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.

Yesterday, while waiting fro UPS to arrive with my new iPad I tweeted “What App will I buy first?.” It’s probably interesting to the App authors/sponsors both what the priority was, and also where I went to validate my choices.

By far the coolest review site is Terry White’s Best App Site and his associated Technology Blog in which he writes clearly about what he finds useful, sufficiently so that one can readily decide whether his needs match the problem one wants to solve, or if necessary move on and continue looking.

As it turns out, the first app was not one I selected, but rather an Apple-sponsored upgrade as they start moving toward IOS5 — the iBooks app.  However I did spend some money at the App store yesterday, in order:

1. Prompt (ssh terminal)
2. Air Display (uses the iPad screen as a second monitor)
3. On-One Camera Remote HD — remote camera trigger with BIG review
4. Snapseed for iPad (How cool is this photo editing?)
5. Kelbytraining.com playback app
6. Rich Sammon’s Light It

If I  hadn’t already bought it, Easy Release (as recommended by Alamy) would have been #3, as it was, I simply had to load it from iTunes.

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)

It’s really nice that so many people share their thoughts on a regular basis, and only fair that they should get some idea of where their traffic is coming from.  As a reader I’m getting massively fed up with failing to read the blogs on blogspot whose RSS feed comes through feedproxy:

Feedproxy out to lunch 40% of the time

often one can wait 2 minutes and click refresh and the redirect comes through, but I wonder how many false impressions are being recorded, and worse, how many readers are being turned off?

That’s why I run WordPress directly, and offer it to OA5‘s web hosting customers.

On Monday I took some time out to go to Focus on Imaging at the NEC in Birmingham.  This year we got away in good time, and arrived before the halls opened at 10am.

One of the highlights was meeting Dave Cross, Photoshop guru from NAPP who was demonstrating on the onOne booth.  A truly charming person, and if you don’t know of him look at the “Ask Dave” and “Photoshop User TV” podcasts from Kelby TV He started the show with a demonstration of the onOne iPad camera remote control app, and an explanation of how useful this is to the single handed photographer, before he went on to introduce more of the onOne suite.

A big surprise was the absence of Canon but that had been pre-nnounced, and really odd was the apparent absence of Nik Software as their website was advertising Focus — if they were there I neither saw them, nor found them in the show guide.

Sony had various entertainers — contortionists, gymnasts, jugglers — to give you something to photograph, and FJ Westcott were demonstrating their continuous lighting with the aid of a mini studio complete with beautiful model, and a competition for the most interesting shot.

Continuous Light Temptress

The entries have to be added to their Flickr group by April 1^st and there is a restricted model release, for personal, portfolio, and educational purposes only.

Otherwise the show was interesting, some things one carefully averted ones eyes from (eg Phase One) others were very useful (Lion Picture Framing).  As always it’s important to go to these things with complete research if one plans to buy, including checking whether what one wants will be available. Nomad print boxes for instance only had their heavy-duty cases at the show, so I wasn’t able to save on the simple storage versions, unfortunately the extra cost of the rugged version which they had brought to sell was more than the postage cost.

A big benefit of going on Monday was that the show floor was not too busy, and it was possible to talk with the various suppliers, avoiding the crush of the weekend crowd and the bargain-hunting frenzy of the final day.

App store search for photography

After this morning’s update of Snow Leopard I have a new icon in the dock toolbar.  It’s Apple trying to sell stuff, using the downloadable App model that has been so successful on the iPhone/Touch/Pad.

There seem to be some significant savings vs store-bought discs for the same products, eg Aperture at £45 is about 1/3 the usual price, and I’ll be pointing this out at the Camera Club, but overwhelmingly the stock on offer is not useful to me just now, and could do with a 3 line description — more than just an icon, app-title and category — to answer the question “What will this let me do?”

I think I’ll be removing it from the dock, but it will be interesting to see if Adobe’s prices for Lightroom respond to Apple’s price-drop