Polaroid Retrospective @ AOP, London - Last Few Days

Rachel Weisz - by Dan Kenyon

Sorry for the late notice on this, the Association of Photographers (AOP) has a great show on right now - a retrospective of Polaroid prints. It’s on for another few days, till 14th November 2008, and open 10-6pm every day. So rush on down if you can as there are some stunning images in there, and it’s a great way to celebrate this now, unfortunately, defunct format.

Photo Inspiration : Nikon’s Travel Photography Finalists 2008

King Penguins - by Dr R A Litton

The finalists for the 2008 Nikon Travel Photography are now up for your perusal. They are all beautiful images, and such a mixed bag that you’re sure to find something that will delight and inspire you - or better yet encourage you to enter next year and win!

The winning photo is wonderful. Nick Edwards’ representation of a smoky Asian market is simultaneously colourful yet dark and moody, and at the same time approachable enough to make you feel that you could do something similar. So put on your travel shoes, even if it’s just to go somewhere else in your home country in this hard financial climate, and use your camera to transport us all away.

UPDATE: Photoshelter No Longer Sells Stock Photos

Innovative photo storage site Photoshelter has just announced that they no longer sell stock photography, instead they are focussing on storage of photographers photos online. Their decision is based upon the dominance of Getty, amongst others, in the stock photography field and although Photoshelter hoped to create their own niche of atypical stock shots, they now feel that this is a non-starter. Unfortunate news indeed.

Lightroom 2.0: Performance Issues, Wait for next Release!

A few weeks ago Adobe released Lightroom 2.0 after a length Beta process. Unfortunately it looks like some fairly serious performance issues got introduced for some users. These include massive slow downs and apparent system hangs while the software tries to work things out with larger catalogs. I’ve experienced these slowdowns myself, and have to say they are incredibly frustrating!

Until Adobe put out a point update that fixes these issues my recommendation for buying Lightroom 2.0 has changed from ‘buy’ to ‘hold’ (even though Amazon.com have currently dropped the price to only $220!). The two workarounds put forward right now, are either to stick with Lightroom 1.4.1 - a trusted, stable release, or to only work with small catalogs. Personally I find that incredibly frustrating, as for me if I need to find a photo of something then I want to search my entire catalog based on shared keywords, rather than having to a) remember which catalog I need, b) load it up, c) find the photo then d) merge it with other photos I want to work with - that may be in other catalogs. Although Lightroom’s ability to work with multiple catalogs is very powerful, the sheer fact that you can’t easily share keyword structures (without manually importing/exporting them*) or search across multiple catalogs makes the software much less useful to my mind. A workaround for the cross-catalog search is to export small JPG previews of your 5 star images with embedded meta data then use your computer’s built in file search (OS X spotlight works a treat for this) - this gives a quick visual preview, but doesn’t solve the need to then manually cross reference this back to Lightroom.

Ah, version 1.0 products… when will we (or software companies) ever learn.

* I’m wondering if a workaround to this is to create a single photo with every keyword tag in that’s shared between multiple catalogs.. Then Lightroom might pick up changes from the image and include them in each catalog’s tag hierarchy. Anyone tried this?

Tip: Save Your Photos in Raw Format

Raw is an uncompressed digital image format used in professional and semi-professional digital cameras. Saving your images in raw format is the nearest equivalent in the digital world to shooting with film, maintaining all the information received by your camera’s sensor in digital format.

The main advantage of saving in raw format is that you have a higher quality image, with more flexibility to tweak and post-process to get exactly the effect you want. The downside is that a raw file takes up more space on your memory card - typically 2-3 times the size of a high quality JPG file of the same image dimensions. That may sound like a lot, but with the ever decreasing cost of memory cards it is not an issue you should worry about if you are even slightly serious about your photographs. Raw is the way to go, and did we mention that a higher quality image is not the only advantage? Yep, raw has a few more tricks up its sleeve.

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