Andrew Macpherson

Just bought Lightroom, at a very nice NAPP member discount, for the job it’s meant to do — Digital Asset Management. With over 20k photos things were getting out of hand, but I was seriously horrified to realise how lax I had become WRT tagging the photos.  Over 12k had no keywords.  Another job to keep one amused for a while, and keywording from a structured keyword dictionary is slightly slicker  in Lightroom compared with Bridge, as Lr will bring up a list of the matching targets, while Bridge obliges one to “Find next”

The first infuriating thing I’ve found with Lightroom is that I can’t Geotag my photos once they’re loaded into Lr.  With Bridge, I would use a combination of GPSPhotoLinker which matches the timestamp against a GPS track to locate my photos or, when I didn’t have the GPS with me, Geotagger to find the right spot on Google Earth.  Bridge would happily re-read the exif, or the xml sidecar whereas Lr really does not want to know. Guess geotagging comes first in the workflow, before import, what a PITA.

Also been watching Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski’s “100 Ways Lightroom KICKS Bridge’s @$$” which is very amusing, but reassuringly demonstrates that they’ve not been serious Bridge users for a while. It is a very good introduction to the useful features of Lr, and well wort a working through, and successfully makes the case for Lr as the tool of choice for photographers (I had to start Firefox for this though, it stuttered horribly in Safari here)

Photo Recipes Live

Just picked up some excellent training. This book and DVD takes the ‘How to get this photo’ chapters from Scott Kelby’s “Digital Photography” series to the next level, and is a great resource.

Photo Recipes Live: Part 2

The format is a slim book in the standard American size for technical books (ie slightly too wide for speed reading) with a dust jacket comprising the DVD box.  The book is held in by spots of clear easily peeled sticky, which I immediately removed to avoid it setting hard over the next few years — there is no reason to suppose that the basic techniques explained are going to go out of date, even if the details of the equipment used, and the processing do change with technology.

The same remarks apply to the sequel .  Click on either image to go to Amazon in a new window.

Sometimes one gets so used to doing things one way, one forgets the old methods.  For instance I’m so used to using the crop tool in photoshop, that I had forgotten that Image > crop will crop round whatever is selected.  A cool tip reminded me of that by selecting 2 separated items, and then cropping, the image was left with those at the edges.

Saved a lot of messing about getting the edges aligned

No; not a golf course.

The Design Centre, Uslington

Scott Kelby’s tour “Photoshop for Digital Photographers” was in London yesterday, and it was a marathon production for Scott, who not only presented all day, but stayed in place during the breaks to answer everyone’s questions.  He also announced that as he had no flight to catch last night, so he was staying put to make sure that no-one went home with unanswered questions.  What a guy! (continue reading…)

Well not really, but opening packages feels somewhat like that.  The day started well with UPS arriving with a small box containing my f1.4 50mm lens back from repair.   The focusing USM, and it’s controller had both had to be replaced.  One doesn’t think one will miss it — but having to fall back to an f2.8 zoom you realise why the initial expenditure on the fast lens was worthwhile.

Then the postman came.  I have been looking forward to getting Scott Kelby’s CS5 for digital photographers, and here it is — in time to read before Scott’s seminar in Islington.

Now what am I going to play with first

Just spent an hour going through an excellent HDR Tutorial from the travel photography blog Stuck in Customs by Trey Ratcliff.  It merges nicely in one spot the various tips I’ve been picking up round the net, and adds in some new to me packages (Topaz Art springs to mind) to help finish the pictures.

He has discount codes for one to use on most of the software he’s promoting (Topaz, Photomatix, Nik and more), so the site is probably worth visiting just to check out his reviews if you’re considering buying one, and pick up the codes if you’re convinced to buy.