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CalevPhoto

Photographing the Earth, one millimeter at a time…
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A Status Update

Wow! Things have been amazingly busy.  Between a very hectic schedule at work and a lot of things at home – including gutting the entire interior of our house, I think I am finally back to the stage where I can begin to write blogs again.

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Photography-wise, much has happened in the last several months.  I purchased the Canon TS-E 17 and the Canon TS-E 24 II lenses for a number of purposes and they are now two of my favorite lenses.  I will discuss them more in a future blog.

I finally bit the bullet and purchased Lightroom – along with Photoshop CS4.  I am still getting used to Lightroom and have barely used CS4 yet – though I hope to ramp up on them soon.  I do rather like Lightroom – particularly the keywording feature – though I must admit I’m still getting used to non-destructive editing.  I think the thing that annoys me most about it so far is I cannot (or at least I haven’t figured it out yet) overwrite the original JPEG.

I typically use the RAW file as my negative and the JPEG as my currently edited version.  If I change an image significantly – I’ll generally save it as a new file.

I have also learned quite a bit about time management lately.  In the past, I heavily participated in photography forums – most particularly a photography alias at my work.  I have come to realize though that these forums are not that incredibly useful.  In particular I began to notice the following.

1) I was writing more about photography equipment than on actual photography.  This may sound rude, but I have noticed that those who write the most about photography generally don’t take the best pictures.  The reason is the exhausting amount of time it takes to create a decent review and research things.

2) In most forums, the truly professional photographers are few and far between.  If you really want strong criticism of your photos and techniques, you’ll generally need to go directly to the photographers – not to the forums.

Therefore I have ceased participation in most of these venues.  I do still occasionally post in a few places – but only when I have a very particular question and I know there are members there that are very familiar with that subject area.

This has allowed me more time lately, which I hope to channel into consistently writing blogs.

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Posted in General Photography 8 months, 2 weeks ago at 7:08 pm.

2 comments

2 Replies

  1. James Fitzell Dec 24th 2009

    You’ll get used to the non-destructive editing.

    Using your example of “I typically use the RAW file as my negative and the JPEG as my currently edited version. If I change an image significantly – I’ll generally save it as a new file.” you would:
    - import the RAW and start working, (that’s always your “currently edited version”)
    - If you change the image significantly then you create a snapshot and can flick between the two
    - if you need both versions within the one working session then you create a virtual copy based on the second snapshot
    - your “negative” is always unchanged (the RAW) and can be reverted to at any point
    - you never deal with a “physical file” up until you want it out of lightroom, at that point you export the file as appropriate (normally a jpg, I have presets for if I’m exporting to print, put online, etc)

    For what it’s worth, I tick the “write changes to XMP sidecar” option, it’s entirely a personal preference but it means that the lightroom database can be lost without losing your changes and it means my backup of my “negatives” also contains the backup of my edits (the XMP files).

  2. jscalev Dec 25th 2009

    Thanks! I am starting to get used to non-destructive editing and I have been able to move to using Lightroom as the basis for all photo management and editing.

    So far I like Lightroom quite a bit.


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