Qantas Airbus A380 does a low pass over Sydney

…ruins it.

At least if you have created a watermark of sufficient boldness to defeat the various semi-skilled image thief’s which inhabit the world wide web as it exists today.  You only have to do a simple Google search to give an exhaustive list of tools and techniques to remove watermarks on images.

As RC Conception says in this guest blog post on Scott Kelby’s website:

The viewers eyes are now set to do the dance of “let me see what this picture COULD HAVE been provided this big symbol wasn’t in front of it”.

My simple copyright watermark, as in the image above would defeat nobody,  but I have now realized that there are better ways to assert your ownership of an image / deter Copyright Thieves:

• File name — A tip / directive from Peter Kroghs “The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers” was to include your name or moniker in your file name so that if you ship them to a client, or upload them someplace, there is still a simple and visible reference to you right there in the name.
• Metadata — I am already a metadata freak, and every one of my images contains my copyright statement and contact details, so anyone using Adobe Lightroom, Google Picasa, or even Windows 7 metadata will see all this information.
• Flickr Stats, Google Image Search, Tineye, and web server logs - Occasionally searching for references to your images using these tools can help you track down images thief’s.
• Fight Back Against Content Scraping — Got a great tip from this article on WordPress Security (Update: Original Source); a simple .htaccess rule can prevent any website other than yours from linking to your posted images:

RewriteEngine On
#Replace ?mysite.com/ with your blog url
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?mysite.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your "don't hotlink" image url
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

• Professional Image Tracking — A number of services have sprung up that attempt to digitally track your images such as Digimarc and ImageRights. They achieve this in different ways, Digimarc by embedding tracking information in each image file, and ImageRights by maintaining a database of your images and continuously searching the web for possible copies. Better still, ImageRights is after launching a free service protecting up to 10,000 images, check it out here!

Up to now, I have used my basic Copyright statement as a watermark on pretty much every image I uploaded to either Flickr or this website. this often resulted in some pretty ugly unintended effects such as on my home screen:

With all that said, and despite the low level of copyright theft that I experience, my new strategy for protecting my images will be as follows:

• Flickr, Facebook, DPReview, or any other public website will get a Watermark as follows:

© 2010 All Rights Reserved www.JonathanBourke.com

• On my own website, I will slowly replace all images with watermark free ones in order to present them in the best light possible. I will also register these images with ImageRights.

No Watermark is the New Watermark!

Now if only Adobe Lightroom 3 could output an “Export Package” containing all the required formats

Flickrs New Look

After the “War and Peace” like length of my last post on “Editing Canon EOS 7D Video with Premiere Pro”, I have taken a bit of a break. Here are some quick photography related links to distract while I craft my next masterpiece

• Lifehacker — How to record great video with your hd dslr camera. Some great tips on shooting video, including knowing which way your focus ring moves. Sounds simple, but you don’t have time to mess around with this when shooting video.
• ImpulseAdventure — Comparison of Digital Photo Catalog Software. After my brief reviews of DAM software such as Adobe Lightroom, I found this excellent (and massive) comparison table of pretty much every software product for digital asset management known to man.
• Finally, Flickr will shortly be introducing an exciting new look, as seen in the image at the head of this post. It also features a great “Dark” mode, seen below, something which many third party services had provided in the past. I use Flickr to showcase my images, it’s a great community, and I enjoy the feedback that an image or gallery on my website doesn’t necessarily receive.

The new Flickr “Dark” mode

Adobe Lightroom 2

In my previous post on Digital Asset Management, I briefly outlined some of the entry level contenders for DAM software such as Google Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Elements. In the rest of this series, I will look at some of the heavy weights, the professional asset management systems. I will start with the one I use most —  Adobe Lightroom. Not sure if this is a good idea as I it is the product that I am most intimate with, knowing its strengths and weaknesses. Let’s get started…

Adobe Lightroom is now the elephant in the room of DAM software. As John Nack (of Adobe) revealed a short while back, Adobe Lightroom pretty much owns the professional market, beating it’s next nearest competitor, Apple Aperture, by a considerable margin. I have been using it since the very early beta’s (and Pixmantic RawShooter before that, which Adobe bought to kick start Adobe Lightroom), and hopefully, am somewhat qualified to give you a non-professionals opinion.

Library / Catalog Tools:

This is the module of Lightroom where I spend 85%+ of my time. I am slowly working through my back catalog of images, and suffering from OCD as I do, I insist on all images being correctly located, named, tagged, etc. Lightroom is very strong here, having the ability to apply extensive keyword tag hierarchies to images. A strong file renaming engine, along with virtual collections (and collections of collections), and numerous methods of catagorizing images (by colour label, by star rating, and by Pick/Reject) are available. Apples’ Aperture was the first major DAM product to be announced in my memory, but immediately there was a lot of critism regarding it’s approach to asset management; namely migrating all managed images INTO it’s database, removing all external access. While this had it’s merits, Adobe chose to go another way, winning lots of friends in the process, allowing the Lightroom user to:

• Reference the image file from it’s existing location
• Manage the image file by copying it to a managed location, still on the file system and accessible from other tools (I will touch on this again at a later date).
• Manage the image file by moving it to a managed location.
• Manage the image file by converting it to Adobe’s open DNG RAW standard, and moving it to a managed location.

Image Editing:

The second major module with Adobe Lightroom is the develop module, which is where the real fun starts. Here is where you apply image adjustments such as exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation, and a host of other modifications. Version 1.0 of Lightroom restricted these adjustments to the whole of the image, requiring the use of Photoshop for more targeted adjustments such as removing blemishes, or other distractions. Thankfully with version 2, Adobe introduced the adjustment brush and other specific pixel level adjustment tools. Now you can remove spots and blemishes, smooth skin, whiten eyes and teeth, apply graduated filters as well as adjust other settings relating to the entire image. You still need Adobe Photoshop in order to perform more advanced adjustments such as panoramas, collages, HDR, or other major image surgery. I would recommend Martin Evenings’ book if you want to get best value out of the Develop module though…

Altering white balance in Adobe Lightroom

Exports / Sharing:

In some respects this is where Adobe Lightroom has lost ground on the competition, especially Apple Aperture. Out of the box, Lightroom can export images to disk, and to CDROM (not on 64 bit windows), as well as having modules to govern printing, creation of a web gallery, and a slideshow. Doesn’t sound to bad… but Facebook, Flickr, and other online resources are now becoming major marketing tools for photographers, and exporting directly to these locations is a capability now offered by some competitors. Another major gap was the ability to export to a Photo Book creation service. This capability may feel a little consumer orientated, but again, it is offered by Apple Aperture.  Yes, export plugins are available, and I use them myself; they are very capable, but the lack of a native ability to export to the major hosting sites feels like an omission.

The X Factor:

What do I mean by the X Factor? Basically, why would I buy this over a competing product when, on paper,  the competing product is more capable. And for Adobe Lightroom, the X Factor is this… community. Lightroom has a massive community around it, producing tutorials, presets, blogs, reviews, reports, etc. When you are getting started with a product as advanced as Lightroom, that really helps and can’t be overlooked.

Details:

• Link: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/
• Cost: US$ 229
• Platforms: Windows, Mac OSX
• Buy: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Jack L @ Dolans Warehouse

On October 17th, Jack L made a triumphant return with his new album “Burn On” to Dolans Warehouse in Limerick. Of course I was there to grab a few shots… While I took over 100 shots, I have whittled them down to a more manageable 20 or so. I particularly like the deep, low-key, blue man shots. Again, all shots were taken with a Canon EOS 20D with  50mm F1.4, mostly at either 800 or 1600 ISO. Check them out on Flickr, or click on the thumbnails below:

A great concert as always, all the more so when you see how much the band are enjoying themselves. They looked to be getting a real buzz from the crowd. That said, could the muppets who talk and make noise and show disrespect please fuck off! Why do ye bother going… at least ye eventually shut up when Jack came out on his own at the end to play “Rooftop Lullaby”. Also, Jack, consider this a standing request for:

• The Man Who Couldn’t Cry
• So Far Gone
• Don’t Fall In Love

Careful where you point that! Medieval jousting in Carcassonne, France

I just posted a new gallery on Flickr of some shots from our recent weekend away to Carcassonne in the South West of France.

I had been through Carcassonne Airport several times en route to Montpelier for work, but had never visited the city. After reading Kate Mosse’s “Labyrinth”, it was high on my list of places to visit. It has a lot of history, having being the centre of the Cathar religion, and it is blessed with the weather!

Some travel details:

1. We flew Shannon Carcassonne with Ryanair out on a Saturday and back on the following Monday. This went as smooth as ice. Many complain about Ryanair, but I find them fantastic, and long may they have a huge presence at Shannon Airport.
2. If you are only visiting Carcassonne and not the surrounding countryside, there is no need to worry about renting a car. Indeed, I have found that to be a trial at the airport there in the past. There is a bus just outside the tiny arrivals hall which does a circuit of the city and all the main hotels for €5 a head. Just let him know where you are going when you get on board.
3. We stayed at the Mercure Hotel, which is less than 100m from one of the main entrances to the medieval Château Comtal. As it was our wedding anniversary getaway, I ordered a bottle of Champagne, which the Hotel duly obliged. They were nearly embarrassed when letting me know the price… Let’s put it this way, I couldn’t buy in an off-license at home what they thought was expensive for Room Service in a Hotel in France.
4. We spent most of our time ambling around the Château Comtal, and took in the Medieval Jousting. That was great for photos, so don’t miss it.

On to the photos:

Is this my best photo?

Is this my best photo?

It is if you are to believe the hive mind of Flickr, but I am not sure. Rating your own photo’s, filtering out the good from the bad, is possibly the most difficult photographic skill in my opinion. Nowadays, with Digital Camera’s we can easily take more and more photo’s, we can store them, organise them, and manipulate them easier than ever. In order not to be overwhelmed (or to overwhelm others ) with this volume, we need to choose the best and discard the rest. Whittling them down to the best of the best is fraught with emotional baggage, what if’s, “I can fix that…”, and “safe it for later” moments. I really struggle with this, and I am guessing I am not alone…

There are many guides on how to use rating systems in Adobe Lightroom, Aperture, or whatever… but very few guide the aspiring photographer on how to apply ratings? What makes a one star, a two star, etc? Should it all just depend on technical merit, sharpness, exposure, etc. When do artistic considerations come into it? Rule of thirds, negative space… What about simple emotion? Does simple mathematics have any place? The definitive guide on managing and sorting “Digital Assets” is The DAM Book by Peter Krogh. This is an exceptional book which I would recommend to anyone wanting some pointers on everything from file naming schemes to backup strategies. In it, Peter takes a more commercial point of view to sorting the levels of ratings applied to his shots. What I find most helpful though is the mathematical approach which is built into his system. He suggests applying ratings in a semi fixed steps:

1. One star is what’s left when all technically deficient photo’s are deleted, i.e everything after the first pass
2. Approx. 10% of 1 star make it to this level, which are the better shots from a shoot
3. Again approx 10% of 2 stars make it to this level

And so on. Blogger, Fraser Spiers, has a less mathematical approach, focusing on whether he would share an image on Flickr or not. In his blog post on this topic, there were some very interesting comments from other readers.I think a combination of all these approaches works for me, using the descriptive definitions to decide which rating a photo gets, but with mathematical quotas to force decisions, with the emphasis on not awarding a higher ratings for the sake of it. As mentioned above, Peter Krogh with his huge commercial library goes with 1/10th of 1/10th of… etc. This would mean that I would have a single 5 star image in my library of over 10000 images. A bit extreme, so I will shoot for a 5 fold reduction at each level. With this approach, I am forced to get over myself and down select by a factor of 5 with each pass. My library of 10400 images would break down as follows:

Now for an example:

So how do I work with this in practice? Assuming a typical import of 100 photo’s, these are the editing passes I would make:

1. Import all related photo’s from cards. The Lightroom import dialog is imensely powerful, and after this step, you should be able to tick the following of the list:
   1. Copy to single directory in Lightroom Managed Photo’s
   2. Rename
   3. Convert to DNG
   4. Backup
   5. Apply basic Copyright and Metadata
   6. Apply initial keywords
   7. Generate 1:1 previews
2. Quickly scan through, removing rubbish, duplicates, blurry, etc. Mark as rejected using “X”, and then deleting. Assign all remaining 1 star, let’s assume it is 95, resulting in the following ratings: (*:95, **:0, ***:0, ****:0, *****:0).
3. Scan through again, stacking similar, or edits (shouldn’t be any at this stage), put best on top. Assign selects or those that might be ok with some processing, cropping a 2nd star, ratings are now: (*:76, **:19, ***:0, ****:0, *****:0).
4. Third pass, these are the photo’s good enough for Flickr / Sharing. Give them a 3rd star (*:76, **:15, ***:4, ****:0, *****:0).
5. Picks of the shoot, not picked immediately, but perhaps a reflection of views on Flickr — 4 star (*:76, **:15, ***:3, ****:1, *****:0).
6. After time, best of collection — 5 star