We shot over 600 photos on our cruise. Anyone who missed it on Facebook: we visited Savona (Italy), Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca (both Spain), Tunis (Tunisia), La Valletta (Malta), Cantania and Rom (both Italy). Anyway, here is a selection of some of the photos. Took me the better of the day to sort out which photos were worth while posting, and then post-processing them.
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I always shoot in RAW + JPEG. For normal point-and-shoot vacation stuff I’m generally satisfied with the JPEG the camera spits out. But I would never shoot only JPEG. The additional information of RAW shouldn’t be underestimated, and to be honest I often tweak around. It makes a difference if you are working on the original RAW data, or if you are working on the JPEG copy the camera has already processed.
Up till now I’ve been post-processing my images with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3. Since I was planning on post-processing a whole load of pictures I decided to see what software there is out there to streamline the work flow a bit (Bridge and CS3 do the job, and the raw converter in CS3 does offer a wide variety of options, but it is still tedious switching to be switching between both programs and working on multiple RAW images at the same time). While I was away, Adobe released Lightroom 3, so I checked out the reviews and it sounded good. I downloaded the 30 day trial version and to sum it up my experience so far … I’m impressed.
I haven’t worked with Lightroom previously, so I can’t say how much has changed in this version. But I really like the details that make life easier when handling collections of images. Being an Adobe product it also offers interfaces to various Photoshop functions (I only own CS3, I could imagine it offers more options if you have the current version CS5 installed). I could go on and on with things I like about it, but I’ll just sum it up and say: It really streamlines the work flow of post-processing photographs from import to print/upload/web/presentation and if you are shooting RAW it has a whole lot of fun stuff to play around with directly built in.
Since I shoot with a Nikon D80 that tends to produce a fair amount of image noise if I go past ISO 400 I liked the noise reduction features of Lightroom, both color and luminance noise can be reduced greatly with sliders for fine tuning.
It’s a good piece of software, and when the 30 day trial ends I’ll probably go buy it.
I finished up my “grid clicker” script. it is intended to simplify testing of games where you have to click certain patterns (a grid). Typical facebook games like farmville or funfari are great examples of this. just download the file (here is the sourcecode), execute it, and an eye should appear in your task bar. Double clicking on the icon in your task bar will start the script, just follow the instructions and everything should be fine.
And while I am at it: here is a spreadsheet I started for plants/trees/animals in funfari: Google online spreadsheets
I haven’t posted anything here in a while. Mostly I’ve been busy preparing a photo-shoot and -documentation of a wedding of friends. As a photographer you will always notice things, when looking at the finished fotos, where you say “hmm, maybe a differnet aperature/iso/flash/exposure setting would have produced an even better result”. but all in all I’m satisfied with the results.
Spent a day this week driving around and taking random photos ….
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