Rodney Campbell's Blog

Week 18

Continuing some of the architecture theme again…

I’d “seen” the locations and shots for the first two images the day before (but I was without camera) when wandering in the city at lunch so I ventured back the next day with camera in hand…

I was particularly happy with how this one turned out

Futurescape

World Square, Sydney CBD

Next week I’m going to limit myself to the ultra wide angle lens (8-16mm) and will try the following again at 8mm for an even wider (more distorted :)) view…

Sails

Sydney

Timed and shot from the hip when crossing the intersection

Silhouette

and for a bit of obtuse fun, made more incongruous because it’s smack in a small busy lane between two tall buildings in the heart of the CBD (between George and Pitt streets)…

Couch

Sydney CBD

I’ve used Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as my go to digital image management solution since just before I got my first D-SLR about 18 months ago – it’s uber and I couldn’t do this without it.

I shoot a lot of images and for varied things…

– I’m always keen to hone my skills, learn new things and create beautiful images – I’ll research a style, technique or skill and try to put that to practice and get better if I can – in this regard I’m kind of always taking up and trying new things (photographically) – e.g. Landscapes, Seascapes, Macro, Lighting, Street and so on and I guess painstakingly following those things
– I do however also have a family with three young daughters so wearing another hat I’m always taking shots of my children and the things we’re doing when I can – you don’t plan and setup for this – it’s candid real life
– lastly I’ve also kind of become the unofficial/official photographer at the school my three girls go to – so I’m often photographing events at or for the school – mostly children at the things they do – music, drama, sports events, fundraising events, school functions, excursions, camps and so on – this has certainly increased the scope of the type of shooting I’ll do

The last two above keep me “practiced” in the skills of the everyday shooting, capturing moments and memories and shooting styles I’m not doing in #1 – e.g. portraits (candid – I take literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of these), sports, group shots, performances, etc.

So I take a lot of images – e.g. at a recent fete our school ran I took an all time one day record of over 1,000 images.

So my Lightroom workflow after a shoot consists of….

• I pretty much keyword everything on or just after import (nothing too fancy – most images might have somewhere between 3 and 8 tags and I generally bulk apply tags)
• Go through and do Rejects (stuff to delete) [Press SHIFT X to mark the current image as Rejected and auto move on to next image] and some Selects on the first run through after import (and probably add keywords – usually on blocks of images)
• Go through and decide the selects (I usually just label with a colour rather than Flagging the image – e.g. yellow (Press 7))
• Bracketed images (e.g. for HDR’s or Pano’s) are Stacked – if I do process the bracket I’ll bring the final image back into Lightroom and into the Stack and that image is moved to the Top of the Stack so it’s the image I see in the Grid view
• Limit my view to the selects only and then start rating the images – basically 1* is nice, 2* is almost postable (e.g. to the forum/blog), 3* good enough for public viewing, 4* my favourites (I’d print these), 5* saved for the very few exceptional (in my eyes) images and everything else is unrated (0 rating) and just sits in my image library
• Fine tune and decide what I’m going to PP (usually 2* and above? – however for school photos this isn’t the case since I’m not after what might be technically the best images but rather inclusive photos – e.g. ones which give a broader view of the event, day, children, etc – I try to have as many different children covered from an event even if they aren’t necessarily the best overall images)
• Post Process the best images
• If it’s event photos I’ll then create one or more web galleries for the event (straight out of Lightroom) – upload the folder and email the link(s) to relevant people; they will then usually email me and ask for email or print resolution versions of specific images if they want them
• If it’s family photos I’ll update an existing gallery (I have a gallery per year) and I’ll email my relatives every now and then so they can check out any updates, sometimes I also post some of these to my blog here
• If it’s my “creative” photography I’ll post to my blog and every now and then I might update my flickr stream with my highest selects [Note: this can also be done automatically out of Lightroom via the Flickr publish component]

In a forthcoming blog post I’ll outline in more detail the sequence of Lightroom adjustments I apply to many of the images I take to the step of post processing.

Mt Wilson in the Blue Mountains was filled with all manner of fungi – it was a chance to get out the macro lens, flash and flash diffuser – here is a selection of a few of them

Faerie Village

Huts on the Hillside

Red Devil (Amanita Muscaria)

Week 17

A bit of architecture this week (some with and some without people) for a change…

Chrome Mirrors

Westfield, Sydney CBD

Sitting Alone

Westfield, Sydney CBD

Fire

Sydney CBD

Having been invited to photograph Autumn colour in the Blue Mountains (Mt Wilson and Mt Tomah) my youngest and eldest daughters accompanied me on the early morning trip up the mountains.

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay gallery viewer.

The first image was taken on the drive up (Bells Line of Road) from Richmond – the view is back towards the coast

Morning Vapours

Just after we arrived at 9AM and before peak hour traffic filled Mt Wilson with cars and hundreds of avid photographers

Autumn Avenue

Golden Lane

Curved

Yellow

This last image was taken at Mt Tomah Botanic Gardens in the afternoon on the way home

Autumn Path