I’m sure His Highness the Duke is perfectly satisfied with his wife’s upper floors, but in the pantheon of breasts, they hardly rate the effort put forth to capture them, or the money that the magazine paid for the images. There are far superior images of more impressive mammaries all over the internet. This Frenchman has added nothing of value to our collective photographic record of the female anatomy.

This episode does prove a point. Tabloid photographers deserve to have the word “photographer” stripped from their title. All they capture are depressingly uncreative images of the famous and allegedly famous engaged in activities for which they are not famous. Seriously, Angelina Jolie is one of the most photographed women in the world. We hardly need more pictures of her, especially bad ones of the actress in yoga pants, taking the dirty diapers out the trash bin. Such images are often badly exposed, poorly framed, and out of focus. Do you idiots even know how to operate your cameras?

It depressing to think of all the first-rate camera equipment in the hands of these chimps. If some hack uses a 5D Mark III to take another goddamned photo of Kristen Stewart on the red carpet, he should have it taken away from him and donated to a deserving photography student. Tabloid “photography” doesn’t require or warrant anything more than a used Rebel and a kit lens. Those $9,000 L-series super-teles should be saved for photographing an endangered species of wildebeest on the African Savannah. At the very least, you can use them to capture a crystal-clear shot of a New England Patriots linebacker knocking Tim Tebow on his ass.

Hopefully, their highnesses realized that not every guy with a long lens is a sleazy professional stalker. To put it more succinctly: “I’m not with stupid.”

Lightroom Import Screen

Connect Camera to Computer or Use a Card Reader?

I have found that not only is copying the photos directly from the camera to the computer much slower than using a card reader, but I’ve often found it to be kind of flakey and unreliable. Since, most new computers come with a built-in gazillion-in-one card read, this is a no-brainer.

Select Which Photos to Import

Select and deselect selected photos using the space bar.

Normally, this ain’t such a big deal. I almost always want to import every photo on the card, but on rare occasions I might have shots from more than one shoot on the same card and want to handle them separately.

So, to selectively import only some of the photos, uncheck those that you don’t want to import this time. To check a group, select the first photo, shift-click on the last photo, then press the space bar to toggle checks for those photos on and off. You can also right-click somewhere in the group and select “Uncheck Photo” from the pop-up menu, but for some unknown reason, this only toggles one photo at a time. Pretty useless if you have hundreds on the same card.

Making a Backup during Import

You can tell Lightroom to make a second copy of each photo in different location. Whether you back up now or later, just make sure you back up.

To do it now, check the box and select a location for the backup.

Select from information "parts" to rename your file.

Renaming Photos on Import

If you have ever looked at the contents of your memory card when it’s connected to the computer, you know that the file names are something useful like “IMG_1234.CR2,” so renaming the files at this point is one of the most helpful things that Lightroom does at this stage at the process.

You have the option of picking one of the Lightroom’s preset renaming templates or creating your own. If you create you own, you have numerous options for the pieces of information you can include in the new file name.

The most useful are:

• Date
• Original File Number or Sequence Number.
• Custom Text
• Shoot Name

The “shoot name” is a new wrinkle in Lightroom 3. How it exactly differs from “custom text” is a little beyond me, but now you can include two separate pieces of custom information in the file name. I guess you could use the shoot name for something like “Fashion Shoot” and use the custom text for each model.

What I usually include in my files are the shoot name, the date in YYYYMMDD format and the original file number. You could use a number from 1 to however many photos your importing, but for some reason I like to use at least some part of the original file name.

Applying Develop Presets while Importing

After you’ve been working with Lightroom long enough, you’ll probably discover that there are adjustments you make to almost every photo you shoot. Once you realize what these are you can turn them into what’s called a “develop preset,” which is just a group of saved settings which can then be applied instantly to other photographs.

Lightroom lets you select one of these presets and apply it to every photo as it’s being imported. I know that I’m probably going to make a tone curve adjustment to almost every photo so I’ve saved a basic one and, when I remember, I apply that during import. I can fine tune the adjustment later during editing, if necessary. If it’s not necessary and the photo looks good as is, I’ve just saved myself a few seconds per photo.

I’ll cover things like develop presets and tone curves in more detail in later articles.

Select develop and metadata presets, and apply keywords to all imported photos.

Applying Metadata Presets while Importing

Metadata is just information stored in the picture file. You never see if don’t go looking for it. Your camera automatically stores what’s call EXIF data: a bunch of metadata for every shot you take: camera make and model, time and date, aperture, shutter speed, ISO setting, camera mode, what lens you were using, and the focal length. That’s one beauty of digital: your camera takes care of the lot of the record keeping that photographers knew they should be doing but never bothered to do.

There is also room for more that your camera doesn’t know about, like your contact and copyright information.

Before you start stuffing your photo files full of personal information, remember that this information will probably be visible when you upload the photo to Flickr. In other words, you might not want to include your home phone and address. If you make money with your camera (or just want to), you probably just want your business phone number and e-mail. If you have a business address or PO Box, then it’s okay to include that.

Generally, I just include my copyright information, business phone number and email, plus my website address. I also include a color label (I’ll explain more about those in a future post) and a 3-star rating (In my work flow, keepers are 4 to 5 stars while rejects are 1 to 2 stars). I then modify these ratings and labels during my next step, the sorting process.

Adding Keywords while Importing

Keywords are just words that can describe, in as little or as much detail as your personal OCD demands. I will say that, if you have tens of thousands of photographs in your library, diligent keywording will pay handsome dividends. It doesn’t matter how ingenious your organizational scheme is, one day you will ask yourself, “Where the hell did I put that brilliant photo I took two years ago?”

Well, if you remember it had clouds in it, and you have been keywording your photos, then a quick search for “clouds” will probably turn up that photo in no time flat.

At this point, it only helps to apply those keywords that apply to every photo on the card. For example, if you were a wedding photographer, then the name of the client, the location, perhaps what package the client bought, and the name of the wedding planner who recommended you. Later you can go back and more specific keywords to individual photos.

Even if you don’t have tens of thousands of shots in your library, it’s easier to start doing this sooner than later.

That’s about it for it for importing (or at least all that I bother myself with). At this point, just click the Import button and, if you’ve got a lot of new photos, go get a cup of coffee.

My next step is sorting through the photo and identifying the keepers and the rejects. I’ll cover that in the my next post.

Whoa there, pardner. Rather than just dump your files into your “My Pictures” folder, it pays to take stock of the organizational tools that Lightroom offers, and take advantage of them. Putting a little thought into the first step now can make your life a lot easier down the road a ways.

You can stop reading now if…

You don’t give a rat’s patootie about what happens to your photos after you’re done with them. Seriously, I do have friends who utterly disdain the idea that photos have any value after they’ve been edited, uploaded and shared. On the other extreme, there are those who never throw anything away and archive every shot they take. Neither extreme is wholly irrational. Of course, because we are talking about photographers, who are by definition slightly irrational, neither position can possibly be completely sane.

Some people have organizational schemes that predate their relationship with Lightroom, and absolutely resist making any changes, even if Lightroom’s tool would make their life 1,000 times easier. Photographers can be creatures of habit, even to our own detriment.

The most common complaint I hear, and not just about Lightroom, is that the software “forces” you to do it “their” way. This usually comes from people who tried vainly to shoehorn Lightroom (or Picasa or Photoshop Elements) into an existing workflow, without bothering to see if the program in question can actually streamline their process.

How I Did It – By Victor Frankenstein

With apologies to Mel Brooks, my goal is to walk you through my Lightroom workflow, one step at a time, and explain my thinking for each one.

Among my photographer friends, I have a reputation for being very quick to get finished shots online. One friend likes to joke that I download and edit my photos while I’m driving home. I would if I could (if it weren’t totally illegal and dangerous!).

The simple fact is that I have a very efficient workflow that takes maximum advantage of the tools that Lightroom offers. This workflow allows to quickly find the best shots from a given shoot and edit only those shots, not wasting time on shots that no other human being will ever lay eyes upon.

Importing Photos Already on the Computer

There are two reasons you might do this:

1. You’ve just installed Lightroom for the first time and you need to get your existing photo library into the Lightroom catalog.
2. You use another program to get your shots from the card to the computer. I know people who do this but, in my opinion, Lightroom’s import tools are just superior, especially in version 3.

Therefore, I will focus on how I accomplished #1. Lightroom has three ways of importing files already on the hard drive.

• Add – This leaves the photos in their current location and simply adds the files to the Lightroom catalog. If you’re happy with your existing file structure, or still need other programs to find your existing photos, this is a good choice.
• Move – This creates a copy of the original file in a new location and removes the original. This is good if you want start somewhat fresh with Lightroom and start working from an external hard disk, which was my thought process when I first started using the software. The risk is, of course, that something could go wrong (it happens…rarely) and one or more of your precious originals could be lost forever, which is why I went with the third choice.
• Copy – Exactly the same as move except without all the risky deleting of originals. This allows you to delete your originals once you’re confident the copy was successful (or keep the originals as backup).

Okay, assuming you’re going to copy your files (or move them, you wild thrillseeker!), the question is: where to?

• Into One Folder – Assuming that you’re importing a couple years worth of existing photos into a new copy of Lightroom, this is probably not a viable option (unless you just keep your photos in one big folder anyway… in which case…you’re weird). This is a better choice for importing new photos from a card.
• By Original Folders – This keeps your original folder structure intact. A good choice if you have a filing system that you’re happy with.
• By Date – This is what I used, on the assumption that I would be using Lightroom’s other organizational tools to keep track of my photos. There are several options. I currently use the one that creates a separate folder for each year and, inside that, a folder for each date, named like this “2011-04-19.” You can have separate folder for each month and day inside of that. I found that to be overkill for the truly anal retentive.

Importing New Photos from a Card or Camera

Lightroom 2 had a separate screen for importing from the hard drive vs. a card or a camera. The options are slightly different, but the process is pretty much the same… which is probably why they ditched the separate screens for version 3.

When you’re importing from a card, the Move and Add options have gone away. You can’t just add the photos on the (most likely correct) assumption that you don’t want to simply leave new photos on the card. The Move option is gone because Adobe assumes (again, mostly likely correctly) that the photos on the card are your originals and you don’t want to risk them by letting Lightroom delete them willy-nilly.

As a general rule, I like to leave copies of my photos on the card until I need the card again, at which point I format the card in the camera, which takes all of a few seconds. It’s quicker and safer than deleting them using a computer.

That leaves us with two ways to get photos from the card off the card and onto the computer.

• Copy – This exactly the same as above. Lightroom creates new copies of the photos where you tell it to.
• Copy As DNG – This is also the same, except that Lightroom converts the file from the original RAW format (assuming your using RAW) to Adobe’s more universal DNG format.

The advantages of this are A) DNG files tend to be slightly smaller than RAW and B) Adobe will presumably always support DNG even in the unlikely instance that they stop supporting your shiny new Nikon D700 or Canon 5D Mk II. The main disadvantage of converting to DNG is that it basically doubles the time amount of time it takes to import your photos from the card. Maybe that doesn’t hurt if you’ve got 30 shots, but if you come back from the Miramar Air Show with 1,700 shots, as I did in 2009, that’s gonna add up. You can always convert to DNG later, after you’ve sorted through the shots and discarded the losers.

Of course, if you’re shooting JPEG for some inexplicable reason, then converting to DNG doesn’t make a lot of sense and reading the previous paragraph was a complete waste of your time.

Your choices for the destination are:

• Into One Folder – If you have a filing system that you like, and it’s one that Lightroom can’t duplicate, this is your best shot.
• By Date – Again this is the option that I use. It has the simultaneous advantage and disadvantage of segregating files by day. This means that the photos from a long trip might be spread across several folders. If you shoot every day, or nearly every day, folders named by date may not be that helpful in locating a photo from a specific shoot. Again, I rely on Lightroom’s internal tools, especially keywords, to organize my photos, so this is not an issue for me.

Since the folder structure on the card is usually cryptic at best, which is another word for useless, the By Original Folders option isn’t that useful at this stage, so Adobe helpfully left it off.

Once you have decided where you’re going to put your photos, you still have a few options left before actually start importing. But since this post is already long enough, I’ll save that for next time.

Laters!

Be honest with me: when you hear phrases like “High Desert Trails” and “Jawbone Canyon,” don’t you automatically think of some old 1950s-era TV western? I picture Ward Bond as the stern but fair trail master. There’d also be some callow towheaded youth who would learn a valuable object lesson at the end of every episode.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with what I was doing last weekend.

At the risk of being pigeon-holed as a “rally photographer guy,” I should inform you that High Desert Trails is another car rally, this time staged in the California High Desert somewhere between Ridgecrest and the Palmdale/Lancaster area in a spot known as, you guessed it, Jawbone Canyon.

Unlike Desert Storm in March, which stretched over four days, HDT is a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” one-day event, which is generally appreciated by rally folk who have to take time off work and drive hundreds of miles (at over $4.00 a gallon) just to be there.

My main memory of this event is, to be blunt, being cold. It’s a little disconcerting for a city boy to be in the middle of the desert and see patches of snow in the shadows of the cacti. My main shooting position was at the top of a hill about a quarter-mile west and uphill from where I had parked my car. The difference in temp was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen degrees colder, and it was probably in the fifties where I parked. I attribute this to my parking spot being sheltered from the wind while my perch most certainly was not.

My initial shooting spot was east of my parking spot, but I wasn’t happy with the angles I was getting, so I started scouting to the west and finally found a nice little curve that a few of the cars were nice enough to slide through sideways. I’m sure they were doing it just for me.

Unfortunately, the rally was delayed by almost two hours by a rather serious accident when a dirtbiker ignored numerous warning signs and strayed across the road right into the path of one of the competitors. Fortunately, the man survived the encounter but had to be airlifted out. This pushed the finishing time of the rally from 5:00pm to approximately 7:00pm, when the sun (and temperature) were dropping like a stone.

Driver: Gaylord Van Brocklin; Co-driver: Steve Secviar

This is one of the last photos of the #78 car in that condition. The driver, Gaylord Van Brocklin, decided to finish the last stage of the rally with a flourish by turning the car on its roof, then its wheels, then its roof again. Fortunately, no one was hurt but the car was…shorter.

More on the next page…

The histogram is a handy little bit of info that can be found in the software that you use to edit your photos on the back on the back of your digital camera. It’s basically a squiggly line inside of a box. It’s looks somewhat like the heart monitor of someone having a very bad day. Rather than showing a myocardial infarction in progress, it’s there to show you if your image is too dark, too light or somewhere in that sweet buttery “Goldilocks zone” known as a correct exposure.

The left side of the histogram represents black while the right side is white. The 253 values of gray run left to right from dark to light. If the squiggly line is high off the bottom edge at a certain point, it means that there are a lot of pixels with that level of lightness. If the squiggly line tends to be higher on the left side of the histogram, then you have a dark image. If the high points are gathered to the right side, the image is lighter.

To be clear, dark and light are different than being under- or over-exposed. A ‘dark’ image (histogram bunched toward the left) is just dominated by dark pixels. The main subject is still properly exposed. This kind of picture is often referred to as a low-key. A high-key image is exactly the opposite, with the background very bright, perhaps even blown out, while the main subject is still correctly exposed.

The histogram of correctly exposed image

So how do you use the histogram to recognize over- and under-exposed images? First, let’s define how to recognize the histogram of a good exposure. A well-exposed image will have a histogram that starts in the lower left corner of the box and ends in the lower right corner. You may have heard some so-called experts talk about a “perfect” histogram that forms a pyramid between the two corners. This perfect histogram doesn’t exist in the real world, so don’t worry about it too much.

The histogram for an under-exposed image will appear to disappear off the left side of the “box.” More importantly, the light end of the histogram will not get anywhere near the right corner.

Underexposure...

Conversely, the histogram of the over-exposed image will disappear off the right side and not reach the left corner.

Overexposure...

In some cases, the histogram may disappear off one edge, yet still reach the other edge. An image that pushes its histogram off the left side while still reaching to the far right corner is probably just a low-key image with extremely dark shadows.

Let me say here that your eye, and not the histogram, is the final judge as to what makes a good exposur and what isn’t. Your histogram may be screaming over-exposure or under-exposure, but something about the picture just speaks to you. If so, goes with your gut, your eye and your heart.

My next camera (purchased at the Ritz Camera at Riverwalk Mall on that same trip, thereby doubling the cost of that trip) was a Minolta Maxxum. By this time, it was well into the automatic era, autofocus and program exposure and, quite frankly, my photography took a nose dive. Nothing seemed to turn out quite as good as it had with the old Pentax. I thought I’d lost my photo-mojo and, quite frankly, somewhat lost interest in photography.

The rise of digital began to rekindle my passion for those handheld image capture devices and, in 2007, I purchased by first digital SLR, a then-spanking new Canon Digital Rebel XTi. Three years later, I upgraded to a 7D. I also re-discovered another aspect of photography from my Sears/Pentax days: the joys of doing things manually.

Back when I first acquired the Minolta, I was suckered in buy the notion that the cameras automatic focus and metering was far smarter about these things than I ever would be. Boy, was that dumb. The gizmos inside those cameras aren’t really that smart and the more you can ignore them the better. To be fair, any halfway-decent autofocus is probably much more accurate than my aging eyes, but the exposure meter in even the most expensive camera is always going to be a poor substitute for experience and good eyes. Of course, the rise of digital means that bad photos don’t cost anything and no one but the photographer ever has to see them. The ability to read the LCD and check the histogram while you still have the subject in front of you makes shooting manually a lot less scary.

You might think, “Hey I just dropped two large on this new camera! You want me to turn stuff off?”

Not all the time. There are occasions when aperture priority or shutter priority are going to save your ass, but there are many other times when learning to trust your judgment over the cameras is the path to better, and more satisfying photography. That’s one thing I learned out in the Arizona desert, with my $1,500 Canon 7D, going pure manual and depending on the age-old “Sunny 16” rule for my exposure.

The more I put into the photograph, it seems, the more I get out of it.

The PikaSports 2002 Subaru WRX of Katianna Pihakari and Marie Boyd.

Desert Storm was a car rally staged in the Arizona desert between March 3 and 6, 2011. I volunteered as a member of the media team to photograph the event. They stationed me at a what they called the “Arizona turnaround.” This was where the cars finished stage 3, turned around and went back the other way.

The entire event was held in a place where the military tests things that go boom to make sure they… go boom. Go too far off the path and you were faced with a sign warning you about unexploded ordinance, but you usually had to wander a little farther if you wanted to discreetly relieve yourself. So you had to make peace with the thought that you might be taking a leak on an old artillery shell.

For the uninitiated, rally is a form of motor sport where cars run against the clock on (mostly) dirt roads. It’s not “racing” like you think of NASCAR, but it is a true test of driving skill. The driver has to navigate a course he or she has only seen once before, if that. The co-driver has to keep the driver up to speed on what’s next, reading from notes in a car that is sometimes going over 100 miles per hour along some pretty bumpy roads. The bond between driver and co-driver has to be one of absolute trust.

The event was a tough one. Out of 11 entries, only nine survived a preliminary event prior to the start of the actual rally. By the end of the first day, only four were still running. The course was a real car breaker. A co-driver friend of mine insists that, “Courses don’t break cars, drivers do.” Maybe, but this course seemed more than eager to help.

My own fallibility came into play on the first day, when there was a couple of hours between the time the cars left the turnaround and when they would be back for a second pass. The rally headquarters was actually over the state line in Blythe, CA. Of course, that put the course and the headquarters in different time zones and the event was run on California time.  I was told that cars would return around 12:30pm. Of course that was 12:30pm PST. My iPhone didn’t know any better and had switched over to Mountain time as soon as I passed over the state line. So I blithely went out into the desert to find my spot at 12:30pm Mountain time, or 11:30am PST, a hour before I needed to.

Needless to say, I got to spend a peaceful hour communing with nature (and unexploded ordinance) before the cars started rolling through. It’s time like this when you have to learn to enjoy watching paint dry.