Black and White in lightroom

2011 so far has been a rubbish year for photography for me.  I was laid up with a really nasty bought of Pneumonia at the beginning of the year  and as soon as I was feeling well the sky became a thick featureless mass of cloud.  I managed to snap my LEE big stopper into 3 bits - even though it has hardly left my bag for months. After managing a decent weeks shooting in Derbyshire I am now suffering with eye problems which make photography difficult and driving anywhere to take shots impossible.

A new collection as virtual copies

In a desperate attempt to produce some pictures, I decided to take a look at last years photos and see if they looked any good in black and white:

In Lightroom I selected every shot I took last year, which is easy enough to do as I have my pictures automatically stored into folders for each year, so it is simply a question of navigating to the correct folder and using ctrl + A to select all the images.

I then decide to create a new collection of these images as virtual copies. Virtual copies are a duplication of your picture but they don’t exist as actual photos, they are simply stored as a new set of settings in the catalog.You can create as many virtual copies of a master photo as you wish so you can have color, sepia, B&W and different crops of the same picture yet all you are storing is a recipy of yur changes to the original file.

So having created my new collection I select all of the images (ctrl+A)  and desaturate them (V).  The I selected Library>Previews>render standard size previews which will speed up the viewing process later.  This takes quite a while with an entire years images, so I left it running overnight.

Now I have a complete collection of last years shots,  so I work my way through them using the arrow key, X to mark as a reject and P for my picks.  I whittled 3,600 images down to 9 I liked in B&W which I then saved as tiffs to give some sort of permanence to the virtual images.

Below are a few of those shots I thought you might like.

Curbar Fence

Down in the Tube Station at Midnight

Dawn in the Meadows

Trebarwith Strand

Nick Walton is photographer of the month for May

Nick Walton has a very varied portfolio of images form landscapes, to wildlife to some well observed candid images.  His website is well worth a visit.

What the feck

by Nick Walton

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100mm f/2.80 for 40 minutes

On Friday I took my camera out for a well deserved return to my Friday Project.  The light wasn't great but I had my trusty 100mm f2.8 macro lens on so I thought I would give it a go.  here are the shots I managed to grab in a mere 40minutes.

Boris Bikes

Links

Lunchbreak

Pipe & Post

Reflections

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Kathy Wright is photographer of the month for April

Kathy Wright was the well deserved winner of Amateur Photographer Of The Year 2009.  She produces stunning images of her native Norfolk and Suffolk and her very obedient dogs, her website is well worth a visit.

Fire in the Sky

by Kathy Wright

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Lightroom: Just Do It!..........but create a collection first

Sometimes I can be really dim.  I have been using Lightroom for ages now and it has only just dawned on me what I should be doing.

Usually when I look through my Lightroom catalogue it is with some sort of purpose in mind. I might be selecting pictures to go into a competition or to send to a magazine, or maybe even just those I think might be "worth a print".  The trouble is,  I will often select the pictures, process them and forget all about them.  So if in a months time I want to get hold of all the images I sent to a particular magazine, I would have to hope that I could find it in my emails, or the directory I exported the files to - or more usually just desperately try to remember them.

My "purpose" for selecting a group of images is useful information  and its pretty obvious I may need that information in the future. Basically, I have been throwing away information....that makes me a very bad Lightroom user.  The whole point of having a computer is for it to store information for me.

So, now I have decided to make it a rule to always create a collection to store the images I am selecting.  The collection should describe my purpose in selecting the images.  If I start getting swamped in collections,  I can group them into collection groups like "competitions" and "magazine submissions".

Hopefully this level of organisation will save a lot of desperate searching and head scratching in futre.
Here's hoping!

The power of a picture

It's a funny thing,  as a photographer who looks at and analysis pictures every day, it is so easy to forget what power a photograph can actually hold.  We spend ages working on composition, exposure, processing, etc and it is so easy to get absorbed by the process and forget what a photo can actually mean to people.

A reality check came for me this week.  Unfortunately a good friend of my wife died last week, taken well before her time by cancer.  Her family got in touch with me to see if I could help as they had no recent photos of her. A quick look through my archive and I managed to pull up 20 or so shots of her from the shoot I did at a wedding.  Upon looking through them,  this seemed the best shot I could find:

 

Before - A proud mum with her two boys.  

Its a nice enough shot,  but the family were looking for a simple head and shoulders shot.  It was time to fire up Photoshop.  Not for the first time,  I was really grateful for the 21 megapixies who live inside the 5DmkII.  All that resolution allowed me to crop much more than I would have ever dared before.  Then it was some cloning, painting in a new background and added a vignette.  The final result was this:

After - gone but not forgotten

I printed it using the qimage rip to force my now tired and exhausted megapixies, back up to a 10x8 print.  Framed and mounted it looked OK.

I popped the picture round to the family and was absolutely blown away with how grateful they were to see a nice picture of their mum/wife/daughter., To me it had become an exercise in masking, reducing pixelation getting a good print and doing the best job I could.  Suddenly I realised that all the technical stuff wasn't worth a hill of beans compared to the memories and love it evoked for them.

Do yourself a favour - make sure you have plenty of pictures of the people you love.

Paul Stefan is photographer of the month for March

Paul Stefan was awarded practical photography's photographer of the year in 2006.  When you look round the images on his website, this comes as no surprise at all.

by Paul Stefan

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