November 26, 2019

Sometimes I get the question what app I use to edit and manage my photos and what I recommend … an almost hopeless question to answer. Or at least answer quickly. But I’ll make an attempt and describe what I use together with a very short motivation, hopefully I’ll get the time to write a few longer posts that better describe why I’m currently using Lightroom and Photos (macOS).

Yep, the answer is Lightroom Classic and Photos and the main reason I use them is convenience. The major reasons why I use Lightroom are

• I started to use Lightroom when Apple declared that they were stopping the development of Aperture. That move was rather painful despite not having that many photos and I don’t really want to spend the time moving to another app right now.

• Lightroom can do most of the things I want to do. It might not be the best or have best user experience but it can do it.

• Lightroom has a decent iOS app that make it fairly painless to work on my iPad. And I do enjoy editing photos on my iPad.

• The DAM (digital assets management) feature of Lightroom Classic is adequate, it’s better than the other programs I’ve tried but not as great as remember Aperture.

• The ability to directly upload and synchronize my photos with Smugmug

The reasons I use Photos are

• I’m all in the Apple eco-system which makes it really convenient and get access to them everywhere.

• Photos just keep getting better, the editing capabilities are becoming really good and the integration with external apps are also good.

• I mainly use Photos as a first destination for my iPhone shots but also for keeping a copy of some photos from my bigger cameras.

• Photos have these automatic stuff that I think is fun to have, things like automatic album generation etc.

But I should add that I’m highly skeptical of the future of Adobe Classic and have several things I dislike about how Lightroom works (some later post). I also think that Photos severely lacks organization functionality or perhaps more correctly: it doesn’t really have the organizational functionality that I would like to have.

photography organization

November 21, 2019

I’ve heard about Photo Mechanic before, and that for example wedding and sports photographers use to quickly go through a large number of photos. Well, I’ve always huffed and puffed thinking that it’s silly to have one program just for this: “I can do that in Lightroom, why bother with another program???”

However … there is a slight problem, it has now been about 1 year since my son & friends graduated to 3rd Dan in Ju-Jutsu Kai (third degree black belt) and I haven’t still gone through the photos and picked which to process further.

I started going through them on my desktop but I never managed to get through the photos, I then synced them so I could use my iPad and while I’ve made some progress I’m still only at 1/2 - 2/3 somewhere. What has been the problem? Simply that it takes too much time, I can’t really put my finger on why it’s so difficult for me to do this but it is.

Well, during the weekend of 30 November - 1 December I’m going to photograph three other graduations. I expect that I’ll get back home with some 5000-8000 photos, not a huge amount but at least significant. The problem is that I only have about 8 days to whittle this down to about 50 photos. I’m not aiming to produce the final “albums” for the three graduations, for the albums I’m aiming at 100 photos for each graduation, but I need to come up with 50 finished photos in 8 days. The 8 days are a hard limit since I’m in for eye surgery on day 9, so while I’m aiming for a couple of days (hey, I’m working also) 8 days is the absolute maximum.

My experience tells me that this is going to be difficult to do in Lightroom, so what better time to test out if Photo Mechanic is as good as people says. I’ve downloaded the demo and is going to spend the weekend figuring out how it work. And then it’s time for the real test.

photography software photo mechanic

November 14, 2019

I’m severely tempted to switch from Lightroom Classes to Capture One … tempted but I know it will not happen. Why? I’m pretty sure that it will take too much time to move my library from LR to CO, I moved from Aperture to Lightroom in 2014 when Apple first announced that had stopped the development … and I have still not completed that move. And I don’t want my photos managed by two different apps.

So, unless some drastic happens, like Adobe shutting down LR Classic and go all CC … which I assume will happen in the not too distant future, I’m going to stay with LR Classic.

Yes, I know that the last paragraph really says that I should move away from LR.

photography software capture one

August 29, 2019

I assume that everybody except me had figured this out by now … but just in case.

I know that some people strongly suggests that you shouldn’t organize your photos by date. I disagree with that and use some kind of hybrid system that basically looks like this:

My idea was that this would allow me to neatly organize my photos without the need to figure out som kind of tagging/grouping scheme, simple and fast … and it has actually proven to work just fine. Except for one single thing: the list of years has become so long that it makes it difficult to efficiently using some software (too much scrolling).

I have been sighing over this for several years but I haven’t had the energy to move around the photos to make it better. Don’t get me wrong, dragging around a couple of folders isn’t that much work but it has effects on things like backup etc.

However, I’ve been filling up my disks and I needed to move to a larger storage, so I took the chance of making a small but important change. I now have this organization:

And suddenly I don’t have to scroll as much. Lesson learned, even if it looks silly when you start organizing, for example with only one month of photos, it pays off to think a bit further. I thought I had done that but I didn’t take bad user interfaces into consideration.

photography

July 29, 2019

I mitten av juli var det dags att avbryta semestern och åka till Aberdeen för lite jobb. Först några dagars arbetsmöte och sedan några dagars konferens (lugn!! jag ska inte tråka ut dig med några detaljer), men som vanligt så kan jag inte låta bli att passa på att ta en titt på omgivningarna.

Det första som slog mig när jag kom till Aberdeen var hur grått allting är, vart du än tittar så ser du grå granit överallt. Nästan alla hus är byggda av granitstenar och … det är grått!!

Det fanns några olika områden som jag fastnade för Seaton Park, Old Aberdeen, King’s College, stranden och den äldre delen av hamnområdet.

Seaton Park är som namnet antyder en hyfsat stor park nära Old Aberdeen. Som park sett så är det inget speciellt, det är snarast lite av ”man ska inte förhäva sig”-stämning över parken. Den är trevlig att gå omkring i men det finns inget som gör att man reagerar med ett ”Åhhhh”. Det finns tre olika delar som är värda att titta på: River Don - det ska finnas uttrar där sa en kvinna men jag såg inte några, The Hidden Garden - verkar vara ett lugnt ställe att slappna av i och sedan själva huvudgången med kyrkan i bakgrunden.

Fortsätter man sedan in mot centrala Aberdeen så kommer man till Old Aberdeen. Det syns naturligtvis skillnad mot de nyare stadsdelarna men ändå mindre än vad jag sett i andra städer.

Som vanligt så passade jag på att gå in i några kyrkor för att kolla, det brukar vara rätt intressant att se hur de är byggda osv. Vad som slog mig är att även om de hade en hel del historia, St. Machars Cathedral är tydligen byggd på samma ställe som den första kristna samlingsplatsen från 580, så är mycket ganska nytt. Om jag förstod det rätt så var glasfönstren från 1930-talet.

Direkt efter kommer universitetet, detta campus kallas King’s College och är rätt trevligt. Själva universitetet grundades 1495 så det är inget nybygge. Det var naturligtvis här själva konferensen hölls och där jag spenderade mest tid. Det som jag gillade bäst här var faktiskt en staty, ”Youth With Split Apple”, den är visserligen ganska ny men jag tyckte den var riktigt kul.

XOm man sedan knatar vidare ett tag så hamnar man vid stranden och det är precis som de fördomar jag har om Storbritannien och havsstränder. En lång sandstrand med några vågbrytare, en gångstråk och sedan några märkliga nöjesställen - inte något som jag kände mig så intresserad av att besöka. Men det är lite kul att gå längs stranden och titta, något som som jag inte är ensam om att tycka. När vädret är OK så var det ganska mycket folk som knatade omkring där.

I slutet av stranden så finns ett litet område som verkar vara en äldre del av själva stadskärnan, husen är små och verkar vara byggda för att stå emot vind och vågor från haven.

Alldeles bredvid så är infarten till hamnen, som i princip ligger mitt i stan, och det åker båtar in och ut hela tiden.

Själva centrala Aberdeen vet jag inte om det är så mycket att berätta om, det finns några intressanta hus, de vanliga affärerna och det du brukar hitta i en större stad.

Jag hängde på en tur till ett slott, Crathes Castle, utanför själva stan och även om byggnaderna fortfarande är byggda av grå granit så är det betydligt grönare i omgivningarna.

Jag hade tur, samma dag som jag åkte så fick jag svaret på en sak som jag hade undrat över några dagar. Hur/vart övar säckpipespelare??? En säckpipa är inte något tyst litet instrument utan det hörs ordentligt, så det känns som om att det inte vore helt populärt att öva i en lägenhet. På min sista promenad i Aberdeen så fick jag svaret: man kan öva på en tom parkeringsplats nere vid golfbanan !!!

Så sammanfattningsvis: får du chansen ska du naturligtvis åka till Aberdeen men jag skulle föreslå att när du har tittat på stranden, Seaton Park, Old Aberdeen och King’s College så tar du dig utanför själva stan och ser hur det ser ut där.

Vill du se fler bilder från Aberdeen så hittar du dem här

resor skottland

May 30, 2019

Isn’t Kendo interesting?

I think I better explain what I meant with

the problem was to make the photos interesting

in a previous post. I did not mean that Kendo isn’t interesting, just that for me the problem was to make my photos interesting. Let me explain, in Jutsu there is a lot of movement like when a person is being thrown

or when someone tries to kick someone

But there are also “slower” parts where it’s possible to concentrate on faces and details.

Add to this the fact that I know some jutsu, which makes it possible for me to guess what is going to happen right before it happens, which of course makes it easier for me to capture a photo at the right moment.

So what is it the makes Kendo more difficult? First problem is that I know nothing about Kendo, making it difficult to predict what is going to happen. Another problem is the protective gear Kendo practitioners wear, the helmet makes it much more difficult to catch facial expressions, the gloves makes it difficult to catch hand/finger movements, etc. My third problem has to do with Kendo itself.

This first attempt told me that Kendo is pretty much two-dimensional. With this I mean that much of the action is along a straight line. This makes things easy in the sense that I could position myself closer and use a different point of view. But I didn’t know that so I didn’t, I didn’t even consider it because if I would move closer in jutsu the risk of getting a body part slamming into me or the camera would be high. So in jutsu I want to keep some distance to the people I’m photographing, in Kendo I could be much closer … but I would of course have to check that it was OK before doing that.

BTW - sorry about no example photos from the Kendo shoot but they didn’t want any images online so I’m going to respect that.

Another thing that differs from jutsu is that the focus of the action seem to be when the Shinai (the bamboo sword) hits the opponent, in jutsu a number of things could happen. This means that I that if I want an action photo I know what to concentrate on, but this happens very fast so it’s more difficult to catch the right moment … and I’m not convinced that it makes for a good photo.

To just see the Shinai hitting the opponents helmet doesn’t make for a good photo … at least not more that a couple of good photos before it gets repetitive.

So the photos I liked best were photos taken at the start of an attack, they showed the fast movements, the energy and other things that seem to be what Kendo is all about. I also liked the more “portrait” like photos I took, which in my opinion shows the other side of Kendo - calmness and concentration.

Well, it was my first attempt so I can easily have missed the important parts of shooting Kendo just because I don’t understand.

martial arts kendo jutsu photography