Photo organization

How do you organize your photos? I prefer to use Lightroom for this. It’s great for quick edits and for RAW corrections. Still I have to do a lot of cleaning in my database, as it’s same as with everything else. When one does not organize everything right away, it starts to pile up and get a little overwhelming. My lightroom currently indexes around 100 000+ photos and I know, when I start to clean it up, I could delete at least 30-50% of them. But this will take a long time.

I also quite like the way Trey Ratcliff handles his photos. He describes it in his ebook Digital Workflow for Photographers and I really want to implement it. But for now I’m still struggling a bit. Will have to do the clean up first :)

On the pier

I went out today, hoping to get some new photos. Whole Bratislava is covered by a very heavy fog, so I thought a view from a higher place could look quite interesting. But no luck for me. The two highest spots in the city were not accessible. On the castle fortification they started a renovation project, so they are fenced off and on top of the SNP bridge was a private party. So no nice views for me. So I chosen another photo from this beautiful sunset at the lighthouse in Austria. Btw. don’t forget to visit this blog tomorrow, as there will be a little different post :)

This is a manual blend from 6 shots, created in Photoshop.

It’s so strange to have such a bright white in a photo. I usually tone it down a lot. But it’s not overexposed, it actually is how it should be. The chapel was nice an white, and it was in a direct sunlight at the time. So it really was shining. It was quite hard even to look at it directly.

This time I used Photomatix to blend the exposures. I haven’t used it in a long time, and I wanted to try out the new beta version. I have to say I’m quite pleased with the result, and it looks like the new algorithm does a very good job. Will probably use it from time to time again. A lot of photographers have a specific way they edit photos. I don’t. I use manual blending, Oloneo Photoengine, Photomatix or any other software I find interesting. And sometimes I chose the one I use just randomly. It’s a good way not to be stagnant and finding new ways to edit and new looks for your photos. And it’s also quite fun to try things out.

Me

I’m not such a big fan of photos I’m on. It’s probably the same by a lot of photographers. We like to be behind the camera, not in front of it. But I really like this shots, even if the quality is horrible (taken with an Ipad, one can’t expect a lot with so little light :)).

A sunset lighthouse

As I mentioned yesterday, I got quite a lot of nice photos of this lighthouse. During the hour I was taking photos there, I got more nice photos than during some of my week long trips.

It was also very fortunate that I got there in Autumn. The place is quite busy in summer and I would never be able to get a photo without people in it. I always like to visit places outside of the busiest times. It usually works quite well, as the sunrise and sunset times are usually not the most popular for tourists and other visitors.

This is a manual blend from 6 shots.

DSLR controller app

Anyone of you tried this app? It allows you to control the camera using most android devices, via a cable. It looks pretty good and the delay is acceptable. I just cant see myself using it in the field. Maybe for some product style photography. What do you think?

Of course here I played with a recursion, where I placed the tablet in front of the camera. Just having a little fun :)

High above the river

I almost posted another lighthouse photo today :) I just like all the photos from that sunset so much. But then I decided for a different one, just so it’s not all the same here. But I will add the lighthouse tomorrow. This is a view of the Danube river from the Aggstein castle in Austria. You just have to wonder how much work it took to build this castle on top of such a high hill. I really would not like to move all the needed stones there :)

This is a manual blend form 5 exposures. Blended in Photoshop.

How the week passed quickly. And again we have here another Tuesday and another process post. Today I chosen a very recent photos, as a lot of people liked it. So here goes.

To get this photo

I started as always in Lightroom, where I applied lens correction, removed chromatic abberations and applied a little noise reduction.

After that I loaded all the brackets into layers in Photoshop. I used the following layers (numbered from bottom up):
1. 0EV exposure
2. +1EV exposure to brighten the foreground
3. +2EV exposure to brighten the foreground even more
4. +1EV exposure once more, to recover few areas. I’m including here a screenshot of what I had to correct. Blending can make colors look grey, and this has to be corrected.

5. -1EV to darken the sky
6. -2EV to darken the brigtest parts of the sunset
7. Color Efex Pro contrast to add more structure and local contrast to the photo
8+9. aded glow (check out my tutorial on this) but I removed it from the darkest parts of the image, as they got too dark
10. brightened the darkest spots on the rocks
11. brightened the whole photo by adding a little bit of exposure

And that was all.
Please continue to the full post to see the original 0EV shot.