Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday.

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, mes amis.

• LR2/Blog is cool for Wordpress/Blogger users, so it bears repeating. Last week in my LR seminar in Utah County, we talked a lot about export options - people understandably have many places to put their photos. From SmugMug to blogs to CDs to other parts in between, LR can deliver.
• Speaking of exporting, we often go to JPGs when doing thusly. For good reason. Matt K has a nice rundown of JPGness here.
• Lightroom Mistakes? People make those? Oh I have stories. Here is a rundown of 5 top mistakes one photographer sees that you should avoid.
• Lightroomsecrets.com covers some interesting Keyword issues to take note of when using tags in Lightroom.
• Luminous Landscape has some interesting video tutorials for Lightroom (and that other photo app that Adobe makes). I think these are pay to view, but they have previews. Check them out.
• X-equals reviews some portfolio gallery software for Lightroom.
• LIghtroom-Blog.com covers a nice Filmstrip selection tip here.
• Gavin Seim has a nice rundown on how to install LIghtroom presets.
• Having issues with LIghtroom’s thumbnails not generating properly? Check here.
• Nick Potter covers some keyword basics in Lightroom. He even has some downloadable keyword lists that you can install yourself and use.
• Sherri Meyer’s top ten Lightroom tweets of the week. Lots of goodness I won’t have to duplicate here.

Not Lightroom related, but worth a look:

• Battery-o-rama for Macbooks. An inverter and a 12 volt battery also works...
• One of LIghtroom’s founders is going back to work for Adobe.
• HDR - don’t do it. At least very often. Here is a tutorial for those few times.

Have a great Tuesday...

Tags:Lightroom

Marathon road trip back home. Had a ball. Glad to be back and am working on getting back into my normal, daily routine.

Here is a photo I took in an obscure valley in Idaho. I’m going to buy some land here someday soon.

Ugh, its 100 degrees here in Washington. We’re all melting...

I gave a raucous Lightroom seminar yesterday to a group of photographers in the Utah County area. What started out as a favor to a few of my sister’s photographer friends grew into a larger crowd of enthusiastic photogs, and I was glad to be of service. Infamous Utah photo-phenom Jarvie even showed up.

We started a bit late (as usual) and didn’t split up until after 10 PM, with lots left to cover (as usual).

I pretty much followed my outline detailed in my free ebook Adobe Lightroom 2: Workflow For Busy Photographers PDF. Setup, Ingest, Edit, Process and Export. You know, the basics.

Lots of discussion about DNG, the coolness that is the Adjustment Brush and Backup strategies.

Here is my Keynote Presentation if you’re interested, although frankly it does not give much beyond what the above mentioned PDF does.

Cheers to all attendees. I hope you managed to get a few nuggets out of my extended yammering.

Tags:Lightroom

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday! Huzzah!

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, my cherished readers.

• This week everyone was all up on a technique to find the fastest way to export photos from Lightroom.
• Scott Kelby did a nice long Q&A about Lightroom the other day (via Matt K’s blog)
• Nik Software is putting on a bunch of webinars - I’m sure they’ll include some Lightroom integration demos.
• Look Ma, Only Lightroom. A nice demo on how to do some complex layout stuff without resorting to Photoshop.
• More tips on how to optimize Lightroom...
• How to move a Lightroom Catalog to an external drive. If you work on the road, this is a must-know as I never have enough internal drive space.
• A look at Noise Reduction in Lightroom. Personally I don’t do much NR on my work. I shot fast film and pushed it, so I’m not afraid of grain. Still, nice to know.
• Top 10 Lightroom tweets for the past week. Lots of great links I won’t have to duplicate here, so have a look...
• Jeff Friedl’s plugins are a must-have, and he supports quite a few photo sharing sites (including the best of the bunch, SmugMug). He just released a few new ones as well...
• Speaking of export plugins, DPS has a nice summary of what is out there...
• DPS this week covers how to print from Lightroom with colored backgrounds...
• An interesting look at someone’s initial thoughts at going SOOC to Lightroom...
• Get those panels under control. A look at taming the myriad panels in Lightroom.
• TTG Highside (a Lightroom web gallery) was recently updated. The Turning Gate has a plethora of great galleries to choose from. Would you say I have a plethora of galleries Jefe?
• X-Equals has a great article on grayscale mixing. Look at you Mr. DJ of Light. Vikka Vikka Vow!
• The Adobe Learning Resource people (hi Anita!) have a new blog, entitled Phosphors, that contains some great links to learning Lightroom and those other photo apps that Adobe makes. They need some design help though...
• Keywording and Tagging. It isn’t for the faint of heart. But it can be really useful.

That is about it.

Have a great Tuesday.

Tags:Lightroom

I was just going back thru some pictures from before we left on our trip. Included in that were shots from the 4th of July.

Growing up in Canada, we never got overly excited about fireworks, because you couldn’t buy them and it wasn’t a big part of the whole Canada Day celebrations either. I think I remember bigger cities putting on a big show, but personal use was very limited to stuff smuggled over the border. And a few of us did that on occasion, focusing on firecrackers and bottlerockets. The good stuff, as it were.

So now that I’m an ex-pat living in the great state of Washington, I just don’t think of it as the 1st/4th rolls near.

But my 12 year old son is certainly enticed by the possibilities, so this year he requested (repeatedly) if we could get some fireworks. So this year I relented and we stopped buy, uh I mean by (woah, talk about freudian slip) and bought a variety of things from the local Kiwanis booth.

The kids had a hoot. Here are a few pictures of the neighborhood shoot-off...

PS. Some of these are very Lord of the Fliesesque.

Tags:Personal Work

I’ll be holding a free Lightroom seminar in Utah County tomorrow (July 21st) at 7 pm in Saratoga Springs, UT.

This started out as a favor for my sister and a few friends and has grown as more people have asked to come. Bring it on, I say. We’ll have fun.

The class will be hosted by Dustin Bess, so ping me for the address.

The Course
The course will focus on someone new to Lightroom - importing, editing and basic development/retouching. I’m sure we’ll get into some advanced topics and I’ll be around to answer harder questions. I’ll also spend some time on Lightroom integration with SmugMug. Finally, I’ll probably also get into a basic LR toolkit and describe a few third party tools for your I’m-so-Cool-Lightroom-Toolbox.

Currently we have 15 spots filled, and could probably accommodate one or two more, so don’t be shy.

Tags:Lightroom

Ok, so I’m doing a Lightroom seminar this week in Utah Valley and as part of that I talk about integration points with SmugMug. Of course, you import, edit and develop for a reason, and that reason is to share with friends, families or your clients. That is where we come in.

As part of that, I had HQ send me some new SmugMug Pro camera straps and hats to giveaway to participants. But they sent beaucoup stuff, so I figured I’d do a little giveaway via twitter/blog as well. I’m nice that way.

So, here is the deal. I’m going to post a couple of questions over the next day or two and the first person to respond via twitter or email wins the loot. Send straight to your door even.

Drum roll please...

Question 1 - We just shipped a new display style for SmugMug galleries. Name it and give me a good use for it and you get your choice of a SmugMug Pro hat or a camera strap. Or maybe both. I did point out how nice I was, right?

Go!

Tags:giveaway

The past two days have been a blast. We left Mesa Verde Tuesday morning and headed for the Great Sand Dunes National Park in south central Colorado. En-route we went over the great divide and saw the intersection with the GDT (the Great Divide Trail), one of the three big long distance hiking trails in the US.

The Sand Dunes were awesome. Hundreds of acres of towering sand dunes (highest in North America) and a crazy ecosystem that feeds and maintains them (yes we watched the 1/2 hour movie in the visitors center). We spent quite a bit of time running around the dunes, the boys loving the soft landing when jumping the lip of a big dune, and Wednesday morning we climbed to the top of the largest dune in the system - no small feat as it turns out. It took us 1 hour 20 to climb, but only 15 min to run back down. Somehow, running with a gait of 6 feet per step makes for good time.

Awesome.

After the climb, we rode bikes around the park for an hour or so, and then headed for a shower and to Alamosa for a movie. The kids had seen that the new Harry Potter movie was opening, so we spent several hours waiting in line to get tickets for the 7:30 show. Fun, and we returned to camp in the dark with exhausted boys.

We packed up Thursday and headed towards Fort Garland, an old adobe fort once commanded by Kit Carson. It was pretty cool, and we ran into an archeological dig being run by a prof at the local college. He was very interesting to talk to and he ended up giving us a 20 min personal tutorial on how to fire one of the mountain howitzers they had in the fort. Turns out this was one of the canon that the confederates brought from Texas to invade Colorado in the civil war. They lost and buried the canon, but they were recovered and still are fired at the fort on occasion. I have the entire thing on HD video (thank you 5D MKII) so I’ll post it when I get the horsepower to actually edit it.


We then headed north, with the intention of going all the way to Black Canyon. However, on hitting Gunnison, Coloroado, we saw that it was the town’s Cattlemen’s Days summer festival and that meant a fair (rides) and a rodeo (rides, of a sort). So we stopped and checked into the local KOA to take it the sights. Being spontaneous rules.

The fair/rodeo turns out to be an expensive proposition - the tickets for the rides/games were expensive and easily spent. After some rides and some not-good for you food, we headed in to watch the steer wrasstlin, ropin and “the ladies” racing barrels. It was quite fun, even though we were not exactly in our element. Crowd watching was also a hoot.

Yeahaw to you, as it were.

Here are a few assorted picts from the past few days.

Today we head back to Moab. Unless something cool gets in our way.

Cheers!

Tags:Personal Work

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday.

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, my cherished readers.

• Need help? With LIghtroom I mean. Check out this great rundown of the various Help resources for Lightroom.
• As I mentioned yesterday, I’m on an extended road trip with my boys. Lots of fun. This article talks a bit about how you can take your work with you. Personally, I just export any files I want with me as a Catalog to an external USB drive, dupe it to a backup drive, and work from that. When I’m back, I just reimport.
• Lightroomsecrets.com has two articles (one) and (two) that discuss the differences between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. When you just need to take it to, ahem, eleven.
• The title of this article from DPS is so good, I’ll leave it as is: Ten Objects you Didn’t Know could be Dragged, Clicked or Opened in Lightroom
• I hesitate to share this with the goody-goodies among us, but here is a list of what are purportedly to be 100 Wicked Tips for Lightroom and those other apps I don’t open as much anymore. Er. I mean CS4 apps.
• Please don’t do this. Evah. Its trite and goofy. And we’ll make fun of you. But in a good way that won’t preclude you from hanging with us again when you get over it.
• Canon makes a Raw processor? I kid. I kid.
• Another take on watermarking in Lightroom using LR/Mogrify.
• A short tutorial on Sharpening in Lightroom. Me? I don’t sharpen much because I have wicked sharp, expensive lenses. Oh,and I’m lazy and don’t bother most of the time. The latter contains more truth. Unless I get out my M8 and then the former is more correct.
• A nice article on migrating your library to a bigger drive. Sorry Nat, I’ll get to your book when I get back from my roadtrip.
• Blue Velvet, a preset for Lightroom. Furry hat not included. These guys are new on my radar, so check the other presets they offer.
• Morning Glow - a new preset from Matt K.
• Update: Keywording and Tagging in Lightroom from X-equals. I wish I did this better. We built in all kinds of new goodness for keywording in LR2, but I just don’t bother using it.

Not strictly Lightroom related, but worth a look:

• Rob Sylvan looks at ways to protect your photos when you put them online.
• SmugMug just shipped a very cool new viewing style for your SmugMug Galleries - We call it Journal, and its all about presenting big images, with or without caption to your viewers. Check it out here.
• Speaking of SmugMug, we just put together some tentative steps toward having a sMUG meeting in Salt Lake City. Coming soon - I’ll let you know the details when I get the finalized stuff.
• Voightlander’s new Nokton 1.1 lens for Leica M cameras. Kinda cool. I love my Canon 1.2, but it has a very different personality.
• David Jay is offering a free version of Showit, a quick tool for building a photo website.

Ok folks, that is it for this week. I’m still on the road, somewhere in southern Colorado as you read this, so things will be a bit slow for the next week.

We spent today exploring all the wonderful things in Mesa Verde National Park.

We woke up early and headed into see some of the self guided walks before our scheduled ranger-led tour at the Long House complex. Yesterday we went and saw the Cliff Palace complex, and it was cool, but today was much better.

The Long House tour was a small group, and we got to go down and walk thru more of the ruins (in a sensible way of course). We got to handle some artifacts (pottery, corn cobs) and got some great insight into this massive series of buildings. We saw pit-houses, pit-rooms, tall ladders, kivas, ancient masonry (urine, ash and sand), corn cob impressions (decoration), water seeps (with hand-carved catch basins), the result of some big lightning strikes, majestic canyon vistas, hand painted wall art and about 100 french tourists doing the same. Bienvenue mes amis!

Here are a few photos:

That is all for today. Cheers!

Tags:Personal Work

Sorry for the lack of posting this past week.

I’m on vacation with my two older boys - we’re running around like madmen, exploring the desert southwest (Utah, Colorado so far) and having a ball. I’ll be back Tuesday with the Lightroom stuff and hopefully a few photos as well.

Tomorrow we’ll be exploring some of the wonderful sights in Mesa Verde, so that should give my 5DMKII a workout.

Cheers all.

Tags:Personal Work

Welcome to Lightroom Tuesday.

This weekly post is aptly named, as each Tuesday I gather together the best presets, tips, tricks, tutorials from the Lightroom-o-sphere and post them for you, my cherished readers.

• Looking for some “get me in the ballpark” presets for your Fuji DSLR? First off, look at you fly your freak flag. You go! Now go download them.
• Want to rename folders on import? Here is a nice tutorial on how to do just that.
• Terry White talks about Nikon tethering options from Lightroom.
• For those of you who like to buy preset packs, Presetopia has some interesting offerings. Oh, I know you’re out there. Kevin Kubota is on a big boat because of you
• Want to export and Zip some photos in one easy step? Try this new plugin. Update: its Mac and Windows!
• Ok, N00b alert time - DPS teaches you how to resize images on export. No more getting angry emails back from your cousin when you sent them 200 MB of full size jpegs!
• N00b alert, part II - here are some great “getting started” videos for those of you new to Lightroom.
• Lightroom Tweets of the week.
• Nice free preset - A Farewell To Arms - from A Scenic World.
• Timothy Armes has released LR/Mogrify 2.0. This is the most valuable Lightroom plugin in my arsenal bar none. Rock on Timothy!
• Into Black & White. There is a new book on this available on Amazon. Yes, I still have another Lightroom book to review (sorry Nat) before this one...
• I love triptychs. I really love them. The masters of painting were onto something with those you know. Check out how to simplify their creation in Lightroom.
• X-Equals has a review of the KBSC application RPG Keys. Lightroom productivity is greatly enhanced by knowing a few keyboard shortcuts, but RPGKeys takes it to the next level. Worth a look.
• The eyes have it. No really, they do. Here is how to enhance the eyes in Lightroom. This tutorial focuses on animals, but it applies to humans as well. Or at least your feral child. And if you’re talking goats, you’re on your own - goat eyes are just freaky.
• Finally figured out that ACR sucks compared to Lightroom? Here is a plugin that lets you convert your presets in ACR to ones useable in Lightroom. Why they are different is a question you might ask, but without knowing the politics of Adobe, its best to smile and walk away.
• Matt K’s Lightroom O Rama tour is hitting Chicago and New York.
• The Lightroom Forums was down for an upgrade. Its back.

Well that should do it for today.

Just an FYI, I’m on the road for the next few weeks. I’m in Utah now and will be spending some time in southern Colorado with my two boys exploring the back-roads and shooting pictures. Fun!

Also, I’m going to be holding a free 2 hour Lightroom Seminar in the Lehi, Utah area Tuesday, July 21st. Location and time TBD, but if you are interested and are in the area, drop me an email and I’ll give you info when everything is finalized.

Tags:Lightroom

Here is a short minumentary we made last night of my son and his tap shoes.

The backstory: My youngest recently went to a year-end dance recital with my wife. Our daughter had a short contemporary piece in the show, and there were a variety of other acts on display. One was tap dancing. For some reason (and I’ll be honest, tap mystifies me) he really caught fire with the tapping and spent the next few weeks repeatedly asking for some tap shoes. And by repeatedly, I mean 200 times a day.

Turns out, he was really serious, and one thing I really try to do is support my kids when they want to give something a go. So we looked around for tap shoes locally. $50-100. Uh, ouch. Payless had some Mary Jane tap shoes (for girls) and he was having none of that.

I finally decided to look online and found some $5 shoes @ Capezio. Heck of a deal. for $15 they were on their way.

They arrived yesterday, and he wasted no time getting them out and wanting to practice. Mr. Smart Homeowner eyed my nice hardwood floor, then quickly ran to grab a small sheet of plywood and the “studio” was ready.

Here is his debut tap routine:

If that isn’t the cutest thing ever, I don’t know what is.

Look at those feet move. He’s hauling.

And you gotta love the “I’m going to wear my PJ shorts” getup as well. That boy has an eye toward fashion, I tell ya. This is the same boy who, on being told to “get some shoes on” emerged from the van on arrival to a soccer game in one gum boot and a Crock (note to self, check before you leave).

He’s already learned some new things as my daughter teaches him stuff she’s picked up in Irish hard shoe.

I love my kids.

P.S. Happy 4th. w00t to America!

P.S.S This gets better. My second youngest is fixated on learning the Bag Pipes. And we’re going to do that as well. I’ll have quite a show to put on downtown with tappers and pipers - I should be able to recoup some of my investment.

This has been a crazy week. Have lots to do, and probably the least blogged week in my year plus doing this.

What is more, I’m coming up on a 3 week road trip to Utah, Wyoming and parts beyond and I’m furiously packing for that.

However, a few new props have shown up at the ranch recently, so I pulled them out and had my son Steen model them.

Go Steen.

Have a great 4th of July weekend everyone in the US. Those of you outside, just marvel at how few black powder injuries there are with all the fireworks play.

Tags:Personal Work