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Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Lightroom 3 beta 2 Now Available – Brings with it Tethered Shooting!

Posted in Photography, on March 24th, 2010 by Carlos.

Impeccable timing. I saw this right after posting my photography tip. Adobe has released its second beta for Lightroom 3. Lightroom, is a powerful tool to manage and manipulate your photography. Here are the list of features they’ve introduced in the latest build:

  • Improved performance throughout the application for faster importing and loading of images
  • Native tethered shooting support for select Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras
  • Luminance noise reduction has been added to the previous color noise reduction improvements available in the first public beta for outstanding overall high ISO quality
  • Support for importing and managing video files from DSLR cameras for better overall photographic workflow control
  • Improvements to the import experience in the first beta to reflect public feedback
  • Improved watermarking functionality from the first beta to reflect public feedback

I’m certainly most interested in “Native tethered shooting support for select Nikon and Canon DSLR cameras”, explained here from an excerpt grabbed from the announcement page:

“You don’t need to be a professional photographer in a studio environment to appreciate the instant feedback provided by a tethered workflow.  Any time you need quick access to an image immediately after capture, simply plug in your Nikon or Canon DSLR via USB or Firewire and start a tethered session to view key camera settings, control the shutter release or apply various metadata and develop settings to incoming images.  No need for intermediate software or “watched” folders, Lightroom will handle the communication with your camera and safely transfer images to the folder you specify.  For this first implementation we’ve certified a limited number of Nikon and Canon DSLR models and look forward to adding additional Nikon and Canon camera models going forward.”

I’ve been using Nikon’s sub-standard Camera Control Pro 2 (ridiculously priced at $224.99 CAD), to tether my Nikon to my laptop when doing a photoshoot. Sure I had it save directly to a folder that I set Lightroom to automatically import as mentioned in the excerpt, but I can now cut-out the middle-man and tether straight into Lightroom. Looking forward to the official release of this one! [Adobe via TUAW]

Keys Photography Tip: Don’t Chuck that Photo – It Still has Potential!

Posted in Photography, on March 24th, 2010 by Carlos.

As a new segment for Keys That Click, I’ll throw in some photography tips every now and then. Given I’m a photo enthusiast (and semi-pro, as technically I do get paid for some of my photography) I figure I’d share some tips that I’ve found useful.

In my not-so-many-years of photography, one of the most important things I’ve learned is that there’s no such thing as a bad photo. Well, perhaps it starts bad, but if you give it some time and a heavy dose of Photoshop or Lightroom, you can wind up transforming it into something great. In fact, many of my own favourite photographs come from photos that I nearly deleted on first inspection.

Here are a few before and after examples of photos that I’ve transformed quite a bit.

You can see that sometimes there is a drastic difference between the original photo and the tweaked one. There is no exact science on how to achieve these results, but there are some things you can try to add more interest to seemingly dull shots. Here are some tips you can use:

  • Be creative with your cropping. Sometimes it’s just as easy as cropping an image to give it new life. Throw the image on an angle, or crop out something or someone you don’t want in the shot.
  • Set the exposure. More often then not, exposure is something that isn’t always as bang-on as you’d like it to be. For this reason, I’ll purposely under-expose my photos so that I can fix them up after the fact. It’s easy to adjust exposure on an under exposed shot, than it is on an over-exposed shot. Adjust your exposure to achieve the proper balance of your lights and darks.
  • Shoot in RAW. If your camera has the ability, shoot in RAW format. There is much more colour and light information stored in RAW photos, then you would in a JPG, making the adjustments much more natural looking.
  • Explore the hue/saturation/luminance in your photo. Bring out certain colours, or change them altogether to make your photo pop.
  • Focus the attention on a particular area of the photograph. Whether you use focus to achieve this, or my favourite, vignetting, you can really help to lead the eye in the right direction.
  • Go nuts. Just try anything and everything. I find Lightroom, with its non-descrtuctive changes, to be a phenomenal tool for this. You can literally spend hours on your photograph adjusting things.

Well there you have it! Hopefully this will inspire you to do some more photography, or go back and find some hidden gems in your existing collection!