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Posts Tagged ‘tech’

Photography, Studio, Technology | 0 comment

Working with Lightroom Catalogs – Tech Thursday

©TimeLine Media - US Capitol Building, Washington, DC

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!

©TimeLine Media - US Capitol Building, Washington, DC
©TimeLine Media – US Capitol Building, Washington, DC

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Event, Photography, Sports, Technology | 0 comment

Nikon 70-200mm F/2.8 – Tech Thursday

Photo with Nikon 70-200mm, www.timelinedc.com
Flower bed photographed with the Nikon 70-200mm F/2.8 lens

This Nikon 70-200mm lens is the first professional lens I had the opportunity to purchase. The above photo is the first I took with it right out of the box. Just a simple shot of the front bed of mums. Truth be told, my mom helped me out with the payment – but I have made good use of the investment.

Professional Gear

The 70-200mm is the most versatile lens in my bag. I have used it on almost every assignment from ballroom dance, to weddings, sports, and portraits. When I first started using the lens, it seemed like it instantly transported my photography to the next level. This was different from other “new” lenses because of two factors. The first is the focal length – starting at 70 and going to 200 means that you cannot take a shot that is too wide.

Photo with Nikon 70-200mm, www.timelinedc.com

Anything you are trying to photograph with this lens has to be a good distance from the camera, and many distractions will be eliminated from the frame. Both of these factors already change how you think about composition, making it simpler than if you had a wider angle lens on your camera. With an isolated subject, now you only need to think about placement of your main subject, and maybe something at the edges that would give some context.

Portraits

Photo with Nikon 70-200mm, www.timelinedc.com

All camera manufacturers make a variant of this lens, so this information is not exclusive to Nikon. The other technical specification of this lens that helps your photography is it’s constant f/2.8 maximum aperture across all focal lengths. There are kit lenses that are sold with cameras that have longer focal lengths, but their max apertures vary getting smaller as the lenses is zoomed out to it longest focal length. Having f/2.8 allows me to photo at lower ISO settings in low light situations like conference rooms, and dance studios.

Photo with Nikon 70-200mm, www.timelinedc.com

For shooting any field sports, the 70-200mm lens would be a minimum for catching action on the field. It was often too short to catch game action for me without extreme cropping. On the practice field or warm ups before the game, however, it was still able to work its magic. 

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

Personal, Photography, Technology | 0 comment

Adobe Lightroom Library – Tech Thursday

Adobe Lightroom Version 4

In photography school, my first digital class introduced me to Lightroom when it was still a free downloadable beta program. Much like Quickbooks for accountants, this program is the most essential piece of software for photographers today. In each version, they have added so many features, that it is rare when initially editing an event where I have to go into the full version of Photoshop. I think of Lightroom as the version of Photoshop with all of the non-photographer functions stripped out. Then fitted with a modern interface that is analagous to working on touchscreen or tablets more than keyboard and mouse.

Library Module

In the screen capture below, you can see the Library module – the default for working in Lightroom.

Adobe Lightroom 4 Library

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com

In this module, you can get a quick overview of the photos in your collection. Each cell shows the file name, and some of the important data in the corners. There are also many icons around the image which help to identify your progress. You can sort by photos that you want to keep, delete photos that are not usable, and organize the thousands of photos into sections that you can break down prior to working.

On the left side of the screen is a Navigator which has an enlargement of the selected photo, then a file explorer-type interface for working with the files on your computer. This allows management of images whether they are stored locally, or on network drives. Collections also helps to keep track of photos that you may want use later, or favorites of especially good photos that you want to go back to in the future.

On the right side of the screen, there is a histogram of the selected image. This is a graphical representation of the tones in the images from darkest on the left, to lightest on the right. This helps to see how good an exposure is for each photograph – a curve skewing to the left will tend to be underexposed (too dark) while a curve skewing to the right will tend to be overexposed (too bright). In the Develop module, I will talk about this more, but it is in the Library module too if you want to use any of the Quick Develop functions just underneath the histogram.

Keywords

Keywording, underneath the Quick Develop, is another way that Lightroom makes managing photos great for working photographers and saves them lots of time in the process. If you have a catalog of thousands of photos of various events from weddings, ballroom dance, personal photos, etc., keywording lets you tag photos with descriptive words to help you identify photos in case you need to find them quickly in the future. This can be powerful for photojournalists or sports photographers to find previous subjects when requested by newspapers, customers, etc.

The last buttons on the right perform “Sync” functions from selected photos. “Sync Settings” will let you apply changes that you make to one photo (Exposure, color balance, saturation, etc.) and apply those same changes to a group of selected photos. This is an AMAZING time saver and helps me to work on more important aspects of an image, rather than having to make adjustments to many photos one at a time.

When I first started using Lightroom, I could not foresee that my photography career would lead to shooting ballroom dance events with 10,000+ photos each. This program alone has allowed me to make many photos for dancers and edit them as quickly as I can for them to see within 2 weeks of events. It is still a lot of work, but from the feedback I get from customers, I think the results are worth it.

TimeLine Media – www.timelinedc.com
703-864-8208

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