Hey Flagstaff-area readers: This year Flagstaff has a slot on the Worldwide Photo Walk. We’ll be strolling from downtown Flagstaff, toward the NAU campus and back again on the evening of July 18.
So come visit the photowalk site, sign up, and join us. No experience necessary — just a desire to meet some friendly neighbors, go for a walk, and take some pictures.
A couple of years ago I came across Camiel Schoonen’s very well-done set of antique presets for Lightroom/Lightroom 2 (link to flickr discussion page for the presets). They achieve some nice effects, as in my example below from a ride on the Grand Canyon Railway. The modified photo is on top, original beneath:
(link is to flickr photo)
After a laptop transition gone awry, Camiel lost his copies of the presets, but I still have a copy. I’ve forwarded these back to Camiel so he can resume their distribution over at his own site.
Thanks for the great work, Camiel!
These are tremendously powerful photos of the Tehran riots.
Update: Commenter Roozbeh suggests that the protester is not, in fact, lending aid, but “taking” the officer, and points to another photo of the same scene. In this third photo, it appears that two protesters are leading the police officer out of the crowd.
There are plenty of fairly brutal photos in that same series — many cops have responded to the protests violently, to be sure, and that’s really important to recognize. Aside from awareness of the apparently stolen election that has mobilized protesters to the streets, I of course don’t know what’s in this particular protester’s mind, but it doesn’t appear to me in either photo that he’s trying to hurt the police officer. The only thing that would resolve that would be to find him and get his description of the scene — I hope that somebody does.
I’m sure the rest of you figured this out ages ago, but it was a new realization to me. The LR2/Mogrify border options for Lightroom 2 allow for borders to be applied on three metrics: pixel size, percent of height, and percent of width. That allow, for example, for easy application of letterbox-style top and bottom borders without needing to pay any attention to the cropped dimension of your image.
The plugin default is in pixels; just switch to percent and you’re off. Something in the range of 10% of height seems to suit my eye pretty well.
A while back I described my Lightroom 2 backup routine. A couple of recent blog posts around the web have given me some new things to think about with regard to backup and workflow.
Thomas Hawk writes about his workflow and Eric Scouten follows up with some thoughts. A core part of Thomas’s workflow is quick development of any and all keeper photos from a shoot and immediate export of those images to JPG. He re-synchronizes those JPGs with his Lightroom library and moves all the raw images offline (to a drobo; Jon at blurbomat extolls the drobo’s virtues, too) , and doesn’t apply keywords and such except to the finished JPGs.
Reacting to this, Eric notes a couple of things that get my attention (his emphasis):
- The act of choosing what’s in and what’s out becomes an affirmative process rather than a process that’s about rejecting photos. Why not make the selection process a happy one?
- This means the “selects” catalog is always in tip-top shape whenever I need to show someone my current work. Right now, the “main” catalog always contains some number of rough photos that haven’t been filtered out to the archive catalog.
By quickly moving from raw to selected and and “finished” JPG, the process builds the catalog of preferred images and gets the unused images out of the way. And applying keywords and other metadata only to the keepers dramatically reduces the overall metadata workload.
Where does this point me? I have a couple of thoughts:
Thoughts? How do you manage the possibility of future image development with your goals, limited creative time and storage space?
I had not known about the Purge Unused Keywords command. Good way to clean up from quick or typo-ridden keywording
Working on learning to play a little guitar.
Pentax K100D / Pentax SMC FA 35mm @ f/2.8
From today’s hike on Sedona’s Wilson Mountain trail:
Pentax K100D / Pentax SMC FA 35mm @ f/11. Black and white conversion with Lightroom 2.
Matt Yglesias asks “What are Today’s Protests Missing?” Turns out he asked much the same question a few years ago, and I had some thoughts at the time about what seems to be a common feature of both the left and right: When compared to the protest of ye old days, contemporary mass mobilization is greeted by public intellectuals with a sigh and either one of a) regret that it isn’t ye old days anymore when protests were coherent and organized, or b) dismissive sneering about how the hippies have never been good for anything and still aren’t good for anything.
This time around, Matt makes a really important point, that coherence of movements often is really only sensible in hindsight:
Both Gandhi and King led movements that were committed to vaguely defined and quite sweeping visions of social change that, among other things, included opposition to capitalism and all forms of war. Their goals look well-defined in retrospect because they achieved a great deal so, in retrospect, MLK’s leadership resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Gandhi’s leadership led to independence for India. But all mass-movements are prone to ill-defined goals.
That’s a part of one of the key observations I made in response to this same thread a few years ago:
The single largest event of the period was a Washington, D.C., antiwar rally of November 15, 1969, attended by an estimated 250,000 people. A quick read of the coverage of that weekend—like yesterday’s march, it really was a series of events, not a single event—demonstrates that participants were there to take part for many reasons, although they all ended up under the anti-war banner: Students protested the draft; religious activists ranging from Catholic to Quaker participated; radical leftists were there, as were elderly women and parents with their children, as were small groups seeking violent confrontations; also present were African American organizers and advocates for the poor, protesting the war’s diversion of funds from domestic programs. This is still an oversimplified list of participants; it’s clear that while the war was the most tangible target of the protests, many grievances actually brought protesters out. Like this weekend’s march, officially organized by United for Peace and Justice, that series of events had a nominal set of organizers, but plenty of other groups also participated. In a sister protest across the country, where another 100,000 people demonstrated, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Gay Liberation Front were among notable organizations represented.
This is not to say that the context for contemporary protest hasn’t changed: Political opportunity structure is different, modes and tools of mobilization are transforming, and movement organizations are functioning in some very different ways. But we need to be aware of the reality of the good old days of American protest in order to make sense of what has changed and what hasn’t changed.
Update: Brayden King, one of my old office-mates, has more thoughts on this topic. Typically for him, it’s good, smart, well-researched stuff.
The MacHeist 3 bundle is only available through April 7th, so if you’ve thought about it and haven’t made up your mind — or are just now hearing about it for the first time — well it’s time to decide.
This year’s MacHeist currently includes, for the low-low-edge-of-your-seat price of $39, OS X applications like Acorn (lightweight complement to PhotoShop, scriptable with Python, cool) and World of Goo. Total bundle value according to MacHeist is over $600.
So amble on over and check it out.
The second part of the excellent sharpening tutorial from X-Equals covers export sharpening.
I had read about rigging a macro lens by placing a fast prime lens, inverted, at the end of a first lens mounted on the camera, but I haven’t ever really been inspired to try it until I saw Robert’s tutorial. Turns out it’s easy and lots of fun to do with the K100D kit lens and the FA50mm.
Here’s a bottle cap from a fine Yeti Imperial Stout:
These are tiny screws (5mm to 7mm or so in length) from my coffee machine:
It’s not a substitute for a true macro lens with a close minimum focal distance (there’s so little depth of field that focus is shifty and hard to hold long enough for the shot, and the angle of view of very, very small) but it’s pretty cool all the same.
Very good description of setting default camera-specific develop settings in LR2. I have not worked much with this yet, but this tutorial has me thinking that it is time to do so for my own Pentax.
Stata, Sociology and Culture. Brayden is right: Bitchinest soc blog title in a long while.
Some 3rd party lenses use ID numbers that duplicate Pentax lens IDs, and this causes confusion for photo software. A bit of perl magic rewrites the IDs with unique text descriptions.
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Copyright and so forth: Commenters own their own posts, and linked or excerpted material is subject to whatever copyright covers the original. Everything else here is mine, rights reserved.
