Today marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Capitol Dome in Washington, DC. I had no idea this milestone was this close, but I have been taking many photos of the building lately. There are plans to completely cover the dome with scaffolding for the next 2 years because of the deteriorating conditions of the structure.
A story published on CBS News’ 60 Minutes program last night had a lot more photography from inside the dome and flyovers above the building. I know that the time will pass quickly, but I want to get as many photos as I can before the dome is covered. These photos were from a recent walk on Capitol Hill in the early evening with the Fuji X100s. The camera continues to perform very well for me!
Being that scaffolding is planned for the dome, wedding photographers have posted their concerns about photos around the city for the next couple of years. Indeed, it will be another way to mark this time in DC history. Additionally it will be completed by the time we inaugurate the next president. Progress and democracy will keep rolling on in our city.
Adobe Lightroom is the best photo editing software available today. At this time it has support of all the major camera manufacturers and is best suited to handle professional RAW files from digital cameras. Many of my Tech Thursday articles have talked about working in the program, but I want to post today about the backend of working with Lightroom, specifically Catalogs. These are files that have the “.lrcat” extension. There are different strategies for working with these files, but I wanted to show you how I work with them to keep things organized, and to keep your hard work safe from potential data loss.
Catalogs in Lightroom
With this in mind, I create a new catalog file for every big event that I photograph. If it is a wedding, I will create a new catalog “brides_name__grooms_name.lrcat”, if it is a ballroom dance event, I will make a catalog “year_eventname.lrcat”. Afterwards, I will import only the files from each event into the catalogs, and work with them from there. There are some that will add every image from every shoot into one large catalog. With the metadata searching power of the Library, I can see the advantage of doing this. According to Adobe, there is no limit to the amount of photos you can have in one catalog – some have reported using catalogs with 800,000 images and more!
I separate my shoots into separate catalogs for 2 reasons. The first is that I have experienced catalog corruption when working with some Lightroom catalogs. In these cases, there was some data errors in the lrcat file which prevented the file from being opened! All of the edits from that event with ~1200 photos were lost, and had to be redone. What if that were to happen in a catalog with 800,000+ photos! From then on, I have clicked the “Automatically write changes into XMP” under Catalog Settings so that if a catalog was corrupted, the work would be saved in the XMP sidecar files along with the RAW files, and the catalog could easily be recreated. Let me know if you have any tips with working on your Lightroom catalogs.
Enough with the geeky talk, here’s a pretty photo. The Capitol building will need major renovations which are scheduled to begin later this year. Here is a late afternoon photo before all of the scaffolding goes up. Enjoy!
My father, an architect that arrived in the US in the early 1970s, would go on and on about the design and building of the Twin Towers. EVERY time we would drive to Jersey City to visit family, we would take time to view them from different vantage points. It made such an impression on me. I grew up looking forward to seeing them rise out of the horizon. In short, a trip to the New York – New Jersey area did not seem complete without some viewing of them. They fill the background of so many of my family’s photos.
This is one I happened to catalog with my own photos. I hope Tatay doesn’t mind that I took one of his photos to add to my collection. While scanning through our collection of slides around the house, I found this beautiful capture.
Have you photographed slide film? Although this analog capture is not as popular, the experience of viewing a transparent positive chrome is wholly different. Comparatively, the light is transferred through the film before it hits your eyes. Thus it has a different quality to it compared to the digitally projected images from a computer monitor.
It is for this reason that it adds to placing the image from a different time. Subsequently, the September 11, 2001 events that changed the fate of these buildings also places this image into history. So that inspired this post today. Coming across the image was wistful for the lives that had past, the terrorism revealed, the family rituals that have changed. However, it also reinforced the power of photography. To preserve, remind, and protect memories of what has come before.
I remember my father, his passion for architecture, photography, and enthusiasm that he passed on to all of us on my 35th birthday.
