And ...

... I'm back.

#CanIGettaW00t?!

mkay...

...seems all was not as simple as I first thought.

Came up with over 1,100 "Missing Photos" in each of my two now-synchronized catalogs.

erk...

But, Lightroom to the rescue.

Select a specific missing photo (part of the beauty of Lightroom is that, even though it knows when a photo's gone missing it can still show you what it knew about it before it vanished) in Grid mode of the Library module, and click on the "Missing Photo" icon in the upper-right corner.

Lightroom attempts to give you a best-guess as to where it was, to navigate from.

*If* you know the photo is really still around, navigate to the correct folder and select the specific file.

Leave "Find nearby photos?" selected.

Click OK.

Lightroom recovers the missing photos!

In the Library module, under "Catalog" select "All photos" and select Library > Find missing photos.

Again, select one, click "Missing" icon, find, find nearby.

Find the photos, Spot! Good dog.

Repeat as needed, or wade through all the missing photos all at once.

Coolness...

And what had happened to the "Missing" photos in the first place?

I had renamed a few directories on my file server, which Lightroom had no way of knowing about.

Takeaway: only rename source directories on the file server from within Lightroom, under the "Folders" panel in the Library module.

duh...

*Whew* That was really...

...scary.

Any first-time experiment that involves *really* important stuff (my photos) and new software (Adobe Lightroom) and the primary index file of a large and important database (Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat) has got to be scary.

The primary problem is that I have two essentially identical shiny-new Win 7 boxes to use for photo post-processing.

Each has its own copy of Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5.

The core idea here is that I can be working on one project, move to the other box when something on the first is taking time (i.e. printing) and keep right on working -- but on a separate project.

Or just switch back and forth between two projects: work for a half hour on wrestling, work for a half hour on basketball, lather-rinse-repeat.

Or wanting to print photos from one project simultaneously on both boxes when the catalog's only on one.

The problem is that over time I get two entirely different catalogs of photos on each box.

Which at the very least is a PITA trying to remember what's where.

So, search Lightroom Help for "combine catalog" or "merge catalog" or variants, only to finally discover that what I want to do is "Import from catalog".

Which is, of course, right there on the File menu in the first place, but whatever...

Select "Import from catalog" and navigate to the *.lrcat file on the other box over the network, select it, and "OK".

"Check All".

"Add new photos to catalog without moving" i.e. keep them out on the file server.

Select "Replace metadata, Develop settings and negative files" and "Preserve Old Settings As A Virtual Copy".

Click "Import".

Hold breath.

And it works -- although it takes a while, given that I've got over 6,500 photos that have been imported.

And what I get is identical catalogs on both computers, with photos in an equivalent state on both boxes.

Of course the two catalogs will diverge as I work separately on each box, but it's nice to know that I can synchronize them pretty painlessly -- and quickly, having done the heavy lifting once the first time.

Further thoughts about Adobe Lightroom...

...while I'm waiting for the printer to finish.

So I'm printing an order, one which in the past would have been rather a PITA because it involves six different photos in four different formats or aspect ratios.

One image is to be done as an 8x10" portrait, a 5x7" portrait, and at 1.9x2.8" on a 4x6" sheet -- this to fit a custom commemorative frame from the 2010 Father-Daughter Dance.

The first two would be rather straight forward: load the original image, compose and finalize the crop, load the paper, do the page setup, do the print setup, print it.

But switching between the two crops always brought up a "Save the Changes?" dialog, and it was here I had to pay attention, because although many times I want to save changes, here I don't because all I'm doing is sending out a transient version to the printer.

But more than once I'd hit <Enter> reflexively, only to go "Oh cr*p..." because, no, I really didn't want to save that specific crop: I'd just over-written the original which is Not a Good Thing(tm).

But with Lightroom, there's no concept of "Save" or "Save as" at all - in fact there isn't even such a thing on any menu.

Which takes some getting used to.

Again, what Lightroom does is all "virtual" -- or, as I'd rather think of it, write to a database that records a list of state changes for a given image.

So there's no risk of saving some intermediate format of an image, because all I'd done was work through some new state changes, print that, and *poof* none of it really exists anywhere except the final print, and even those state changes can go away as soon as I need to edit the image a little.

Like print a 4x6" right after I've printed an 8x10".

Without having to pay a lot of attention to what I'm doing, because I'm probably doing something else on the other computer at the same time...

Very cool!

OK: Adobe Bridge...

...is exactly what I've been looking for to replace BreezeBrowser Pro and do all the front-end file management stuff before I even start into Adobe Lightroom.

I'm able to sit on one (or two, although not both at once) of my new Win 7 boxes and look at Canon RAW files that are on my file server, over my network.

I can move, delete, and re-name files at will.

And all much, much faster than I'd been able to do it on the file server box itself, which is running Ubuntu 10.10 and where I have to use gthumb to view files in the Canon RAW format via dcraw.

Totally cool!

OK: Adobe Lightroom...

...is simply an extraordinary piece of software on any number of levels: possibly more so than any other software I've purchased in a long time.

(Disclaimer: a lot of that hyperbole is due to the fact that I've been running Open Source/Free as in Beer software -- currently Ubuntu Linux -- for a good ten years and I simply don't buy a lot of software. But, whatever...)

Two core issues have presented themselves in the last several months.

1) I've been shooting an overwhelming number of photos at any given event -- on the order of several thousand for a Saturday's pair of Vashon Island Soccer matches, for example.

2) I had one of my two years-old mainline photo processing computers (Intel P4, 2 GB ram -- actually it was the root hard drive, a 250 GB Seagate, that fried) die as a direct result of the wind storm/power outages we had in late November.

So it became clear that something was trying to tell me it was past time to bite the bullet, get out the credit cards, purchase some contemporary computer hardware and finally make the move to Adobe Lightroom, with Photoshop CS5 available in the background for the really heavy lifting.

Long story short: I now have two Intel Core I5's, each with 8 GB ram and middling-good gaming level NVidia video running Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

And Adobe Lightroom 3, and Adobe Photoshop CS5 on each.

Lightroom is amazing.

Fundamentally it's a DBMS: a database management system.

The focus (hahaha) is on cataloging photos. Lots of photos.

I've just gotten started using Lightroom and so far I've got over 4,500 photos pulled into the generic Catalog "All Photos" for the two instances I'm running.

These are keyworded as they're pulled in off a file server box out on my home network, and can then be grouped and categorized by keywords, meta-data, date shot, time shot, camera body shot with, lens shot with, ISO used, f-stop used, etc etc etc...

Once categorized photos can be pulled into a Collection -- which in my case is a single event -- at which point I can start to actually "develop" the individual photos in (wait for it) the Develop module.

Except that entire groups of photos (or an entire Collection, if needed) can be "developed" using the same settings such that often the only photo-by-photo adjustments I find myself doing are to rotate slightly, and crop.

When happy, I export to whatever the specific end-use is: jpegs 600 pixels wide to go up on FinchHaven.com, for example.

Except that all of this done non-destructively, such that all the original Canon RAW images back on the file server are untouched.

All Lightroom is doing, really, is recording an (apparently) unlimited list of state-changes (white balance, exposure compensation, hue, saturation, luminance, rotation, cropping) without doing anything to the original images until they're exported.

Only then does some actual new image come into existence.

And all the work done to get to that end point is recorded step-by-step and is completely reversable, such that creating an image for my web site, or outputting an image to the printer for a reprint as part of an order are completely decoupled one from the other, and yet the labor put into sort of one end point is both permanently retained, and yet completely segregated.

Hard to get your head around the idea until you've done a few things with Lightroom, but extremely powerful.

More later...

Tried something a little...

...different for the Vashon High School Cross Country meet on Thursday, October 7, 2010.



I wanted to shoot something other than the finish line, something other than winners (one) and losers (many).

The Vashon High School XC course is laid out on the Vashon School District campus: the start is over at the High School, goes off into some woods on the east side of the campus, comes back onto the Chautauqua Elementary School playground along the edge of the woods, goes across the Chautauqua playfield, onto the jogging track that goes around the McMurray Middle School playfield, back over to the High School, and starts another lap. Two laps total; I think it's something around 2.5 miles.

I knew of a really neat spot on the edge of the Chautauqua playfield where the runners would be skirting the woods and then climbing a very short hill to come up onto the playfield, which continues on gently uphill to the jogging track.

Heavy woods in the background, bushes and roots and stuff to run around, up the incline which is infrequently mowed grass, and onto the playfield which is mowed.

Anyhoo, the idea was to shoot with a very slow shutter speed (1/15th, finally 1/30th second) and pan with the runners as they ran across my field of view and climbed the short hill up onto the playfield.

I was using my EOS 1D Mark IV and the 70-200mm f2.8L zoom, no extender, in AI Servo Autofocus mode and High Speed Continuous Shooting mode, which should approach 10 frames per second if it's not obsessing too much about maintaining focus.

I shot 881 frames total, of which only 196 (!) were even acceptable enough to make the first cut, and ended up using only 77 (!!).

In post-processing I used the Lasso Tool to select those areas of the face and jersey that were in focus and applied a little Unsharp Mask to the selection to sharpen the features I wanted to emphasize.

All-in-all I'm pretty happy with how they came out.