Saturday Morning . . .

. . . in Glenwood, MD. With my Canon G-9 and a pass through Lightroom.

Lightroom: My new Best Friend

I love Lightroom. In fact the more I use and understand it the more I love it. Everything I shoot now goes through Lightroom. For me, all final images are still worked on in Photoshop but all now begin their lives in Lightroom. The interface is well designed and so very intuitive, I can see ( just as in Photoshop) spending years wrapping my head around how deep this program is. But this is a good thing and one reason why I like it.

When I first started using Lightroom over the Summer I found this book, Lightroom Adventure, very helpful in understanding the utility and scope of this program. With Lightroom the image processing alone is fantastic but also creating presets, wonderful web galleries, keywording, appending metadata, cataloging and more. There is so much more and will only grow as creatives embrace this program. One example, here is an independently produced module, Slideshowpro, which allows you to highly customize Lightroom galleries. Also, an interesting blog, Lightroom Killer Tips, with lots of good info. I pulled a few presets from this site and occassionally use them. Below are a few images from a recent shoot one morning that I have been working on today. For this project I wanted a vintage feel so I utilized a few Lightroom presets:

Taking the Lensbaby for a stroll

Yesterday Val decided we should do something. It was afterall in the mid 50's so we loaded up the truck and headed to Baltimore for a nice family walk around the Inner Harbor. Ordinarily I would bring a Leica for such excursions but for me nowadays film is a hassle. I have a box accross the room with unprocessed rolls of 35mm and 120 crying out to be processed and scanned. My middle son Jay is in a wheelchair so it's a little tough pushing that, lugging a bag full of heavy Canon L Lenses, and enjoying myself.

S0, I just brought a Canon 5D with a Lensbaby . If you don't know what a Lensbaby is check the link, you might like it. Yes, I know the effect is overdone and all that but I never claimed to be above cheap gimmickery to force my art upon the masses. And besides, I like the effect. Sometimes it's good to change your perspective a bit and view the world through a different lens. Here are a few images from yesterday. BTW- other than passing through Lightroom, a sepia effect on a few, these are basically straight from the camera, no additional trickery.