and the 18-55mm lens (27-82mm equivalent in traditional 35mm cameras) for the past week, and today I ordered a 55-200mm (82-300mm equiv.) telephoto lens to provide some more zoom range.
I’ve mainly just been playing around with the camera so far, but I’ve started collecting some of the better photos in a new D40 album in our photo gallery. I’ll include a couple of them here. Of course, the main reason for getting a new camera is so I can take even better pictures during our upcoming cruise of the Mediterranean. More news on that coming soon!
The last photo news is that I’ve also started tagging all the photos in our gallery with keywords describing what’s in the photo (things like “sheba”, or “buildings”, or “scenery”), and by visiting the gallery’s tag cloud, you can see virtual albums containing just the photos matching each tag (in other words, click on “sheba” to see all the pictures that have Sheba in them, no matter which album they are in). I’ve been tagging my all time favorite photos with the “favorites” keyword, so it’s easy to view my favorite photos from all our albums and vacations in the same place.
