Tonemap overload

I’ve added some images to a Flickr website – it’s astonishing how much tone-mapped imagery there now is on the site. Seems like no-one wants to see things as they are anymore. Chance is definitely ’in’ and pre-visualisation is ‘out’. Individually, tonemapped images can be striking  but looking at a group of thumbnails show how ’samey’ they really are (which, after all, is what tonemapping is attempting to do). So what’s next year’s look?

Review for Basics: Lighting

I was very pleased to see that my book Basics: Lighting (published  by ava) has just been chosen as the Book of the Month in the July issue of Outdoor Photography magazine and received a sparkling review. It was particularly pleasing as half of the book covers studio lighting which isn’t really relevant to their readership!

Email by Lightroom

I was bemoaning the fact I could no longer email images as conveniently as I did with iView Media Pro. Bit of research solved the issue. Put an alias of Apple Mail in the Export Actions folder – then Export on a Preset (sRGB, 72dpi max 640px) having checked the What to Do after Export pop-up as Mail Alias.  Works like a treat opening a new mail document with the resized and profiled image from Lightroom.

Why Lightroom?

Why the change to Adobe Lightroom at this relatively late stage? I have been using iView Media Pro 3 happily for file cataloguing and ‘upgraded’ to Microsoft’s version Expression Media when the company was taken over. I have to say I’ve not been pleased  - the great tech support has gone with a user forum masquerading as tech support. The Microsoft incarnation runs much slower and now seems to think that XML sidecar files are somehow separate from their RAW parents and need cataloguing separately. It wasn’t long before I was unhappy enough to be looking at other Workflow products. Which is where the new version of Lightroom came in - Ver 1.1 now allows for synchronising catalogs – which is a big improvement. 

Portable drive

Having just upgraded to Adobe Lightroom 1.1 (more of which later) I  decided to put my early digital images onto a portable drive to catalogue and keyword them – finally. I got lucky – a shallow trawl threw up the Seagate FreeAgent Go drive as a cost effective solution. Unusually one was bought on the spur of the moment from a local PC World – the last 160Gb a store full of 120Gb drives. Apart from the surprise at finding a double ended USB cable – one for signal, both for power – the drive reformats for the Mac (just junk the Windows Vista backup stuff and attack with Drive Utility) at 149Gb useable. Speed is acceptably quick – copying two full 690Mb CDs in parallel takes about 6 minutes. The illuminated front panel is seriously attractive but the colours are not a delight. Cataloguing is going well… 

Hello world! A new blog

While waiting for 4Gb of images to copy onto a new portable HD I thought I’d start a photography blog.