Andrew Macpherson

I very much like to GeoTag my photos, particularly Landscape and Street photography.  I’ve been a great fan of both GeoTagger and GPS Photolinker on the Mac.  The first links to a Google Earth plugin to find where you have placed location crosshairs, the second works with GPX track logs to work out where you were when you took a photo.  In both cases one has to get Lightroom to re-read the metadata for it to notice the location.

Lightroom 4 Beta has all this functionality built in to the Maps module, which is a big win, but ideally one should still carry a GPS device, such as a Garmin eTrex and download the tracks to synchronise with the photo timestamps.  Of course there is also the track data held inside one’s iPhone, but Apple have gone out of their way to make that difficult to access.

Enter GPX Master+ which uses your Dropbox account to synchronise track files to your computer from your iOS device, ready for import into Lightroom 4 (or GPSPhotoLinker) and just makes life that little bit easier.  Usual caveats about Battery drain apply, but if like me you have a car charger this is unlikely to be an issue.

Three weekends ago, just before I went off for an op, we had a stand at Hatfield Heath Festival to try to raise awareness of the club, and raise some cash for the projector fund.  I havn’t quite got round to writing about it, having been slightly distracted, so it’s time to make amends

Hatfield Heath Public Photoshoot, © 2011 Paul Lambert

Photo given to sitter as 6x4 print

The Saturday session was in direct competition with Bishop’s Stortford Carnival, where we also had a stand, so each event had one of the two print stands, usually used for print competitions

We had a selection of member’s prints for sale, both ones that had been in competition, and some framed or mounted specially for this event.  Mainly though the exercise was to engage potential members, and enthuse them to come along for a trial club evening, and I think we were moderately successful in that.

We were also offering free “Hollywood Look” 4×6 portrait, retouched with “Portrait Professional”  (continue reading…)

Lightroom is great, don’t get me wrong. This is about what’s missing or could be better.

Lightroom is slooow. Let’s be honest, Lr is a huge memory hog, and would benefit massively from being able to use a real database.

Lightroom does not know the difference between orientation and aspect ratio, it thinks that landscape, portrait and square are aspect ratios; ever tried to find your panoramas in Lightroom if you havn’t tagged them? As managing and sorting images is a major part of Lr’s remit this is a major failing.

If you use multiple machines it’s essential to write the metadata to the file or an xmp sidecar.

It’s nearly impossible to run Lr & Ps on a 4G MacBoook Pro at the same time

Just been trying a borrowed Eye-Fi card with a CF adapter in my Canon 5DII, to see if it would work.  My goodness it was so slow till I turned round to “point” the CF slot in the camera at the hub. then it speeded up to about 15 seconds per frame from having been taking minutes.

When I compare this with Canon’s EOS utility which takes about 3 seconds even on the end of a USB cable with a 5m regenerating extender, and you’ll see why I’m not rushing out to buy one.  The lack of wires would be nice, and I hope we’ll start seeing Bluetooth tethering in every new camera soon, but this is just too slow.

It’s nice to have downloaded an apparently working version of EOS utility (December update), but I would still advise setting “leave image on card” out of general paranoia, along with putting the camera into “one shot” drive mode, just to avoid overrunning the buffer.

I do like the Lr Watch folder feature to bring in the photos transferred on the tether, but found Lr’s built-in camera control less useful than I had hoped — I had been expecting something closer to On-1′s camera remote for iPhone and iPad, with pretty full control, rather than just the remote shutter trigger.

It’s all an issue because we’ll be doing event-style portraits to raise money for camera club funds at the Bishop’s Stortford Carnival on the 19^th. We need a new higher resolution projector, now that the competition resolution spec has improved.

This leads to a thought for the day: “HDTV” describes a comparison with what went before, not any sort of absolute quality.

Holiday Photo book

Inspired by Scott Kelby’s post on making soft-cover photo-books for each trip, I decided to follow suit and give iPhoto a go.  One swiftly discovered that he had upgraded iPhoto from the release that came with Snow Leopard to the new version from the App Store.

Scott’s video is great on showing the workflow of collecting the photos for the book in Lightroom, and exporting suitably sized finished JPEGs that will hold good for any book making project.  It’s worth calculating that your photos, especially that mega-panorama probably need restricted to approximately the pixels to fit vertically on the page (eg 8in x 300px/in) as that will immediately be ¼ the size (you do stitch portrait format shots don’t you?).

The iPhoto software / templates have a USP which it would be easy to overlook. Maps.  Lots of the layouts have a small map which you can annotate with your locations.  The other thing iPhoto does,which you have to work at with other book-publishing software is that it makes it very easy to span your photo across a double-page spread.

So why didn’t I go with iPhoto?  Well 2 reasons.

1. Taxes.  In Britain there is no tax on Books or printing (other than forms) Yet iPhoto proposed to charge me VAT at 20%
2. Flexibility.  I found the available layouts restricting.  I would have lived with this had it not been for the tax issue.

In terms of flexibility — I take lots of panoramas.  I also have a 1:2 portrait to landscape shooting ratio.  The templates are very much set up for standard landscape shots, and without the ability to add ones own.  This approach does have advantages in terms of ensuring that the book is well styled, but …

So I went back to Booksmart from Blurb

The Jacobite, fired and ready for off

Just back from one of those remarkable experiences, you know the sort, where you tell people what you’ve just done and the almost universal reaction is “Oh, I’ve been meaning to do that…” in this case it was a trip I arranged for my brother-in-law who is a great railway buff.  We took the steam train “The Jacobite” on an excursion from Fort William to Mallaig.  This is the Hogwarts Express run over Glenfinnan viaduct.

In fact a lot of the outdoors shooting for Harry Potter took place in Glenfinnan, and Alnwick castle (Hogwarts) was transposed from it’s rather flatter borders setting by the magic of post-production up to a promontory on the loch.  I got much fascinating detail from Robert Haining a National Trust for Scotland ranger.  NTS owns the Glenfinnan Monument to the 1645 rising.

Anyway here’s a slideshow: Jacobite Steam Trip (warning 120 Mb)