Bosque’s Memorable Brilliance

©Joe Bridwell
A cold but still morning found Bosque birds on the move. As the sun burned underbellies of capping clouds and began lightening distant hills, hunger called birds aloft.
A relatively short handheld lens ranged behind this flock; yet, image clarity balances an off-axis presence of the uppermost bird, where all are capped by morning’s glory.
Although these birds are normally white-gray, morning’s gentle, forgiving light, filtered through distant atmosphere lying east, shows such a wonderful concordance of soft, pastel color between sharp, in-focus birds and slightly out-of-focus hills as backdrop.
Nikon D300, 70-300mm, 155mm, 1/500, f4.5, iso 200, 0700 112308

Laptop Workflow
These days, my blog or workshop is written on a laptop. I put an image in Word, I pick up a microphone, and I begin to talk around the image. Pretty soon, a well edited piece, often containing multiple images, is the result.
That morning, I filled two 4 GB cards. With other commitments, it took a day before I actually uploaded the cards; I put images on the studio's external hard drive.

But Lightroom 2 contains a lot of the 'grease' to simplify this process. Indeed, this image took a few minor nondestructive changes and it was ready to publish. To start the blog, I needed to do several things:
1. Go through initial images, throwing away out-of-focus or badly composed images. Voilà... essentially, shooting rapid fire, many shots produced only a few usable images.
2. To make that decision, I uploaded all cards, imported images with metadata, then went through using flags to Pick (P) or Reject (X).
3. With a 4 a.m. Bosque departure, when those cards were uploaded, I was still tired. So I exported images converted on the studio to make flag choices on laptop, then re-imported to begin development.
4. Bosque’s Memorable Brilliance used Lightroom's Develop module to perform the following steps:
a. Create a Virtual Copy of original DNG image.
b. Tweak Exposure, Clarity, Vibrance, Strong Tone Contrast, TAT (Lighten Clouds), Gradient Filter, and Landscape Sharpen Preset. I do this color work on studio computer with a calibrated monitor.
c. Save as a full-size JPEG.
d. Downsize JPEG using CS3 and return image to catalog.
5. Export appropriate images to laptop to write this blog.
6. When I'm done, it'll end up on an external hard drive on the studio computer with main catalog up to date from this new effort.

Checkout Scott Kelby’s Laptop Workflow In today's Photoshop Insider blog, Scott Kelby talked about a recent vacation where he used Lightgroom’s Collections, flags, and labels to quickly create Picks and Selects for a Travel Slideshow and a Fine Art Book.
For this Bosque trip, I shot two classes of images; birds in flight and five shot HDR still images. I found Collecting five HDR images in a unique collection let me quickly use the Photomatix plug-in to decide if HDR shots were any good.

Blog Rolls

Last summer, my digital horizons began expanding.  Quickly, I became aware there are good blogs, better blogs, and consistently top blogs.  Before I began blogging, I was using browser favorites to keep up with what was new.  It might take an hour per morning to browse, download the PDF, and read at some other time.  I didn't want to sign up for e-mail or RSS; it seemed better to download if I needed it rather than to have it crud up an already beleaguered hard drive.
Then I began constructing my own blog.  Some of its benefits included Blog Rolls (Blog List from Google gadgets), an automatic feature under Layouts.  One can create a series of blog rolls on the right-hand side of the blog.  So I began to include blogs; rather than calling them a dull thing like Blog Rolls, I could create my own names (Big Guy’s (Gal's) Blogs).

New Way Home...
I really enjoy Blog Rolls now; there's provider's name, title, and how long ago the provider put that blog on the net.  Now, it's like a dynamic Table of Contents – latest first.  If I like the title, I click on it - just that blog comes on my screen, then I save it to a PDF.  If one of the blogs runs a regular progression on a certain weekday, and it is a very long download, I click on the provider's name, go down to the blog, and make a PDF.

Now, each time I read a new blogger, I'll look through their blog rolls and add anyone of new interest to my list.  Pretty quickly, I find out if they are active bloggers - top bloggers (content and timeliness) sort to the top each day.
When I found Lightroom Forums, I subscribed to several threads.  Now, at a glance, I can see where the latest newbie is confused, then read a moderator's clearly explained fix.
Or, in several Lightroom specific blogs, I might find a tutorial example which clearly shows a complicated workflow like merging catalogs using snapshots of different panels.

Try it; you might really like Blog Rolls for your blog...
Or, simply use mine!

Lightroom Work Style

Lightroom 2.1 File Menu – Catalog Import/Export Controls

When I recently took note of the Lightroom Forums community, I was seeking an answer to the complex question, "What is the difference between Main and Multiple Catalogs?" At that time, I've been reading along the digital photographers trail. That is: shoot them, import them, keyword them, and the job gets done with a main catalog.

At the same time, I was working my way through integrated workflows, trying to make Lightroom an integral part of my paradigm; shooting and writing! For me, writing occurs around an image. But it's more than that. Writing is the way where conscious and subconscious come together to express and mature unrecognized feelings and reorder awareness.

Disorder

Needing to create a six part Lightroom, Photomatix, CS3 workflow for February, 2009, I fell back to years of working in Windows. I'd start off with an idea, put an image in Word, pick up a microphone, and begin to talk... on screen, words and feelings would appear around the image. Now, most writers I've read say writing is very hard. For me, it's a process which may take days; it's a process where I constantly have to edit - therein lies the problem. I've developed a habitat where it might take 5 or 10 edits to get a piece written. After a night of sleep, I might come back, make a change to an image, and keep on truckin’.

Since this is a description of a tumultuous, non-planned process, the pieces, the changing images - all appeared with Roman numbers for each edition and all appeared in folders (sometimes different folders depending on either capricious mind or state of progress).

Now, that tumultuous process is exactly what goes against the neat main catalog you see in digital photography books for Lightroom image organization. Here I was, creating multiple images in multiple versions with multiple folders. I'd begun to realize the laptop was a very creative environment whereas the desktop is more of a storage environment (particularly after I finally calibrated the laptop screen for CS3).

So I needed to gain control of this wretched tumult, consolidate images in one form and Word documents in another, and get on with my real-life ~ an abiding love for wild things and wilderness photography.

Order

So I patiently drilled back into Scott Kelby's The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers. I could not find an exact solution to the problem which vexed me. So, it took more digging to reach a satisfactory answer. To my surprise, in the Library module lying under Import from Catalog and Export as Catalog, lay a very powerful set of answers.

Tongue-in-cheek, let me quote Scott Kelby, referring to his laptop, "The file structure you see here stinks. It's the one I use when I'm writing books, which has never been, nor sadly will ever be, very organized." Scott just didn’t bother to tell us exactly how he solved the disorder problem…

To make a long story short, I've consolidated all images for each phase of the six part workflow into their own folders. I've exported them to a main catalog, then sent it by ethernet to the studio computer. I've collected all writings, thrown away earlier edit versions, and etherneted that folder to a project folders on the studio's external hard drive. Others may use USB 2 or FireWire external hard drives instead of ethernet.

Thanks to Adobe engineers design skill and a little discipline on my part, I'm trying to be a bit more organized...