As a professional shooter, I use Lightroom as a standard part of my workflow. Over the weekend, I turned Lightroom loose on a long-overdue, personal project. I’m now more fond of Lightroom than ever. The reason? Lightroom found photos of my kids that I haven’t seen in years. [Read more →]

The dates for the upcoming 2008/09 tour of the Epson Print Academy are now online. The 16-city tour starts in Atlanta on November 8. No specifics about pricing or curriculum have been released. Click here for the event calendar. I expect that more details will be released by the end of the month.

The last tour, held in 2006, offered two tracks at each venue –- one for amateurs and one for professionals. I attended the pro track in San Francisco and met Bruce Fraser, JP Caponigro, Greg Gorman, Jeff Schewe and Mac Holbert. I expect that the instructors on the new tour will be equally stellar.

I always look forward to the Epson Print Academy as a way to catch up the latest techniques. Even though I drive my Epson 3800 with a high-degree of confidence, I’m looking forward to attending the pro track in San Francisco next February. With the recent release of Lightroom 2 and the upcoming announcement of Photoshop CS4, I highly recommend the event regardless of your printer make and skill level.

I’m a big advocate of shooting tethered into Lightroom. Great synergies result when I send images from my DSLR straight into Lightroom.  Even on location shoots, I’ll tie my camera into my laptop. Here’s a run down of the benefits of tethered shooting - for both photographers and their clients. [Read more →]

Adobe has started shipping the 2nd generation of Lightroom (officially “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2″). I’ll say it up front, “I love Lightroom.” As a commercial shooter, Lightroom has become the backbone of my post-capture workflow. In my studio, Photoshop now handles only those things that Lightroom cannot do… which is much less now that Lightroom can handle many localized corrections.

Is Lightroom 2 perfect? No. Is it the best software around for one-stop handling of ingestion, DNG conversion, keywording, metatagging, sorting, ranking, RAW processing, exporting in multiple formats, creating slideshows and web galleries? Definitely yes. [Read more →]

Like many photographers, I am a voyeur. That’s why I love to read Death To Film - the blog of Image Mechanics.

IM is the gang of superheros based in Santa Monica that’s lead by Michael Britt (the fellow who wrote the original Lightroom user’s guide for Adobe.) As digital capture specialists, these guys have to manage as many captures in a day as most non-pro shooters will create in a lifetime.

The greatest thing about the Image Mechanics crew and their blog is that they share virtually all of their secrets. Check out the latest post about their off-line archiving system. Then just start scrolling through their archives. You’ll find tale after tale about being in the trenches of high-volume digital capture. Need more? Then jump over to the IM site for another long session of good reading.

If you could be a fly on the wall and listen in on intimate conversations with Jay Maisel, Pete Turner, Jerry Uelsmann or Richard Benson, would you be interested? Then tune in to George Jardine’s podcasts published under the boring title “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom”. One of the great windfall’s of Adobe’s efforts to promote Lightroom is that George, as Adobe’s Pro Evangelist, has traveled the country and published dozens of his conversations with pro shooters – both iconic and not-so-iconic. [July 1 Update: George bids farewell to his friends at Adobe. Read the post on his blog here.]

You’ll hear photographers talk about their work, the ups and downs of their careers and where they think photography is headed. The podcasts are free. Many are enhanced podcasts with photos of the interview and/or the photographer’s work. [Read more →]