Josef “Jeff” Sipek

In my previous post I mentioned that I have more or less settled on using Adobe Lightroom 4 for my photo management and editing needs. After getting a comment from someone about his trouble with image management software, I decided to write a blahg post just about why I decided to go with Lightroom.

Adobe

Some people love Adobe while some hate it. Regardless of your feelings for the company, you’ve got to agree, they have a lot of experience when it comes to making photo editing and management software. If you want to get serious with digital photo management and editing, they probably got it right. It turns out that a fair amount of professional photographers use Lightroom during their workflow. So, if this program is good enough for people that rely on it for their livelihood, it is probably good enough for me. :)

catalog

I talked about this a bit in my previous post already, but I will repeat it here. Lightroom lets me do most things the same way I did before it except for the parts I didn’t like. So, I get to keep my <year>/<event> directory structure that I like, but all the photos are indexed and searchable. The catalog stores all the metadata and lets me quickly see thumbnails of only the photos I want to see.

tagging

This is a very common feature of photo management software, but I am including it here since I did not have anything like it with my previous workflow. One can associate arbitrary text strings with a photo and then filter based on that.

geo-tagging

One special metadata field that Lightroom handles is the GPS location. It also lets you select photos based on location on a nice map (pulled from Google Maps).

captions

Every photo can have a title and a caption. I haven’t experimented with this feature all that much but it is rather self explanatory.

ratings

Lightroom offers several ways to “rate” photographs. There is a very straight forward 5-star scale (you can set zero to five stars) as well as each photo can have a “pick” flag or a “reject” flag. After I first import photos from a new event, I display all the thumbnails to get a quick glance at what I shot. Then I view every photo individually and mark every photo that is utterly useless (e.g., blur-y) as a “reject” and every photo that seems promising as “pick”. Then, I look at just the rejects and delete them completely. Now, I just have ok photos (un-flagged) and good photos (flagged as “pick”). I use the stars to rate post-processed photos from mediocre (1-star) to ones I am proud of (5 stars).

DNG

Lightroom supports a variety of image formats — JPGs, TIFFs, PSDs, even various camera raw formats. I used to occasionally shoot in raw (NEFs) but viewing and editing them was a pain. With Ligthroom, I can use them just like any other file format. They just work. Interestingly, I no longer store NEFs. Instead of importing them and storing them as is, I let Lightroom convert them to  DNGs. I won’t go into NEF vs. DNG, but what tipped the scale in DNG’s favor in my case were sidecar files.

 sidecars

I do not know what most photo management applications do, but Lightroom stores all the metadata changes in its (SQLite) database. Additionally, it lets you tell it to store all metadata changes along with the original images as well. For every NEF file, it creates a sidecar  XMP file. That is, next to foo.nef it will create foo.xmp which contains all the metadata changes. JPGs store the metadata in the EXIF tags. DNGs also store the metadata internally. So, if you want raw files because of their quality, you can either use the camera manufacturer’s native raw format and have to keep the XMP files around, or convert them to DNG (which is lossless conversion by default) and then not worry about sidecars.

misc

There are many other cool features that Lightroom offers — from being able to quickly batch process hundreds of photos to being able to generate web galleries and upload them via sftp with a single click. The list of features is way too long, and I am certain that I haven’t found them all yet.

So there you have it. That is what I do with Lightroom. Other software packages had various deficiencies. As an added benefit, with Lightroom I get to use more open formats (DNG & XMP) than without it.

As a technical side-note, all my photos are on a ZFS dataset that I access via CIFS. Yes, compression is enabled ( lzjb).

As some of you know, I do enjoy running around with my camera. It really is a lot of fun wandering aimlessly around, taking a photo or a dozen of something that looks interesting or funny. Unfortunately, there is more to photography than just capturing photons. Once you have the “raw” images, you need to post-process them. Digital cameras make the photon capture part super-easy, however they don’t simplify post processing all that much. (Yes, I know, you no longer need to deal with darkrooms and chemical baths. My point is, the amount of improvement in photo taking is way greater than the amount of improvement in post processing.)

About two weeks ago, I decided to give Adobe Lightroom 4 a go. Up until then, I just had a super-simple organizational scheme: a directory for every year (2004, 2005, …, 2012) and inside each, a directory for each “event”. For example, the 2005 Ottawa Linux Symposium was in 2005/ols while the 2006 one was in 2006/ols. In each event directory, I just had a bunch of jpegs or NEFs. If I wanted to modify an image, I’d open it in Gimp or Photoshop, and save whatever variants I wanted to in a subdirectory called pp — which stands for post-processed. A very simple scheme, but it doesn’t scale. Over the years, I moved my photo collection from computer to computer, trying to keep a backup on an external disk whenever possible. Sadly, this resulted in my having a 130 GB directory with the per-year scheme and “temp” directories with various amounts of the same images, as well as some “I need to empty the CF card now, so I’ll just dump it somewhere temporarily” directories. I suspect that I have about 70–80 GB of unique content.

With this mess on my hands, I decided to try some photo management software. A while ago, I looked at digiKam and I was not impressed. Then about two weeks ago, I gave Picasa and Lightroom a try. Picasa didn’t quite do what I wanted it to do — keep a very similar workflow to what I have now (keep the per-year and per-event directories) but make it really easy to make powerful edits to the images non-destructively. That is, I want to keep the original as they are, but associate the edited images with the original. Lightroom hit the spot right on. At this point I am still using the 30-day trial, but I’m going to spring for the $150 full version.

Anyway, I’ll talk more about Lightroom at some later time. Today, I just want to share 25 photos from an air show I went to on Memorial Day in 2005. (Photos that have been “rotting” in my giant pile of photos until I imported them into Lightroom.) I generated a photo gallery with all 25. Below are the better ones.

Everyone can appreciate a cute photo of a cat. Here’s Jasmine again:

It’s been a while since I used my camera. Yesterday evening, my girlfriend got her cat from home. I used the opportunity to take a few shots. As you may have guessed, her name (the cat’s) is Jasmine.

Today is 4th of July…which means fireworks everywhere. Yesterday evening, Jackson, MI had a rather nice display. Here are some of the photos I took:

Today being 4th of July meant that I could get some fireworks photography going. I was disappointed to find out that Ann Arbor didn’t have a fireworks display (or at least I haven’t found any information about one). The closest one I could find was in Romulus - about 20 minute drive east on I-94.

The fireworks started around 22:05, and ran for about 25 minutes. Since I managed to not charge up the battery before leaving, the camera let me take only about 40 photos. Below are some of them.

Yesterday, I went to the anual Roth Pond Regatta at Stony Brook. It’s an event where different groups of people race their cardboard and duct-tape boats across a pond. (This was the third time I went, but this year, my participation was limited to taking photos.) Below are some of the more interesting ones, you can always check out the whole gallery (as well as photos from 2007 and 2006; note that the photos haven’t been post processed).

The Stony Brook Computing Society’s boat:

Some other team’s boat…both nice looking and fast:

These folks did not have Dino around:

Gargamel (SBCS member):

Getting the head on:

Papa Smurf! (note the size of the people in comparison):

Another team had fun with special effects:

Then, the races began…

Some boats didn’t make it off the starting line:

Others did extremely well:

Papa Smurf is getting old, and isn’t as agile as he once used to be:

Gargamel finds it very amusing:

Paddle faster!

Trojans nearing the finish line (note that the boat looks somewhat unfinished - the legs aren’t fully painted!)

Papa Smurf getting demolished (part of the rules, once you lose, you must dispose of your boat)

Mummy trying to get to the shore:

The dumpster “guardians” using power-tools on Papa Smurf’s head:

This is a very small subset of the photos I took…if you want to see more (un-postprocessed) photos, follow the link near the top of this entry.

It was a dark and stormy night…wait a minute…it was a clear and calm night; the night sky glistened with the light from thousands of streetlights releasing billions upon billions of photons, only to be scattered by the atmosphere and to rain down upon Ann Arbor — to pollute the otherwise perfect night sky. So, Jeff, a twenty-odd year old who can be best described using Dungeons & Dragons character alignment as "chaotic good," decided that it was time to escape the particle bombardment to attempt the astronomically difficult, and equally arcane, task known as astrophotography…

Anyway…Here are the exposure details and the photos (from February 24, 2009):

826 seconds
f/3.5
ISO 800
Nikon D70
18—70mm @ 18mm (35mm equiv: 27mm)
Location: McCollum Rd, MI

Here’s the same photo, but with a very well known constallation outlined.

Today, I ended up in Chelsea, MI. It’s about 12-ish miles west of Ann Arbor. It’s a relatively tiny place (or at least it looks that way). I dropped in at the library, and there I took a couple of photos (hunting for places to take photos of things is fun!)…

The library itself:

When you enter it, you notice a staircase. Before I took this photo, I accidentally managed to turn of auto-focus, and after about 10 failed attempts at getting the photo to not look fuzzy I gave up. It took me about 10 more minutes of wondering around to figure out that it wasn’t focusing :)

The best part of the library (well, I may be wrong :) ) are these lights:

I always considered libraries a generally safe place, but if they really were safe, why would they sport a sign like this one? Also, note the scratches on the sign itself! A dangerous place indeed!

Anyway, that’s that for today.

Edit: For those curious enough, the single lamp photo was taken with my D70 + 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor @ 1/3200s, f/2.2, -1.00 EV Ex. Comp., ISO 200

This is essentially a follow up to a previous post.

As it turns out, the big gray-ish blob commonly referred to as Luna, or even more commonly referred to as the Moon, is still there. As always, it seems to hide about once every 4 weeks.

The other day, I read somewhere that the moon was going to appear bigger than usual. When I got home, I ran outside, saw that it wasn’t cloudy, and took a bunch of photos of the moon. I spend a grand total of about 4 minutes outside before the -8C air got too much for my fingers to control the camera well.

Here are the spoils of war. Just as in the earlier post, these are taken at the 300mm end of my 70-300 zoom, which on my D70 is equivalent to 450mm on 35mm film.

They were all taken at f/5.6, with either 1/640 or 1/800 second exposure.

I should try to use a tripod one day, take a burst of 1/800 exposures, and then try to stack them in software. (I know people use webcams though telescopes and hundreds of exposures to get decent images, so it should work just as well with an SLR.)