Can you believe it? 2009 is nearly over! Where does the time go? Are you satisfied with your photography this year? Do you have photographic plans for 2010?
Lightroom is an excellent program but it still needs you to feed it images. If you find yourself in a creative slump or the shooting doldrums don’t despair! Leave all that in 2009 and look to the new year with fresh eyes!
Here are ten suggestions to help you rekindle that passion for photography! You may have seen some (or all) of these elsewhere but it never hurts to see them again.
Digital photography has come a long way in the last few years. Few today would argue that digital cannot stand as film’s equal. In many cases the technology now surpasses film. Not only do we have a digital substitute for film, we also have digital substitutes for most physical filters. Between the built in tools in Lightroom and the many sets of plugins available there are really only two physical filters needed today.
The effects of a polarizing filter cannot be reproduced digitally. Yes, there are a few digital polarizing effects which attempt to approximate some aspects of a polarizer. But only a physical polarizer present between the subject and the sensor can remove reflections and deepen the sky’s shade of blue. You can get close with digital effects but it’s much more work that just putting that filter on the lens.
Ever wonder if your workflow is sound and efficient? Are you following best practices in dealing with your valuable images? Nervous about keeping those files safe and backed up? Well, as Douglas Adams once told us, Don’t Panic! The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) with funding from the Library of Congress has launched dpBestFlow.org.
The best way to introduce you to this site is with their video tour. Take a look.
This is one rich and still growing repository of knowledge! You can spend hours here learning everything you need to know about how to handle your digital images.
The first time you installed Lightroom you were presented with The Five Rules. They were there in Lightroom 1, are still there in Lightroom 2, and can even be seen in the help menu of Lightroom 3 Beta. If you remember anything you should remember Rule 5.
What is Rule 5? The simple and elegant reminder to ENJOY. That’s right! Enjoy. We spend a lot of time practicing our art. Reading blogs and books to learn more about how to hone that craft. Laboring over our images. Striving for artistic perfection. And on and on and on…
Sometimes we lose sight of why we started down this path. Our passion can turn into drudgery if we’re not careful. Hence, the ever present reminder of Rule 5. Enjoy. So to that end I suggest you create what I call a play catalog.
Collections were a great idea in version 1 of Lightroom. It was so good, in fact, that Adobe decided to expand collections in Lightroom 2. Now you can access your collections in other modules via the Collections panel that appears in the left panel set in every module. But did you know that collections come in different flavors? We’re all familiar now with collections, collection sets, and smart collections. But you can also create slideshow collections, print collections, and web gallery collections. They even have their own distinct icons so you can tell them apart!
Mark Wilson over at rusticolus images has a new article that shows you how to use Lightroom 3 Beta’s Publish Services to publish your images directly from Lightroom to the cloud. It’s a creative use of the Hard Drive connection to link to Dropbox. Take a minute to read Lightroom 3 Beta – Save photos to the cloud. You’ll be glad you did!
A while ago I wrote about Moving Your Images From iPhoto to Lightroom. A reader, Tom, pointed out a neat feature in Snow Leopard that allows you to directly access the contents of your iPhoto Library.
Sometimes thumbnails are just too small to let you see all the details in an image. If you don’t have a second display and you would like to apply a group of keywords while looking at the Loupe view of an image here’s an easy way.
Begin by setting up your Keyword Shortcut. You find this under the Metadata menu in the Library module. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Command-Option-Shift-K on a Mac or Ctrl-Alt-Shift-K on a PC. This will present you with a deceptively simple dialog into which you can enter any number of keywords separated by commas.
Well almost! Snow Leopard, the latest iteration of Mac OS X, is set to arrive on August 28th. Whenever a new operating system arrives we have to research our applications before upgrading. (Don’t forget that Windows 7 is coming at the end of October so our Windows colleagues will be facing this very soon as well.)
Luckily, it seems, that Lightroom 2.4 and the Creative Suite 4 applications will run under Snow Leopard. John Nack has posted an FAQ regarding the Creative Suite 4 applications on his blog. Click here for the PDF.
Each week Brandon Oelling and the X=blog staff offer up oodles of information to help you streamline your digital image workflow, strengthen your business, tackle technology, and turn great images into memorable ones.
The first time you installed Lightroom you were presented with The Five Rules. They were there in Lightroom 1, are still there in Lightroom 2, and can even be seen in the help menu of Lightroom 3 Beta. If you remember anything you should remember Rule 5.
