Lightroomers!

See this location on Google Maps
Sunrise From the Top of Cadillac Mountain, Acadia, ME.

Camera: NIKON D200
Lens: 80.0-400.0 mm f/4.5-5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/100
Aperture: f/8

Having worked every Photoshop World since 2004 I have had the pleasure of attending many classes taught by some of the best teachers in the digital imaging world. Back in 2008 I was fortunate to get work in the Epson Print Academy pre-conference full day class. It was here that I first got to see John Paul Caponigro teach alongside Jeff Schewe and Andrew Rodney. It was an excellent class and highly recommend it to anyone interested in improving your own printing technique, plus Jeff always seems to give away a brand new Epson 3800 at the end of the class to one lucky soul (you need to figure out how you’ll get that monster home, but that is a quality problem). 

During that class I discovered that John Paul has a studio in Maine where conducts several multi-day workshops on photography and creativity each year. I resolved then to keep an eye out for a workshop that would fit into my schedule and interests, and I’m pleased to report that I did. Starting tomorrow I’ll be exploring the rocky Maine coast with a small group of like minded folks making pictures and hopefully learning a thing or two along the way.

Suggested reading for getting in the right mindset for the weekend are books by Freeman Patterson, The Art of Seeing and PhotoImpressionism, which are workshops in their own right. This promises to be an opportunity for me to stretch outside my own photographic comfort zone and break through some of my own self imposed limitations. I can’t wait.

On July 18th I’ll be hosting a photo walk in downtown Portsmouth, NH from 9:30 - 11:30 am. As of today we have 25 people signed up and there is plenty of room for more. Read the details and sign up here:

Portsmouth, NH Morning Photo Walk

Hope to see you there!

I’m interested in hearing how other people use Lightroom’s Import Backup function. Care to vote and comment in my poll over at Lightroom Forums?

I’m very excited to get my copy of Photoshop User magazine with my feature article on using GPS with Lightroom!

It is in the June 2009 issue. If you are a NAPP member it should be hitting your mailbox now, but you can also pick up a copy on most newstands that carry photography magazines.

In the article I referenced a couple of ways I include GPS data during output. One of the ways is in my blog posts that have the GPS tag. I do this using a Lightroom export plugin called LR2/Blog. Using LR2/Blog I can export directly to a wordpress template for my blog. In this template I can pull metadata from my photos and insert that right into the blog post itself.

The other way I use GPS data in my output is with a Lightroom web gallery template. Here is an example gallery you can take for a spin. The gallery being used in that example is the default HTML gallery that comes with Lightroom … with a few minor modifications. Lightroom can display the GPS coordinates just fine out of the box. You just need to create a custom text template that pulls the GPS data. This is what I did to display the data above each photo in the close up view page. That is the easy part.

The hard(er) part is that I went under the hood in the gallery code to create the “Map This” link you see below each photo. In addition to creating the link I also had to format the GPS coordinate data a little so that Google Maps could read it correctly and display the correct location when you click the link. This isn’t brain surgery, but it probably deserves a tutorial of its own to show you how I did it (so stay tuned!).

I hope you find the article helpful and please let me know if you have any questions or links to other resources!