Happy Thanksgiving!
I’m in Montana at my brother’s place and everyone is in the last moments of dinner prep. We’ve got a turkey being carved, ham warming up, mash potatoes being mashed, rolls cooling on a rack, broccoli being sautéed, and I’ve got to go add marshmallows to the top of the sweet potatoes.
We did a 5K fun run this morning (it was cold) and I felt pretty good considering I’m not a runner. Aidan, Mike (my bro in law) and Erin (Jeff’s wife) all ran. Fun.
So cheers! Have a good holiday and enjoy!
Technical Difficulties
Lightroom Tuesday!
- Check out this series of videos from photographer Eric Hamilton, all happily focused on providing an Intro to Lightroom.
- 1001 Noisy Cameras has a rundown of Black Friday Deals, including a deal on a LR2/PSCS4 bundle.
- Aperture or Lightroom for Mac users? A thread on the DPS forum with some basic back/forth. FWIW, the local editing properties in Lightroom dance all over what Aperture offers (and yes, I worked on them).
- I’ve been following Zack Arias for quite a few months now. He’s a great photographer and teacher (he has some great lighting classes/DVDs) and it looks like Dave Cross has an interview with him that covers the tools of the trade. Lightroom figures big, of course...
- Another great preset or two from Preset Heaven
- Not strictly Lightroom related, but JP Caponigro has a nice short discussion on Digital Exposure and histograms.
- Matt K has a great tip on changing the direction of the Grad Fitlter - nice.
- Inside Lightroom’s Tip of the Week has a weekly tip to make your Lightroom sessions more effective
- It looks like Camera Raw finally got some TAT-tool like adjustments. They also mention some “Snapshot functionality” in the update - I wonder if they followed my UX spec from a year or so ago? Yawn. ACR is for suckas.
- SlideshowPro for Lightroom was updated awhile back - I’m using this periodically when I need an exportable slideshow for the web.
- PTLens - a great lens pincushion/barreldistortion/chromatic abberation/perspective tool
- LR Mogrify rocks for extending the export capabilities of Lightroom. You can do alot of extra stuff with this tool.
- Jeff Friedl has a nice raft of Lightroom plugins as well. The SmugMug one is especially cool, for obvious reasons.
- Lightroomgalleries.com has some great third party web galleries for Lightroom.
- Presetopia has some interetsting presets for photographers...
Well, that is it folks.
I’m off to Montana for the Thanksgiving Holiday.
Expect a post or two, but nothing regular till I get
back.
If you’re in the US - Happy Thanksgiving. If not,
have a great Thursday.
Beginning Ballet
Pity, really, as some of our youngest dancers make great subjects; they’re just starting down this path and full of energy and excitement for dance.
Here are a few pictures from a recent visit with EBT’s youngest ballerinas.
More on Books
With regards to books in general, I’ve noticed a huge uptick in sales of books in the last year, and its pretty obvious why. Books rock. If you consider an average client shoot, I usually walk away with at least a thousand frames in a 2 hour session. After editing them tightly (yah Lightroom!), I end up showing anywhere from 40-60 images to the client. I used to show much less as to not overwhelm the client, but given that books are so easy to do these days, it really makes sense for me to offer a book option for those that don’t end up in frames.
And more and more, my clients are taking that option.
I price them pretty attractively, considering that each one is a custom layout. My 2008 Price List covers the basics and I custom quote anything beyond that:
heninger fotographik | 2008 price
list
Recently Blurb started offering Premium Paper as an
option, and this latest round of books will be
printed on such. I’m pretty excited about this option
as I’ve really wanting something to fill that premium
niche without going to higher end (read: more costly)
book makers.
The new Blurb paper is 100 pound silk-finish paper
that is 35% heavier than the normal. Sounds good to
me. The books I just ordered are all printed with
this option and I’m sure my clients will be quite
happy with them.
Given that it is
Thanksgiving weekend, I’ll be posting a bit more
sporadically this week as we’re hitting the road
Tuesday afternoon and won’t be back until Sunday.
Don’t worry, I’ve got a few things cataloged for
Lightroom Tuesday, so stay tuned...
Gift Guide 2008
We are gearing up for a whole month of awesomeness. It begins with Thanksgiving and running for over a full month until we hit New Years, with plenty of time to spend with friends and family and even take some needed time off work.
And that, my friends, is pretty cool.
We have a myriad of things lined up already. We are spending Thanksgiving with family in Montana. Then we are coming home for the “ok, you can finally put up the tree” celebration. My wife would probably put up the tree mid-October if she could get away with it. She has this condition that tends to not honor the necessary placement of season part of ‘tis the season’ and has been caught more than once listening to Christmas music in September.
After that there are the typical holiday things - shopping, gearing up for the Nutcracker, christmas parties, sledding, caroling (please, no!) and the enjoying of those classic holiday movies (Christmas Vacation, Christmas Story, the various Christmas specials we used to have to wait for). This time of year generally also involves a whole bunch of photo work - lots of printing, book making, framing and the like. I’m working on at least 3 books right now for various people and it will be even more frantic until it becomes too late to ship a book and get it on time.
I mentioned that we were going to be getting together with my siblings this Thanksgiving, and we all decided to get our Christmas shopping done early this year just exchange stuff then. That requiredme to pull together a Christmas list, and it got me thinking that I should put one together for my loyal readers.
I’ve decided to expand it beyond photography a bit and cover all the things I love.
Hope you enjoy it.
For
Anyone
These are gifts that will work for most anyone.
- Photography - I can’t think of a better present - a framed or canvas print from my gallery of portfolio images
- Photo Commission - Treat yourself or someone you love to a photo session with yours truly.
- Photo Book - a book with some of my favorite dance pictures from the past year.
For the
Photographer
This represents the bulk of you. And
there are many great things for us camera nerds.
- Lightroom - You saw this coming, right? Get that photographer in your life something that will actually improve his photo workflow. $299
- Drobo - something every photographer wants - a reliable on-site backup of their work. Its important. Really. $500
- Lightroom Training - Learn to use Lightroom. For real. From someone who worked on it. Space is limited. $250
- SmugMug Account - unlimited storage, Raw backup, no ads, stellar customer service and great prints! $40-150
- Photoshop CS4 - Lightroom does most of what you want, but sometimes you need Photoshop’s “special abilities”. $700 (or upgrade it)
- The Moment it Clicks - photo book by a great photographer $35
- Strobist DVD - learn to light
- Shots Magazine - a great fine art photography magazine $24
- Photoshop User Magazine - pretty good rag on the visual arts
- RadioPopper Jrs - great wireless flash triggers (hope they are released before Christmas)
For the
Reader
I love reading. Here are some of my favorite books...
- Grapes of Wrath - the American classic in the Everyman’s Library Edition
- Exodus - a novel set amidst the founding of Israel
- World War Z - a little frivolity now than then isn’t a bad thing
- Animal, Vegetable, Mineral - a great book on food.
- Guests of the Ayatollah - a great book on events that shape today
For the
Backpacker
I backpack as much as I can. I love
the simplicity of having everything I need in a 13 lb
pack on my back.
- Backpacking Light Subscription - a great online community for lightweight backpacking $25
- Titanium Alcohol/Fuel Tab Stove - there are lighter stoves, but those are for crazies like me $30
- A poncho tarp - cool rain-gear and shelter in one 11 oz package $150
- Survival Training - learn to actually survive in the wild (no urine drinking needed). I do work for these guys on occasion and they’re great. $350-500
For the Biker
I like to ride bikes. A lot. Dirt,
Road. Whatever. Just ride!
- CO2 Pump - Faster! You’re holding everyone else up. $15
- Bike Tire - This one is sweet. The bigger the better. $35
- Carbon Handlebar - Light, strong, cool. $95
- Garmin Edge GPS - A gps for biking. Don’t get lost. $300
- Armor - Because falling on rocks can hurt. $15-100
For those in the Know
If you gotta ask, you’re out of it.
- Dirty Burger - Show those boys from Sunnyvale you love burgers! $30
- iPhone - No contest, this is the best phone ever made
- SCTV - Best. TV. Show. Ever.
For the Music
Lover
- Great Big Sea - A rollicking, rolling band from the banks of Newfoundland.
- Sisters of Mercy - An oldy, but a goody.
- Daft Punk - My favorite album by our French brothers...
- Yann Tiersen - Love it all
- Wade’s iMix 1
- Wade’s iMix 2
Well, that is a massive amount of goodness. And its just in time for the weekend. Huzzah!
Book Design
I’m working on a client’s book and wanted to do push beyond the basic layouts, so I fired up google and came up with this great bit...
I like. You like? I like.
Online Services & Adobe
Services, they chanted. Services will save us. Go Services!
And I watched year after year as we dumped millions of dollars into half-baked “services” that subsequently failed or faded quickly into oblivion. It’s not that they didn’t mean well, but they just couldn’t pull it off for a myriad of reasons that are just too varied to go into here.
What always amazed me is that they failed in the photo-sharing market. I mean, this is the company that has the photo editing/retouching/maniupliation world sewn up.
The latest entry into the genre from Adobe comes under the banner of Acrobat.com - your one stop shop for PDF creation, file and screen sharing. And since I needed to share a 25 MB file with someone, I decided to give Acrobat.com a try. After more time than I care to admit, I have one word for the experience:
Fail
I’ve tried several times to get this to work, and
every time I would add a file to the queue to upload
it would happily spin a progress dialog and then
ignore me. Nothing uploads. Not even a small jpg
file.
And this evening, when I went to try it again, I got
this:
Ah yes. Services Adobe Style. Doh!
Leaving Adobe for SmugMug has been somewhat of a
revelation for me on the services front. I went
from a company who just couldn’t win in this area
(despite its reach and millions) to one that
thrives almost singlehandedly in this one area.
SmugMug is blessed with rabidly
loyal customers that put their trust in us and it
is our job to repay that trust with value, uptime
and superb customer service. In my short time
here, I’ve seen this small, nimble company go to
extraordinary measures to make sure people are
happy with our product.
And it’s working. Go Services!
Kilt!
I’ve wanted a kilt for years, and just never got around to it. That and I was always kinda put off by a $500 garment that was made of itchy wool and required dry-cleaning.
But at some point in the last few years I heard of Utilikilts - a company here in Seattle that makes functional kilts for hiking/working/dressing up and for every day wear.
So I grabbed my wife and we went down to their flagship store and bought one. Its black. Its comfy. Its pleated and its got big pockets.
Freaking awesome. I’ve
already elicited at least one “Piper Down” comment from my
extended family. It does not get better than that.
I plan on wearing it to my camp-out this weekend and
then church on Sunday. That and I can threaten my
children to behave or I’ll wear it to pick them up at
school.
Moo-tastic!
You upload pictures,
choose your crop, add your contact info and hit go.
Easy peasy.
I’ve used these cards for the past year and
without fail they are ooh’ed and
aahh’ed over. I’m sure it has something to do with
the spectacular photography, but the unusual form
factor, printing quality and finish are top notch as
well.
Nuff said. Ordered a
bunch more.
It comes from the UK, so it takes a bit of time for
those of us on this side of the puddle.
Now to get them to work with SmugMug galleries...
Lightroom Tuesday!
- Shoot a lot of pictures? Lightroom can help. Ryan Brenizer offers some tips on how to use the next generation raw software to your advantage. How much have you shot in 2008?
- Still shooting JPG? Even the big guns of wedding photography are coming out of the closet to endorse Lightroom and Raw as the way to go. Seriously, JPG is so 2002.
- Steve Paxton continues with his periodic tutorials on how to develop (ahem) a less complicated workflow in Lightroom. This is a nice overview for those new to Lightroom or those wondering why they’d use Lightroom over the old & crusty tools we had before. ACR? Gag. Come on.
- Portrait Retouching in Lightroom? Yes, we designed an 80% solution for most photographers in the new Local Adjustment brushes found in LR 2.
- Want to boost Lightroom performance? Try these tips (via LIghtroom Killer Tips)
- Jeff Friedl has released yet another Lightroom export plugin - this one for Facebook. The man is a plugin machine.
- Creating a Triptych in Lightroom. Very cool.
- LR2/Mogrify is a super useful export plugin I talk about from time to time. And its been updated.
I’m getting ready for
Thanksgiving. We’re all meeting up at my brother’s
home in Poulson, MT this year and I’ve got a bunch of
stuff to deliver to my sister. She’s been patiently
waiting for months while I screw around with other
things instead of her photos.
Well tonight I got everything processed, retouched
and ready to roll. Here is one of my favorites of my
niece Lindy from this summer.
Ah yes, the tried and true Fish-Face (TM).
Steen in Squares
He looks really good in very short hair, although he tends to want to grow it longer like his older brother. The funny thing is that we were goofing thru the entire shoot, but I asked him to be serious at times and those were the ones that came out best. Its amazing to see his complex personality come out - this is certainly the serious and sensitive side of my little guy.
Family Book Time
Every year I comb thru my massive archive of images from the past year and build a book that contains images of our family and its varied activities. Its kinda like mailing grandma that double set of prints from the drugstore back in 1996, only it is a bit more curated, organized and its built to be thrown on a coffee table and shared with others for years to come.
Excitingly, each year the book gets bigger. What began in 2006 as a 30 page book with ~100 pictures and has grown to triple that. This year may be even larger.
I make a bunch and send them to grandparents and keep one for our family. They are a hoot to have lying around and they are a great way to involve others in your family from afar. Traditionally I’ve used Blurb and have been reasonably happy with the cost/quality/format of their offerings.
SmugMug this year has a new
partnership with MyCanvas.com that has an online
flash-based book creator that I’m going to play
around with.
Books: go make one.
Here are a selection of images bound for our Family
book this year. The tip of the iceberg, as it were...
I'm Babysitting
Of course, the beast to which I refer is our 3 year old son. It’s his informal nickname, and we mean it in the best possible way. He’s a firecracker, and I have no-one to blame but myself. I like to say that he is me, without the temperance of age.
Any-who, I was left to babysit this young upstart and having work to do, I set him up with some legos with Bob the Builder on reserve in case he balks. Five minutes past and I’m working intently on a problem. Ten pass and I notice an unsettling silence. My ears perk up at this because I’ve got 3 other children. I’m an expert.
Silence to a parent is like a canon shot across the bow of HMS Holy-Hell. Something is not right. Especially with this kid, as he jabbers like a madman while playing legos. I wander out, expect one of several things:
- He’s into something he shouldn’t and thinks silence will act as cover. Like aural camouflage. Parents know better.
- He’s packed his bags and moved out to somewhere more tolerant of his outrages. He has threatened.
- He’s fallen asleep. If its before noon, this is acceptable. If its after, it means he’ll be with us until 10 pm. Not good.
Turns out it was #3. And it was before noon.
I’m really good at
Babysitting.
Another Selfy
Self Portraits
I find that most pictures turn out best when I’m on the non-sensitive side of the digital sensor*.
But I was asked to submit a self-portrait for a magazine that I contributed work to recently. After digging for awhile and coming up empty - I pulled out the lights/backdrop and tripod and shot something new.
* This is a digital update to the joke I told for years that referenced the film plate. It remains true, I’m afraid.
Leica S2
Dubbed the “S2” this is a
new medium format SLR system focused (surprisingly)
for the higher end photog on your Shristmas list.
What a cool camera.
The sensor is 30 x 45 cm and a whopping 37.5
megapixels. The focus is an fast, AF system for those
running around with medium format backs and the
speed/weight penalties that entails. Phase One is
involved as well, so between the Leica optics and
Phase One’s sensor technology, this is a pretty
interesting camera.
Wow, and I thought my M-system camera was
expensive...
There is also the new Lego camera that was announced
today. Shrug.
Creative Suite CS4 Upgrade
Adobe shipped CS4 a month
or so ago.
Since I worked at Adobe for so long, I never had to
upgrade a single Adobe application in the wild (i.e.
from a CD I purchased) since early versions of
Photoshop 3. I usually had it running a month or so
before anyone else. I also never had to deal with
Adobe tech support and in all those installations
over 10 years, I never had any issues I hear so much
about. I missed the ship date (and the bonus) by a
month or so...
This time it was a bit different.
Now that I’m not an Adobe employee and have to pay
(gasp!) for releases, it took me a few weeks to get
around to actually pushing the buttons. First, I
figured I should see if anyone I knew at Adobe had a
spare employee purchase lying around, but its late in
the year and everyone had already burned thru their
allotments. Luckily, SmugMug surprised me with an
upgrade Monday and I was off to the races.
Or so I wanted to be. It actually took me 4 or 5
tries to install this massive program and after many
fails, I finally had to run the Adobe CS4 Clean
script to get it to remove all vestiges of the
previous suite before it would work. I’m still having
problems with Version Cue’s new Adobe Drive, but
everything else is almost back to normal.
Of course, a few plugins stopped working, which is a
real PITA...
A few new touches that make it a nice upgrade:
- New visual design - things I saw in prototypes years ago finally shipped. Congrats to my friend Andrew Lin and a few others on the XD team at Adobe for finally updating the visual look of the app to something not resembling a mid-90s monster. Even the Bridge looks better, but that wasn’t hard as it was ugly personified in the CS3 release (much to my chagrin at the time). Bridge still sucks for the photographic workflow, but you knew that.
- Clone preview - how long did this take to finally come? Sheesh. But it is nice.
- New Adjustments Tab - I talked with the designer about this a lot a year or so ago and while she had the best intentions, I remember programatic issues were nipping at her heels. It remains to be seen if it is worthwhile or worthless. Not that I do a lot of adjustment in PS anymore (Lightroom has PS beat for most photographic workflow these days) but it has its place in one’s quiver for the heavy lifting.
- The GPU support is something that seems kinda cool. I’ve heard its faster. I’ve seen some cool effects. Shrug.
- Pixel Level zooming - they show pixels when you zoom in closer - this is a godsend for pixel tweakers like me.
- InDesign (shout out Amanda) has some really cool new layout tools - love that grid align help.
Thats it so far, but I’ve only worked with it for a day or two. I’m sure more stuff will pop at me as I work with it.
And to all those who complain about how much this suite costs - yeah its a chunk of change - but if you need it, you can make it back 100 fold.
And if you’re a humble amateur photographer complaining about the cost of Photoshop, skip the dreadful Photoshop Elements and just get Lightroom. It was made for you.
A New Tutu
Yesterday, my little niece showed up dressed to dance in a new tutu, and it was too cute to not break out the backdrop and try to con a 1 year old into staying still/standing/lookiing at the camera for a few minutes.
This one turned out quite nice.
As did this one.
Have a great day...
Lightroom Tuesday!
Here is a rundown on the
Lightroom news for the past week.
- Are you a Geo-tagging nerd? Really like tagging your photos with GPS data? Well, you’ll like this article on a new plugin for Lightroom. Personally, I’m not overly excited about his, but some people go nutty over this kinda geekery.
- The Lightsource podcast has a great show this week that involves some Lightroom discussion for Wedding/Portrait photographers.
- Lightroom: 10 Getting Started Tips covers the basics (via paxtonprints.com)
- Pixelicious has a video tutorial on using various features in Lightroom (virutal copies, vignettes, noise reduction etc). (via paxtonprints.com)
- Like free presets for Lightroom? Me too. Check out this massive list of them...
- An interesting take on Catalog Management for photographers. Me? I’m lazy. I have a catalog a year, and by this time of the year, its pretty big. Do I care? Nope.
- FotoMagico, a photo presentation software package, now works with Lightroom. I’ve not used this product, but Matt K likes them. Might be worth a look.
- onOne has a frame/edge effects package called PhotoFrame. I own an older version, but apparently it works with Lightroom now...
- Speaking of that, Preset Heaven has some basic borders for free. And some free Color-Film Emulation presets.
- JP Caponigro covers why one would want to print in 16 bit. And how as well. I was just wondering this yesterday...
Update: These came in after I posted, but these are too good to miss
I’ve been pretty
productive these last few weeks - mostly owing to the
uptick in rehearsals at the studio. Here are a few
new ones that I’m happy with...
Have a good Remembrance Day. Wear your
poppy. I miss these here in the US.
Viktoria Teaches
As you may have noticed, I do a lot of photo work for EBT and was elated to participate in this project, as it focuses on this Viktoria’s impact on the many young dancers that benefit from her expert instruction. Happily, my daughter is one of those young dancers, and is honing her technique under her Viktoria’s expert eye and world-class tutelage. As I write this, they are both in the studio working on a new routine for a huge national event coming this next February. She is excited and elated, but has much work to do.
Here are some of the out takes that I really liked...
I expect this project to
go live in the next month or two, and I’ll let you
know when it is on the newsstands.
As an aside note, if you
are looking to attend “The Nutcracker” this year and
live in the Seattle area, please consider supporting EBT in
their second annual production of this holiday
classic.
Indeed, the pictures
above come from early rehearsals for said performance
and it promises to be a real treat. And hurry, as
they sell out every performance weeks before the
show.
Soccer Tournament
Soccer tournaments are one of the things we enjoy most about having our son play club soccer. We get to go somewhere fun, stay for a couple of days and just live/breathe soccer. Well, and eat some good food in between. Usually they are summer affairs, but this one was late in the season, and given it is already almost mid-November, the weather was pretty nice for the Pacific Northwest.
We won our first two games handily and lost our third by 1 point to a team we really should beat. They played well for the first two games, but the final found them faltering in the second half. Aidan really applied himself and showed quite well in all three games. His aggressiveness was perfect and he was always on top of the ball when it came near him. Right on Aidan!
A few pictures...
A Visit to Polson Family Eyecare
Well, he recently graduated from optometry school back in Ohio and moved back west to start his own eye-umachacallit-dealio. He wanted somewhere that was close to the families in Canada (his wife is also Canadian- from a town that makes ours look huge) and Polson, MT seemed to fit the bill nicely. Happily, he found an older doctor that was retiring and bought the practice. Its nice to have him back in the west so we can see him on our twice-yearly bike trips to Moab.
This is him trying to ride as expertly as I do. The form is flawed, as is the technique, but you can’t fault him for trying. I kid, I kid.
Polson is on the south end of Flathead Lake in
northwestern Montana. This is a very familiar place,
as we spent a lot of time as kids tromping thru this
area. Some friends had a cabin on a lake near by and
we’d always go down once or twice a year to ski, swim
and muck around. Its only about 3 hours from Cardston
and is just a lovely place to visit. Its very
Montana, with the Rockies staring down at you and
pine trees galore. The Kalispell environs bring back
lots of good memories.
So anywhooo, we stopped by his business for some
quick check-ups - my daughter was in need of some new
glasses and we ran the others thru as well. Being who
I am, I yanked out the Canon and snapped some fun
pictures of the kids trying on goofy frames and doing
the check up thing.
A few more here...
Hey, its the weekend almost! Huzzah! Have a good one...
Hairband of Death!
What a crack up...
Also, a note to those of
you with a Drobo system: apparently they don’t
support Seagate’s new 1.5 TB drive. Something about a
rushed firmware causing problems. And this is exactly
what I ran into with my drive Sunday. So technically
it didn’t die, but it took at least 25 min on hold to
learn that.
Ugh. Still Seagate is on my blacklist...
Finally, I’ve been working on customizing my SmugMug site. As many of you
know, I’m new to the company, and one of the
things I wanted to get into was the professional
customization features they offer to professional
photographers. There is some great stuff you can do to make your
SmugMug site less “smug” and more “me”.
Check it out...
