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Posts Tagged ‘Washington’

Ballroom Dance, Event, Photography | 0 comment

Awards plaques

©TimeLine Media - DC Dance Challenge award plaques

I am currently working on finishing the award plaques from the recent 2013 DC Dance Challenge. This event from last month had some great participation from all the dancers. However there were a few that were recognized for their technique in their categories. Although we could not provide plaques for the dancers to take home from the Ronald Reagan Building that evening, I think the results are better now. This is due to me having edited all the photos for the event for color and exposure. The photos that are used from the plaques are made from photos that were made at the event on the dance floor or the surrounding area at the venue.

©TimeLine Media - DC Dance Challenge award plaques
©TimeLine Media – DC Dance Challenge award plaques

I am much more pleased with how these have turned out since they are produced at the same lab that I send print and album orders. The quality of the print is just as good as these since they are optical prints from the digital files, not prints from an ink jet printer. If you see these plaques up close, you can tell the difference. They will last much longer than ink jet prints, and have much better contrast and saturation of color. Here is a scan of one that is completely assembled.

©TimeLine Media - assembled plaque
©TimeLine Media – assembled plaque

The picture is mounted onto a wooden frame, and mounted underneath a clear plastic. The plaque is cut on the back with some holes for easy mounting to the wall. I really like how these come out, and I hope the dancers like the presentation. It’s a great way to show off their accomplishments!

©TimeLine Media - DC Dance Challenge award plaques
©TimeLine Media – DC Dance Challenge award plaques

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

Personal, Photography, Travel | 0 comment

Minimalism

©TimeLine Media - Minimalism - Hirshhorn Museum at night

On this Saturday morning, there is a lot of sad news coming from the Philippines. The record-breaking Typhoon Haiyan hit the island nation very hard. I still have lots of family that lives in the provinces of Leyte and Southern Leyte, and we are hoping for the best as the recovery and rebuilding starts.

For today’s photography post, I wanted to write about minimalism in photography. Just as in writing, painting, or other artistic forms, it is a challenge to strip out the extraneous elements that may not add to the final piece. There is are authors that write six word novels, or poets that only write haiku. It may seem seem restrictive to put limits on how many words or syllables you use in your work, but it also can open up a new world of creativity. The structure is set for you, just finding how you can fit your art into the structure is the goal.

©TimeLine Media - Minimalism - Hirshhorn Museum at night
©TimeLine Media – Minimalism – Hirshhorn Museum at night

There are many photographers that I follow on social networks that are amazing with their minimalist work. Photographing structures, landscapes, even street scenes with a lot of negative space leaving forms and shapes for the viewer to interpret. For me, this makes for stronger photographs that seem easier to remember in your mental library. It something that I will practice and strive to better in my photography. It adds to my portfolio which is full of busy, action-filled, dance photos. Let me know what you think!

©TimeLine Media - Minimalism in photos DC
©TimeLine Media – Minimalism in photos DC
©TimeLine Media - Minimalism - underneath the Woodrow Wilson Bridge
©TimeLine Media – Minimalism – underneath the Woodrow Wilson Bridge

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

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

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