Universal Truths and the Consequences

Photography is about images

To make photos you need to have a camera. even when people will wear Google glasses, we will still need some type/form of cameras. Without a camera, you can't make a photo. From the pinhole camera to latest and the greatest Leica M or the Hasselblad H5D, you need some type of camera.

Nobody except professional photographers and a few “crazy photographers” carry their dSLRs with them. A few people have their point and shoot camera with them but almost everybody carries a cell phone with them.

Copy External Images from Inside Lightroom

Question: Is it possible to create copies of original files (CR2, NEF, OTF…) within Lightroom

The first immediate answer is: Yes, of course, just create a virtual copy and you have your copy. But no, that's not what I want. I have a file IMG_1234.CR2, and I want to have 2 physical files: IMG_1234.CR2 and IMG_1234-2.CR2.

Lightroom doesn't have a physical copy image function. The “almost” solution is to Export and set the file type to Original.

Her Favorite Photo

Henry: French Bulldog   click on image for gallery

This is Henry a French Bulldog, aka a “Frenchie”. He is only a year old. He can be a terror. Nobody and nothing will stand in between him and treats.

The Secret to IS/OS/VR

Every camera manufacturer is has some type of stabilization. For some cameras like Canon and Nikon, the stabilization is built in the lens, for others like Olympus, Pentax and Sony, the stabilization is built into the camera. Some camera manufacturers claims 3EV gain, the newer ones are claiming 4EV and Nikon is now claiming 5EV of stabilization. Most people doubt these claims then they show their photos where they didn't get the 4EV gain. That's because they don't know how to make it work!

Here is a serie of 6 consecutive photos with the IS. 3 consecutive photos where the IS didn't work as expected and 3 consecutive photos where the IS gave me the full 4EV gain.

I'm using Canon, but this is the same for all the camera manufacturers: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Pentax…

These photos are photos of Wile E. Coyote, from the RoadRunner cartoon. BTW, the E stands for Ethelbert.

Canon 7D Quirk

Saturday was a very foggy day on Canada's West Coast. I still went to hand feed the sandhill cranes and see if there is any way to improve my BIF skills. There is BIF, Bird In Flight, there is BOG, Bird On the Ground, there is BIT, Bird In Tree… Very few people make photos of BIF, most people talk BIF but they don't do BIF, they do BOG or BIT. I'm mostly a BOG/BIT guy, but that's OK since I do not claim to do BIF. So I decided this year to make thousands upon thousands of BIF and eventually they will be good. So I started with one of the most difficult subject for BIF, the ducks! They are fairly small and they are extremely quick. Easy to find but very hard to photograph in flight.

Please note the underexposure from the Canon 7D quirk.

Flying Mallard

Underexposed Flying Mallard  Canon 7D, Aperture Priority f/6.3, AutoISO: 160, 1/320s, Evaluative metering, Canon 70-200 IS f/4L @160mm

Do Your Photos Have Any Value?

Photos can have 3 values:

  1. Sentimental
  2. Financial
  3. Historical
  • The vast majority of the photos only have a sentimental value. These are the photos the people take with them in case of floods, fire, disasters… When was the last time you looked at them? Do you even know where they are? Can you find them? In the old days, only 15 years ago, we would look through the albums and go through the shoe boxes full of photos. Today? I know where my photos are in Lightroom. I know my categories, I know my keywords, I know which directory/folder these photos are located in.

Raw and Colour Space

Almost all dSLRs (except some of the really, really old dSLRs from the early 2000) provide two colour spaces, the ubiquitous sRGB (standard RGB)1 and aRGB (adobe RGB)2. aRGB was developed by Adobe as a colour space that would cover the full CMYK colour space used by printing presses like magazines…

A raw file has a much larger colour space than either sRGB or aRGB.

  1. sRGB is an 8 bit colour space: 8 bit (256) reds, 8 bit (256) greens and 8 bit (256) blues. ↩

  2. aRGB is a 12 bit colour space: 12 bit (4096) reds, 12 bit (4096) greens and 12 bit (4096) blues. ↩

Lightroom: Controlling the Panels

Everything in Lightroom works with the panels. It's very easy to use, but the panels take a lot of screen real estate. Often, I only need some panel. Everybody knows (or should know) that all the panels can be toggled on or off the screen with the Shift-Tab.

But you can toggle every panel on and off with the F5, F6, F7 and F8 function keys.

Lightroom: Sorting Collections

Lightroom is “funny” in the way that it's such a powerful tool but in many ways it's missing some basic functionality. I'd like to sort the order of the collections. The programming code is already there, since Lightroom already provides the functionality in the Grid view where you can drag and drop the images to change the order of the photos within a collection.

Weatherproof L Lenses

According to the popular belief L lenses (the professional line) are supposed to sealed and weatherproof. Weatherproof doesn't mean waterproof. My watch is waterproof to 20 atmospheres. This means that my watch can withstand pressures of 280 pounds per square inch! That's a lot. Weatherproof means that under light rain, the water will not go inside the lens.

So back to our L lenses. Some L lenses are weatherproof out of the box, some L lenses need some filter to make them weather resistant and finally some L lenses are not weatherproof at all.

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