Tuesday December 2
 
16:15
 
Cross Your Fingers That You’re Sorry

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Checking the price of the D700 on a Japanese website, using Google Translate to determine whether the resultant page was an error or success. Is this meant to be a semi-subliminal message to cross my fingers and be sorry for asking the price of expensive cameras in these hard economic times?

The price of the D700 has fallen recently. It is now as low as 229,000 yen, which drops to 199,000 yen after Nikon’s 30,000 yen cashback. It would be tempting if the lens I wanted to buy wasn’t also 200,000 yen.

Monday December 1
 
10:59
 
Yoyogi Koen

Yoyogi Koen, Tokyo, Japan.
Nikon D60, 18-200VR. F5.6 at 1/100s. ISO1600.
Custom B&W conversion in Lightroom.

By the time I got to the park this weekend, the sun wasn’t great and I ended up only taking four photos. I had to use ISO1600 for each of them - not great for capturing the colour of the autumn leaves, but the grain works really well in B&W.

Friday November 28
 
18:15
 
Freedom

For the last two months, I’ve been working on getting my old photos into Lightroom - all 55,000 of them. I’ve been gathering photos from the 30+ DVDs where they have been residing, organising them into conceptual units (Family, Friends, etc), fixing dates and orientation, ensuring the photos are tagged with the relevant DVD so that I can find the originals again, etc. At the same time I’ve been setting up backups, both to Flickr and automatic incremental backup to a USB disk, and setting up a new workflow to replace my old pre-Lightroom workflow.

That organisation is now complete, with the exception of uploading to Flickr. Yes, I don’t have everything micro-tagged with “Korea”, “food”, “falling over drunk”, but those things are searchable. Now it’s time to move on.

So this week I started reading books on the Develop module within Lightroom. Many books. Comparing what each said, and really trying to get it all into my brain. Some were better than others - but through throwing myself into it and cross referencing what I didn’t understand, I’ve now started to get a real feel for how the different parts of Develop work and why. I just regret that I don’t have that many images to really play with, because I only started shooting RAW recently.

One thing that became clear to me when reading the “day in the life” type workflows in these books was just how many of the photographs we see are post processed. Almost every digital photograph we see has been custom post processed in some way - from white balance, to exposure, the more extreme corrections.

I’ve never been one for post-processing. This is partly because I regarded it as “cheating” and so wanted to capture an image which was “right” from the beginning, and partly because I didn’t have the time to do so, since I was lacking both the workflow tools and skill.

I’ve always challenged myself to get great “out of the camera” images and been disappointed at the small percentage of “wow”s compared to the media and other photographers. I realise now that I’ve been far too hard on myself - trying to create the “perfect” image straight out the camera when everyone else is tweaking away.

In some ways, it was partly my misconception. I thought I was doing no post processing when in fact my images were being post processed - but not by me, by the camera. Everything is an interpretation of the RAW underlying photo data - I was letting the camera “interpret” that. It decided the white balance, added generic level of sharpening, enhanced the colour, shone a fill light. Sometimes I wasn’t happy with the result - but then how could I be when generic post processing is applied to everything? Do cameras have eyes? Can they judge everything perfectly? If computers could do that, “Auto Levels” in Photoshop would be perfect every time.

Now I get the chance to decide what “generic” processing should be applied myself - enough so that my images look decent enough to be uploaded to Flickr - and I can tweak as necessary on top of that.

I don’t feel nearly as “fake” about post-processing now that I understand:

RAW has to be post processed, and if I don’t choose the defaults, my converter will.

PP was happening all along when I was shooting JPEG, but it was outside of my control.

No professional digital photographer is using their photos “as is” and presenting them to clients; they are all post processed in some way - from grey-selecting white balance and adjusting exposure to more extreme PP such as cloning out unwanted parts, selective sharpening, and adding highlight or removing distractions.

Since I started playing with Develop in Lightroom this week, I’ve really started to get the “wow” I was missing before, without feeling I am “cheating”. So far I’ve been playing with photos of people - myself, friends - so I’m not posting them here, but when I can take more people-free photos, hopefully in Thailand in Dec, I hope to get some on here.

Friday November 28
 
13:37
 
Lightroom 2.1: Virtual Copies

I’ve started to use Virtual Copies extensively in Lightroom. Whenever I want to make an adjustment to an image, instead of adjusting the original, I right click on it and select “Create Virtual Copy”. This means I have both the original image and my post-processed image, the virtual copy, both easily at hand in the film strip and grid view - but using almost no extra disk space. I prefer this approach to snapshots.

But Lightroom 2.1 has a problem selecting virtual copies to appear in smart collections.

The sensible way to do it would be to select by File Type - after all, to us these appear as separate images. That, however, is not possible - presumably because these are not individual files, but are stored in the library or in metadata.

Thinking laterally, virtual copies have a value in Copy Name - original images do not. So a smart collection based on “Copy Name is not empty” should work, right?

Wrong. All original images are returned - minus the virtual copies.

If you want a collection of virtual copies, ie. where Copy Name is not empty, then you have to select by “Copy Name is empty“. If you want to exclude virtual copies, ie. where Copy Name is empty, then you have to use “Copy Name is not empty”.

Crazy. Apparently this bug was introduced in LR2.1 RC1 and reported to Adobe but still made it into the official 2.1. Let’s hope 2.2 fixes this and does the sensible thing of allowing “FileType is Virtual Copy” or “Virtual Copy is true”. Lightroom 2.2 is due out in December.

Thursday November 20
 
15:39
 
Bolloxroom

“An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

And it was all going so well…