Super Moon Over Manly

Nearly forgot about this; so fired up the trusty Canon 7D @ ISO160 F11 with my 70-300mm IS onboard. It was pretty cloudy, but managed to grab a couple of shots.

The Clouds Begin To Roll In…

Sydney Skyline From North Head

As I mentioned I might, last Tuesday morning, with my tripod strapped to my bike, and my camera, lenses, and MacBook Air stuffed into a backpack, I headed up to North Head, Manly to shoot the passing of Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 and Queen Elizabeth as the passed into Sydney Harbour. Some things worked well, but I must admit that overall I came away disappointed with the fruits of my labours.

Into The Harbour 2

What Worked?

The MacBook Air is a great little machine for in the field tethered shooting. it’s 11.6″ screen was much more useful than my camera LCD for evaluating my images. And the very fact that they were going straight into Lightroom meant that I could sort, select, and edit on the run. If my 3G connection had been a little better, I would have been able to upload them here reasonably quickly as well. Much better than my normal delay between shoot, sort, and publish!

Live View on the Canon 7D is a great help for landscape photography, especially in the early morning light. I have always found it difficult to accurately focus due to the darkness, glasses, etc. but with Live View, I could zoom in 10x and set focus manually.

And I won’t bring a hot shoe mounted bubble level again; the electronic level in the 7D makes this redundant.

Mirror Lock Up is recommended for sharpest images, but when tethering, I found that I couldn’t correctly trigger the double shot from Lightroom. Perhaps I was doing something wrong? Either way, a simple solution was to set a 2 second delay timer, and then it worked fine while tethered.

A Crowded Sydney Harbour

Image Quality from the 7D at a range of ISO’s was pretty good, especially the extremely low light levels.

What Didn’t?

Taking photo’s of large cruise ships entering a harbour before dawn! I know that this was the entire purpose of the exercise, but I completely underestimated the speed at which these 100,000 ton mammoths move at, even in the confined waters between Sydney Heads. They were not the extremely slow, cautious giants I had assumed them to be. As a result, most of my shots of the ships are streaks of light, or hastily composed, refocused, recalculated, slightly less streaky streaks of light.

Queen Elizabeth Streaks In, Queen Mary 2 Waits…

The morning did brighten up eventually, but by that stage the ships were well into the inner harbour. So unless Canon releases a Speedlite with a power rating of 200, I think I will be staying in bed the next time these cruise ships call around…

My Mac!

This post has little to do with photography, but it perhaps does answer some of the most common questions I have heard at trade shows, in forums, and the like… What’s your setup? What do you use? Many will lament the complete lack of photographic merit in those questions, but as a tech head, I will indulge my inner geek.

I recently started reading a great set of interviews where IT personalities give an overview of the hardware and software they use personally called “The Setup”. I really love the format of these interviews, being very breezy, not getting bogged down in the details, while still providing some great insight, tips, and hints for helpful tools and software. I doubt I would ever be invited to feature in “The Setup” but I will try to write this post in the same style.

Who Are You And What Do You Do?

I am Jonathan Bourke, currently living in Sydney, Australia. By day, I am a corporate IT guy, but by night I dream of being a professional travel photographer. Some day…

What Hardware Are You Using And Why?

The title refers to my first real computing experience, editing a school magazine on an original Macintosh. About a year ago I went “back to the mac” from a hot and heavy 18.4″ Sony Vaio laptop to a 17″ Macbook Pro. I love it, the pure clean lines, the excellent battery life, and the lack of extraneous stickers! I have the matte screen, but I must admit, it’s not as good as the one on the Sony, which definitely had a wider gamut for photography. One unexpected benefit of the screen though, is its extra “depth”; the extra 200 or so pixels it has over the Sony are great in Lightroom or other full screen apps. The Sony also had a BluRay burner, but considering I never burned a single BluRay in it, or watched a full movie, I don’t miss it at all. At the time, I couldn’t stretch to an SSD, but I have just upgraded to a Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive, which has provided a bit of a boost when opening apps.

I still keep a Dell desktop as a media centre and as a backup destination using Crashplan. Despite my years in IT using many operating systems, I found the move to the Mac a little of a challenge. I really missed the Windows 7 snap to edge feature which I have since solved with Cinch. I continue to miss the global shortcut Windows Key — E to open an Explorer window, so if anyone knows of a way to implement that in Finder, please let me know!

I have Epson R1800 and Dell 3100cn printers and an Epson V700 scanner. Thankfully, all of which are fully supported under Mac OS X (although the Dell driver requires Rosetta).

What Software Are You Using?

My Applications Folder

I believe a lot of people have the perception that moving to the Mac means missing out on all the software that they already know and (perhaps) love.

Not so!

The majority of the software I used on Windows I also have for Mac, such as Microsoft Office 2011, which is such a major improvement on Office 2008 for a user migrating from Office on the PC, and Adobe Master Collection CS5, which is effectively identical. I have always used iTunes to manage my media; migrating this wasn’t child’s play, but help is available.

I use Lightroom 3 to manage my photo library, and this was a joy to migrate. Just download trial version from Adobe, use your existing serial, which is platform agnostic, open your migrated catalog, and reconnect missing photo’s by selecting the top-level folder of your Lightroom managed photos.

I have always used some excellent Open Source or freely available software, and most have versions for the MAC:

• VLC — for playing assorted media files
• HandBrake — for DVD ripping
• Google Chrome — I flip-flop between this and Safari, only for full screen view and the Omnibox
• Google Earth — well, for travelling the world
• Skype — for a long time the Mac version was much neater, better looking than the windows one
• Evernote — for general note taking / scans of documents, etc.
• Sun, now Oracle, VirtualBox — for when I want to test something out on another OS
• Tweetdeck — for Facebook / Twitter stuff

I have also discovered a thriving world of beautifully designed Mac specific software such as Skitch for screenshots, Tranmission for Bittorrent, CyberDuck for FTP, and Growl for system notifications.

I have never used Apple’s Time Machine, though it looks magnificent. I have been a Crashplan user for a while; It gives me continuous, automatic, block level, differential, deduplicated, versioned backups of all my photo’s, documents, movies, music, and everything else sent to an external disk, my Dell desktop, and a datacenter in the US. Takes some beating!

I love Mac OS X’s integration of mail, calendar, and contacts syncing either from MobileMe or GoogleApps. While there are those who complain about the native clients, I am quite happy with them. I am still looking for a good task management app; I would love to get OmniFocus or Things, but I just can’t justify their cost so I currently use Toodledo.com.

My main camera is a Canon EOS 7D, with Sigma 12–24, Canon 28–135, 50 F1.4, and 70–300 IS lenses, but I use the camera in my iPhone 4 surprisingly often.

What Would Your Dream Setup Be?

I love screen real-estate; you can’t have too many pixels! So the 27″ iMac or the Apple Display are very tempting. I would love to get one, a Bluetooth keyboard and magic trackpad, a BookArc from Twelve South to give me more of a desktop setup.

I would also need to look at some more external storage, preferably Firewire 800 (oh, how I would love that ThunderBolt port now!) for raw, in use movies and photo’s to live before being archived. As it is the internal drive on the MacBook Pro is nearly always at 80% full.

Two last things for the wish list:

• I always struggle with colour consistency from screen to print, so I would love a proper colour management system such as a Spyder3Studio SR or a ColorMunki Photo.
• Now that I am doing more localised adjustments in Ligthroom, a Wacom Tablet would be nice

The Original Image

A quick grab shot of my son in his buggy, looking a little less than pleased . This was taken with a Canon 7D @ ISO320, 50mm F2.5. Not a bad shot, but a little dull.

After Basic Adjustments

After importing into Adobe Lightroom 3, my initial goal is to arrive at the “best quality” photo. In this case I did the following:

1. Lens Profile — enabled lens profiles. As I used my favorite Canon EF 50mm F1.4, this did not make a major difference in this case.
2. Noise levels — Lightroom 3 has excellent noise removal tools, and this table for the Canon 7D from David Gold is a brilliant starting point.
3. Sharpening — I used David Gold’s suggested values again here.
4. White Balance — I can’t remember where I heard this tip, but taking a white balance from the white of an eye gives a pretty good result.
5. Exposure, Fill, Blacks — Pretty much the auto setting.

Crop, Adjustment Brush, and Lightroom Preset

Feeling creative, I said I would try for a wallpaper for my dual monitor setup at work, either in black & white or sepia:

1. Crop — The ratio required would be 3.2:1, and using the Rule of Thirds, I cropped so that the intersection was on Adam’s eye.
2. Adjustment Brush — Never tried this before, but setting up an adjustment brush of –4ev, –100% brightness is fantastic for “painting” out unwanted detail.
3. Lightroom Preset — Finally I simply applied the Color Creative — Color CP 3 preset. Love it.

The Final Result

Can A (Snow) Leopard Change It’s Spots?

Those few hardy souls following my Twitter stream must be wondering what’s going on with some bizarre posts. I have been working away with giving my website a fresh lick of paint, and testing the changes at www.jonathanbourke.ie. It’s coming along nicely, but it will be a few weeks yet. The new site, while looking similar to the existing site, will have a more consistent structure to it and will greatly ease gallery posting.

In the meantime, here are some interesting links I came across:

• How To Get The Best Colour Out Of Your Photos — Lifehacker again comes up with a great guide for photographers. This one is heavily color focused, and the Photoshop wizardry required.
• How to get (more) space in a newspaper — I follow the @adrianweckler on Twitter, editor of the consumer tech section in the Sunday Business Post newspaper in Ireland. He shares some great tips for PR people (and photographers) in this post bemoaning the quality of photo’s sent to journalists.
• Lightroom Camera Calibration — I spend way too much time on my photography tools, rather than using my photography tools. This post on Camera Calibration in Lightroom definitely falls into the first category, but what the hell, I’ll share this link from Matt Kloskowski anyway.
• What I’d Love to See in Lightroom 4 — Damn; and I am only getting started on Lightroom 3 (and the 3.2 release is nearly upon us, bringing with it direct posting to Facebook!). Scott Kelby gets the ball rolling with his wish list for Lightroom 4, then has to defend it, before others chime in with their suggestions.

Lightroom & WordPress user? Then check this out!

Getting my images from Lightroom to my website has always been a bit of an ordeal:

1. Select images and export from Lightroom to disk
2. Log into wordpress, and manage media
3. Upload new images, and dig around on your hard disk to find them
4. Create a new blog post, or page, or whatever, and then attach the images to them
5. …
6. Profit?

If this sounds like you, then you absolutely need this Adobe Lightroom Export plugin from Luc Renambot called “Dossier De Presse”. Read on for more details and a sample gallery.

There are a number of ways to upload photo’s from Lightroom to WordPress:

1. Create a web gallery within Lightroom and upload it using FTP to your website. Not exactly the neatest solution, although there are some impressive addin’s now available such as SlideShowPro
2. There is always my clumsy process of exporting jpegs to disk and then uploading to WordPress. This is rather time-consuming
3. Finally, I located a couple of Lightroom Export Plugins, which connect directly to WordPress from Lightroom:
   1. LR/Blog from Timothy Armes
   2. Dossier De Presse from Luc Renambot

The following photo’s (and the initial creation of this post) were all created by Luc’s Dossier De Presse Plugin. I haven’t had a chance to review all its options (I know it also creates NextGen Galleries), but I am impressed at how quick and easy it was to get this far… select images, export, done.

Next step is incorporating these images into a formated and structured gallery, rather than a post. Watch this space…

BTW: the photo’s are from around Sydney during the visit of my own parents, and in-laws.

This collection features images from the Vatican Museum, the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, St. Peters Basilica, and the Coliseum. If you are visiting Rome, here are some tips I would offer:

• Don’t fill everyday with museums and sightseeing. One of the best ways of getting under the skin of this city is sitting in cafes, or in a Piazza, and watching the world go by.
• Skip the restaurants on the Piazza’s, especially on the Piazza Novona and the Campo Di Fiori. While the food may be good, it will be overpriced. Search down the side streets for the small local trattorias where the locals go.
• Walk or use public transport. Rome is easy to get around by anything other than car!
• The Vatican museum is worth a full day on its own.
• A tripod will not be welcome in the Vatican, nor will you be able to take pictures in the Sistine Chapel (though many do).

While the gallery contains some of my favorite images, I have posted additional images in my Flickr Set.

All images taken with a Canon 20D, and post processed in Adobe Lightroom.

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

20 Years of Adobe Photoshop — But is it Still Relevant for Photographers?

That said, it really has been a phenomenon; so much so that it is often used as a verb:

That image looks photoshopped!

A result of that is that in popular culture it now stands for all that is wrong with magazine images of skinny models. It is accused of being complicated, difficult to learn and use, and extremely expensive. So much so that it must be one of the most pirated pieces of software on the internet.

Still amazing software though…