Month: June 2010

Field trial of Lightroom 3 tethered shooting

Just back from a very pleasant if hard working 2 day shoot with Clive Nichols.

I thought this would be a good trial of Lightroom 3 tethered capture.

It was.

Tethered capture is a real necessity with art directors and clients on a shoot as each shot needs checking and changes made before each setup is signed off and we can move onto the next one.

We abandoned Lightroom 3’s built in camera control straight away as although we could trigger the shutter we only had a readout of aperture and shutter speed so could not make exposure adjustments from the laptop, this was important as when the camera is high up or in a tight corner it is difficult to adjust the camera itself.

We reverted to the Canon software for controlling the camera and setup Lightroom 3 to auto import images from the capture folder. This did work most of the time but we had a few glitches where the images did not make it through. As soon as I realised this was slowing the shoot down I reverted to Lightroom 2.7 which performed the same functions perfectly.

Lesson: Always keep the last good version of software on your computer till you are sure the new version is ok.

It could be that any forthcoming update (3.1?) will sort this problem and perhaps Adobe could spend some of that money they make in extending the functionality to camera control at some point. Until then I’m sticking to 2.7 for tethered shooting.

Client Advisory: Silver TeraStation owners

The silver boxed Buffalo Terastation was released in 2005. With its 1TB capacity (~700GB as raid 5) it was a welcomed device to many photographers who needed secure storage for their images.
I advised purchase of these devices to many people and I know that there are dozens of them still working fine today. There have been a few devices that have developed problems prematurely but as long as the data was backed up to other devices before replacing a faulty hard disk there should have been no problems.
However, we may be approaching the 5th anniversary for many of these devices and in my experience 5 years is a significant time for hard disks to be running continuously.
This advisory is to say, be prepared!, make sure that you have the devices backed up in at least one other separate place and consider migrating files to another device within the next 12 months.For the same cash that bought the 1tb silver device you can now purchase a much faster 4tb device and many clients have already done this. I now use my own silver terastation (pictured above) as an ftp server, it no longer houses copies of master images but is very happy serving copies of retouched files to clients, a pleasant retirement for this old horse.

Lightroom 3 released

I’m not a keen fan of Lightroom for productive imaging workflow but do think its a great way to manage collections of images (search, re purposing etc). Its ideal for small to medium sized businesses who don’t have custom programmed image databases but need some of that functionality.
Its also my preferred platform for auto importing when shooting tethered when its important for art directors to see the shot asap after the shutter is released (though via the canon capture software rather than the built in tethered options). I have been using the Beta of 3 for a while, the release code is on order and I will let you know if there are any changes.

More details from Adobe here: http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshoplightroom/?promoid=DTEWE

GPS Location data panel for Photoshop CS5

For clients who like as rich a metadata set as possible there is nothing like having the location you took an image embedded in it. This has been possible for a while in supported cameras (or via GPS attachments) and now Adobe are supporting the resulting GPS data via a new plug in panel. It’s a manual download and install from here:

for windows
for mac

Just follow the install advice you find there. (What is not mentioned is that if you still don’t see the GPS panel when installed you may need to click on preferences in the file info dialog and select “Restore default dialog”)

Be aware that having rich metadata in your Master collection is a good thing for you but you may want to consider erasing such metadata from versions of the files going out to clients if the images contain subjects such as endangered species or private gardens where its best not to reveal the exact location.
Contact me if you need assistance in automating the stripping out of metadata from retail files, this can be done field by field right down to retaining only essential metadata such as copyright, contact, caption and keyword information.

Sue Flood gets into the RPS International Print Exhibition

Congratulations to Sue Flood for getting one of her images accepted into the Royal Photographic Societies International Print Exhibition of 2010. Her image entitles “Boundaries” was one of only 124 selected from over 3,000 entries.

I made the high quality print for Sue on my profiled Epson 3800 A2 printer. The image was shot on a Canon 1ds mkIII and was carefully converted from RAW to ensure that highlight detail in the snow and shadow detail in the water was retained.

Sue like many of my clients allow me to maintain an off site backup of Master files for them, not only does this provide for security in case of disaster it also allows me to fulfil client requests to supply files to their customers when the photographer is away from base for extended periods.

Purchasing a Mac Pro workstation?

You may want to hold back a while as a refresh is long overdue and there are rumblings that something new in this line could be launched at the WWDC conference June 7- 11.

The current quad core Mac Pros are getting a little long in the tooth and the rumored new 6 core processors would improve Photoshop performance…

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro

Important update to Photoshop CS4

Adobe have been busy! They have released Version 11.0.2 which plugs some security holes in Photoshop CS4. The security issues look pretty obscure and unlikely but its a good idea to install it anyway.
Open Photoshop CS4 and select the menu item: Help:Updates and follow instructions from there.

Photoshop CS5 in not affected by this bug.

You can read more about the issues here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb10-13.html