Lomo experiment

my 1st experiment with Lomo style photos.

Dumb as a box of hair

Adobe Bridge to Lightroom:

How is it that people can make the switch? Or do you have to start with lightroom for the beginning?

Bridge is so easy to use, like windows explorer with pictures. Lightroom is an image management system which is what I *think* I need to sort of the mess that is my archive. Why oh why does it have to be so unintuitive?? I started like I do with every piece of software, just try it out and see what it does. Imported my pics no problem. Except that no, you have to keyword on import and set up all the settings and generally fine tune the whole process before you even begin or its even more unmanageable than before! So tonight I removed all images from the catalogue. Created myself a few test folders of images to play with.

I bought this book that I’ve been trying to read while not sitting in front of my pc (I got up to page 29). The book is very detailed – again showing how difficult Lightroom has to be if you can write a 600 page book on it! This was useful in what settings to use on import. The thing I cannot understand is why do all my bridge labels and settings seem not to import? Is it because I imported to DNG format? hmmm… Does everyone else find the whole thing as boring and frustrating as me? Is it really worth the effort in the end? If I edit in lightroom I can see it in Bridge but if I edit in Bridge I cannot see it in lightroom. Grrr…

I had a play with the develop settings but I couldn’t really understand what I was doing and for tonight at least I’ve lost patience with it! I’m used to bridge and having little colour label filters. I’m used to camera raw and how that works. I only want to change a few things – how hard can it be. I’m not a stupid person (or computer illiterate, I’m a software developer by trade) so why do I feel dumb as a box of hair tonight?

I found this old test image (cant really remember what I was testing now) and processed it camera raw and photoshop in less than a minute.

360 degrees of paradise

Raja Ampat, Indonesia

Click to see a larger version…

16 images stitched together in photoshop CS3. I’d have liked to stitched the 31 images I took but my pc wasn’t loving that one.

New York Panoramas!

Yay for Photoshop CS3! Mike has built himself a new super duper pc whose boundaries he clearly wasn’t pushing… what better way to ‘test’ it than try and merge 11 full size D300 RAW files in photoshop 😀 It only got a little upset with me, for the most part it churned away and allowed me to produce panoramas that my little teeny-tiny laptop would have been crushed under.

They look better at a bigger size (click the photos for a larger view)!

Above is an 11 image stitch of the view of New York from the Staten Island Ferry. Unfortunately the ferry was moving and the boat in the photo was also moving so see if you can spot the mistake in the stitch where the auto merge didn’t quite get it right?

Helipad, New York 2008

This is just around the corner from State street (we actually went to NY to work but that didn’t stop me wandering around with my camera before and after work)! I think this is a 4 or 5 photo stitch.

View from Empire State Building 2008

This is 9 photos. I like this one because it seems like an unfinished jigsaw (I could have done the jigsaw pattern in photoshop but it seemed a little cheesy). I have more of these Empire State building ones to process …. stay tuned.

Software

Installed Nikon Capture NX (the CD in the box was View NX but there was a licence for capture if you downloaded it).
I hope I’m not offending anyone here when I say that I think this software is poop? It seems very unintuitive and slow (although that might be more about my machine but its definitely slower than Photoshop). Decided I couldn’t cope with this so decided to download the trial of Photoshop CS3. The new raw converter (4.3) has the D300 raw reader in it but unfortunately wont work with any earlier versions of Photoshop – this is the first expense I hadn’t budgeted for 😦
Secondly I hadn’t envisaged how big the file would be. The RAW files are between 11 and 13 mb each. Once converted to TIFF the files are 70mb! I think I’m going to need some more space and a faster machine to cope with the new demands 😐
Also *had to* download the codec so that I could see my RAW files in windows explorer:
http://www.nikonimglib.com/nefcodec/