It’s Our Birthday!!

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Hi Folks:

It’s our Birthday!  Actually, technically our blog’s birthday was yesterday, but yesterday was also the Christmas Tree Lighting and Santa Claus Parade downtown and one should never pass up the chance for free hot chocolate.  It’s important to set priorities… 🙂

We’re now four years old, and WordPress tells us we have (cue drum roll)… 404 blog posts and 137 pages to read.  Wow.  But enough about us!  Today we want to give thanks for you, our readers.  Thank you for your visits, your referrals, your comments, and most of all, thanks for continuing to drop by and visit our little corner of the ‘net!  You are much appreciated!!

Hugs,
Marcia and Mike.

P.S. And thanks to our grandsons (and their mom) for the use of their birthday banner.  You totally rocked it!!

Correcting Portrait ‘Shine’ in Lightroom

Hi Folks:

I’m primarily a landscape photographer, and as such I don’t often shoot images of people. However, I’ve seen this question come up a few times and thought I’d take a minute or two to address it.

In any form of photography the best time to get the exposure correct is at the moment of image capture.  However, for varying reasons sometimes that isn’t possible.  The image below is a case in point: Continue Reading →

Small Stones

Hi Folks:

Friday November 1 was Mindful Writing Day according to the people at Writing Our Way Home and it was also our introduction to a form of writing known as small stones.  From the site,  “A small stone is a short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment.”  As photographers, our photographs for the most part are momentary vignettes, small slices of time or experience captured in an image and this style of writing attempts the same only with words.  Some styles of poetry – micropoetry or haiku for example can use this approach, but they need not do so and small stones need not be written in poetic style.  Some excellent examples of small stones can be found on the blogzine a handful of stones.  As for us, we’re still learning this style and so it may be that some of our stones need some polishing, but we’re having fun with it so far.  Here are a few examples from us:

Marcia:

moon roof opens
plump fingers slide into view
as the son rises
blond haired toddler
the light of their lives.

last breath of scent
in blossom full
as leaves release their lives
to flash their own glory
one last time

Autumn leaves masked her path. Rain pelted down as peacocks preened under cover of the gazebo.

Mike:

The soft gentle curve
of her body
as it folds into mine…

Sweet scent of her hair
and the quiet even rhythm
of her breath in sleep…

The best place in the whole world.

Under the gazebo a woman in a bright red raincoat chats on the phone while three peacocks stand by, patiently waiting their turns.

The Great Blue Heron on the pier sits and watches the couple who stare past and do not see … while the harbour seal laughs a silent laugh.

If you’ve written some small stones or other prose/poetry we’d love to read them!  Leave us a note in the comments below.

Hugs,
M&M

Batch Processing in Lightroom

Hi Folks:

I wrote this out the other day in answer to a question on Twitter (thank you, Twitlonger!) and since my answer was over 3000 characters I thought I’d add it in here as well.

Batch processing in Lightroom can be done in a few different ways:

1) In the Library module you can use Quick Develop to make basic adjustments to one or multiple images. It’s important to understand one difference between Quick Develop and the Develop module, which is that Quick Develop makes relative adjustments and Develop makes absolute adjustments. What does that mean? Let’s say you forgot that you had set your camera’s light meter EV reading to -1, and made a series of images that are all one stop underexposed. What you want to do is increase the exposure of each image by one stop – no matter what the exposure was for each image – rather than setting the exposure for all of the images to a value of +1 EV. To make a relative adjustment like this you would use Quick Develop.

Quick Develop

In Contrast, if you made multiple exposures of the same scene at different exposures and you want to give them all approximately the same exposure values, you would select the images you want, go to the Develop module and go to Settings/ Match Total Exposures. For more on that, see our Match Total Exposures in Lightroom post.

Continue Reading →