I spent some time walking around the expo floor at ImagingUSA this morning. Wow! It was huge. Way bigger than Photoplus and Photoshop World. It just went on forever. One of the coolest things I found was called “the Polester”, no, not a portable pole dancing kit, but rather a telescoping pole with a mount for your camera at the top.

The inventor and mastermind behind the Polester, Jim, was kind enough to let me test drive it with my LX3. Jim did say he has a DSLR model, but the original inspiration was for use with a compact digital when you need to get a shot that might otherwise be too dangerous or difficult to capture any other way. In just a couple of minutes he had my LX3 mounted on the pole and he handed it over.

You fire the shutter by pulling a string that activates a lever that pushes the button. Simple. I suppose it could work if you were able to remotely fire your camera wirelessly. I took a few shots of the expo hall in an attempt to make a polester-pano. Results below (click for larger). No, you can’t frame the shot, but I could see that it fired each time and then just slightly rotated the pole for the next.

You can check out a video of the Polester in action over at longshotcamerasystems.com and even see Jim (who, as an aside, bears a striking resemblance to my Photoshop hero Pete Bauer). Priced at $199 it may not be for everyone, but what a blast it would be to walk around taking shots from 20 feet off the ground!

Camera: DMC-LX3
Shutter Speed: 1/30
Aperture: f/2
Processed in Lightroom and stitched in Photoshop CS4.

Adobe has just released Lightroom 3 Beta! Now before you rush out and start downloading I’d like to give you my take on this beta release to help you get off on the right foot.

This is a Beta version, which means it is not the finished product. Beta software is usually stable, but not necessarily bug free. Before you import, please start out by creating a copy of a few folders of photos (already safely backed up) and treat these copies as expendable test files. I don’t expect anything bad to happen to them, but with Beta software there is no reason to take any chances. Think of the Beta release as a way to get a taste for what Adobe has in mind for Lightroom 3, give it a test drive and see what you think. They really want your feedback to incorporate into the final release.

What I’m Most Excited About So Far

1. Improved rendering. The engineer-elves have added some new magic into LR3 to improve the rendering of our raw photos in regards to noise reduction and capture sharpening. Not finished yet (no Luminance noise reduction right now), but any effort to develop better looking photos gets my vote.
2. Improved watermarking. OK this may seem like a small thing, but it has been on my list for a very long time. I’m working on a LR3 Beta Watermarking tutorial that should be posted this week. Stay tuned! I’m not quite ready to give up LRMogrify yet though!
3. Custom Print Packages! Gone will be the days when I have to explain to people why they can’t print 3 different 4×6 photos on an 8.5×11 sheet of paper. Woot!

There is a lot more to love and a lot more to learn! I’ve got several LR3 Beta tutorials in the pipeline so stay tuned, but let me leave you with some valuable resources:

1. Go to Lightroom Journal and read all about the Lightroom 3 Beta.
2. Head over to Scott Kelby’s Blog and see what his top 10 list is all about.
3. Visit the NAPP Lightroom 3 Beta Learning Center to dive into some tutorials.
4. Check in with Lightroom plugin developer Jeffrey Friedl about using plugins with LR3 Beta.

OK, you are probably really itching to download the Beta … but please please please take a few minutes to read the Release Notes before you do. No, seriously, just give them a go over for known issues. I’m only trying to help!

OK, this Beta is free to everyone for the length of the Beta program so head over to Adobe Labs and take it for a spin. Check back here for more tutorials and resources in the coming days!

New! Updated tutorials for Lightroom 3 Beta:

• Boosting Lightroom Performance
• Replacing the Lightroom Preference File
• Back Up Your Lightroom Catalog

Here are the details:

10/26/2009

Boston Convention & Exhibition Center

10 am – 5pm

Read the full scoop here. Hope to see you there!

I finally had the chance to sit down with the latest issue of my favorite magazine Photoshop User. In this issue my Under the Loupe column covers how to control what metadata is included in your exported copies using Jeffrey’s Metadata Wrangler export plugin. This is the plugin you want to have in your toolkit if you want to have any level of control over what is or isn’t in your exported files.

Also in this issue … Matt Kloskowski covers how to set new raw defaults, Victoria Bampton has some great Lightroom tips, RC answers Lightroom questions and Sean McCormack has a kick butt feature article on sharpening. Oh, and there is all that Photoshop content in the beginning part of the magazine (kind of like the opening band for the headliner).

Be sure to stop by the Help Desk live if you have any Lightroom questions. Pete will know where to find me!

Camera: NIKON D200
Lens: 80.0-400.0 mm f/4.5-5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/320
Aperture: f/8

This is a female monarch butterfly who, afflicted with some disease or parasite, has shriviled and non-functioning wings, but is otherwise in good health. I came upon her in a field while looking for monarch caterpillars. It seems I was late for finding caterpillars, but I brought her home and put her out in the garden every day for sun and nectar.  Over the course of this week she’s quite amenable to being our guest and she makes me take more breaks from the computer to go outside. I’m trying to convince her this is Mexico.

The key to this process (as mentioned in the column) is the LR2Blog export plugin. In the column I mentioned I would share the metadata tokens I use to create blog posts like this. Here is what you would see in the LR2Blog template I use to display camera model, lens, shutter speed, aperture and a link to Google maps based on the GPS data embedded in each photo’s metadata:


<!-- This default template simple inserts each image with the correct width and height --><img src="{url}" width="{width}" height="{height}" /><br />{return}{return}<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q={gpsLatitudeDecimal},{gpsLongitudeDecimal}&z=6">See this location on Google Maps</a>{return}{caption}{return}{return}Camera: {cameraModel}{return}Lens: {lens}{return}Shutter Speed: {shutterSpeed}{return}Aperture: {aperture}

The metadata tokens are labeled logically inside the curly brackets. The {return} token is a line break. The link to google maps is simply an HTML code for the link tag wrapped around the URL to google maps, which I added the latitude and longitude values as a parameter at the end of the URL, so when passed to googlemaps it knows the coordinates to display. Hope that helps!