A quick (Dutch) service announcement

Er is een extra sessie van de Masterclass Zwart Wit ingelast op maandag 24 mei. Hierboven vindt u alvast een Before  & After om u een idee te geven (voor zover een tot 16 grijswaarden gecomprimeerde gif een idee kan geven, uiteraard). Alle info over de workshop vindt u op de workshops-pagina.

De andere data voor deze workshop zijn uitverkocht, behalve 29 april, waarvoor één plaatsje vrijgekomen is.

One of the advantages of the fact that Lightroom is essentially a database, is that you can use Virtual Copies. As I explained during my presentations at Professional Imaging, Virtual Copies allow you to experiment with alternative versions of your pictures. Contrary to Snapshots, Virtual Copies can lead their own life in the Catalog.

Sometimes, as I explained in this recent blogpost, I use Virtual Copies to lessen the effect of a Lightroom Preset.

Saturday, at Professional Imaging, I accidentally discovered a new use for Virtual Copies: I wanted to do a slideshow with some Before & After pictures. I had set up Lightroom so that each picture was shown 2 seconds, with a transition time of one second. But I also had an introductory text slide (which I had made in Photoshop and imported into Lightroom), and 2 seconds wasn’t enough for people to read all of that. I could of course change the timing for the entire show, but then it would have lasted way too long… So, I just made a Virtual Copy of the text slide which effectively doubled the time it would be shown. As this still wasn’t enough, I made a second VC.

For those of you who did not make it to Professional Imaging, here’s the slideshow.

So how ‘bout you: what do you use Virtual Copies for?

I’ll be doing a couple of short (well, 45 minutes is short for me, anyway…) Dutch (or Flemish, I should say) Lightroom demoes at Professional Imaging in Nieuwegein in the Netherlands this Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.

• Sunday, march 7th: 12h – 12h45
• Monday, march 8th: 12h – 12h45
• Monday, march 8th: 18h – 18h45
• Tuesday, march 9th: 12h – 12h45

There’s also a small exhibition of sixteen of my favourite Portraits Of Asia pictures that have been craftfully printed with a Durst Epsilon printer on Kodak paper by Fred Smits from Wiegers & Smits. Fred has almost 40 years of experience and it shows: the B&W prints are truly B&W and the amount of detail is just amazing. On the picture at the top of this blogpost, it was the first time that I noticed that there was another car in the scene and that there’s a carpet standing about in the middle of nature. Only in Iran. Come and see them for yourself .

When I’m not talking myself, you’ll find me listening to people’s questions at the Adobe stand.

And if all of those reasons are not good enough to motivate you to come: this year’s keynote speaker at Professional Imaging is the one and only Scott Kelby. Mister Photoshop himself! I wonder if I could get him to sign one of my books .

One of the cool yet often overlooked Lightroom features is the Web Module. As a photographer, you undoubtedly want to show your work to your friends, clients and possibly even the whole world! However, if you’re like me and you think that css is a detective series with enough spinoff’s to make you dizzy and that flash is a synonym for a speedlight and not some web-programming language, then you know that designing your own photo website is a probably not the way to go if you want to get some more photography done before the end of this century.

Of course you can hire a web-designer to make a great looking site, but this can easily set you back a couple of G’s. And not all of you struggling-to-get-by freelancers have that kind of money lying around, do you? And if you do, you probably want to spend that on your next camera or lens, don’t you? I hear you loud and clear!)

So, what if I told you that someone who knows his Flash from his html from his css had already done all the heavy lifting for creating an out-of-the-box photography website for you and even better: what if that person had wrapped all this code (it’s no coincidence that website-language is called ‘code’: it’s a big sign to us, mere mortal photographers to not even try to understand it) into a nice Lightroom plugin?

Wouldn’t that be worth a 100 bucks to you? 200 anyone? Do I here 300 in the back of the room?

Well… this is exactly what Sean McCormack from Lightroom-Blog has done.

He’s made a highly configurable yet easy-to understand Lightroom Web Module Engine called LRB Portfolio. It allows you to design a complete photography portfolio website from within Lightroom’s Web Module, including galleries, an ‘about’ page, a ‘contact’ page and the like).

And the beauty is it won’t cost you thousands of dollars, not even hundreds. About 20 USD/15 Euro + VAT is what you’ll pay for the plugin. That’s one less CD or DVD to buy this week, and it’s all paid for.

Sean has just released a new, identically priced Lightroom Web Engine, called LRB Exhibition. I haven’t had the chance to play around with it yet, but below you find a screenshot from Sean’s site. It allows you to focus even more on your pictures.

Being the great lad that the is, Sean has made a good deal even better by offering a 20% discount on his plugins and other Lightroom goodies (such as his Graduated Filter Presets). Check (them) out before midnight of March 12th, because that’s when the discount ends. Make sure to use coupon code FOCUS20.

In future blogposts, I’ll discuss some other interesting web design plugins for Lightroom. Meanwhile, if you use one that you’re happy with, or have an example of a site you created with Sean’s or other Lightroom Web Engines, please enlighten us in the comments!

International readers:

This is an announcement for a Masterclass on Digital Black & White, held in Dutch in Belgium. This workshop is also available in English. Contact me for more information.

MoreThanWords stelt voor: ’From Megapixel to Mono Print’: een nieuwe, intensieve, ééndaagse workshop waarin u de knepen leert om zelf krachtige zwartwit afdrukken te maken. Even bladeren door de online-brochure (na de break) geeft u een idee van wat u kunt verwachten.

Op het goedgevulde dagprogramma staan ondermeer:

Techniek:

• do’s and don’ts van zwartwitconversie
• de verschillende methodes in Lightroom, Camera Raw& Photoshop
• nuttige plugins
• geavanceerde technieken zoals exposure blending & gebruik van HDR & pseudo-HDR voor een groter dynamisch bereik
• digitaal doordrukken & tegenhouden (‘dodging & burning’) in Lightroom/Camera Raw en Photoshop

Afwerking:

• verschillende manieren om kaders en randen toe te voegen
• simulatie van beperkte scherptediepte
• toevoegen van filmkorrel
• filmsimulatie via plugins
• tinting & toning

Workflow:

• sneller resulaten bereiken met virtual copies, Lightroom presets, Photoshop actions
• niet-destructief werken met Smart Objects voor maximale flexibiliteit
• het afdrukproces: iedere deelnemer krijgt de gelegenheid zijn favoriete foto af te drukken op een state-of-the-art inkjet printer op A3-formaat

Praktisch:

U hebt keuze uit drie sessies in Gent:

• donderdag 29 april
• vrijdag 30 april (volzet)
• zaterdag 22 mei

Het aantal plaatsen is beperkt tot 5 per sessie. De prijs bedraagt 179 € inclusief BTW. Zoals steeds zijn een broodjeslunch en zoveel Nespresso’s als u op kunt, inbegrepen. Inschrijven kan via mail. Uw plaats wordt dan gedurende één week gereserveerd, zodat u ondertussen het cursusbedrag kunt overmaken op rekening nummer 068-2474381-35 op naam van Piet Van den Eynde / MoreThanWords. Een basiskennis Photoshop en Lightroom (of Photoshop en Adobe Camera Raw) is aangewezen.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Nederlands.

Every journey must come to an end, even if that journey is a crazy 10 month trip through South-East Asia by means of an even crazier mode of transportation (a bicycle) loaded with the craziest weight of photography stuff such as a flash umbrella and a printer.

Last monday, I touched down in Zaventem, aka Brussels Airport. My partner-in-crime Ruth takes the proverbial Long Way Home: as I write these lines, she’s on a container ship from Mumbai to Rotterdam, hoping not to be hijacked by Somali pirates.

PortraitsOfAsia, the journey, may well be over for me, but PortraitsOfAsia, the project, isn’t quite finished yet: many of the photos I took will see their way into upcoming publications, workshops and seminars.

One of the next blogposts will feature some behind-the-scenes photos of PortraitsOfAsia , and I also hope to give a review on the gear I used.

Finally, if you happen to live in Belgium or the Netherlands, I’ll be hosting a couple of seminars at the Dutch Photography Fair, Professional Imaging, on my Lightroom workflow during PortraitsOfAsia. More about that here. I’m excited to go there on March 7th, 8th and 9th. Excited, and also a little stressed: the auditorium can hold up to 600 people, so I’m told. Maybe the fair’s Keynote Speaker, Scott Kelby who probably thinks of talking to a group of 600 people as an ‘intimate get-together’, kan give me some relaxation tips.

I’ll keep you… posted!

P.S. I thought I might as well include a Lightroom tip in this post. The photograph at the very top of this blogpost, shows, apart from the crappy bokeh of a cheap Nikon lens, a defocused nightly street scene in central Mumbai. As you may know, Lightroom has a Spot Removal Tool (shortcut N), that lets you (non-destructively!) remove spots and blemishes. It’s great for removing sensor dust, because you can correct 1 picture and then synchronise your settings with the Sync… button. But you can also use the Spot Removal tool to add elements to your photo. Here, I used it to clone two light sources into the picture (to improve the balance), rather than to clone them away. I simply chose an existing light, and set that as the Source of the Spot Removal Tool. I clicked where I wanted the clone to be, and… voilà. I also cropped the picture using the Crop Tool (Shortcut R).

P.P.S. Don’t get too hung up on that shortcut (N): it changes in Lightroom 3 to… Q

Abandoned tea factory near Thekkady, South-India.

A quick note for the Dutch-speaking (or at least Dutch-reading) readers of this blog:

In het december-nummer van het Nederlandse fotografievakblad ‘De Fotograaf’ is ondertussen de vijfde aflevering over PortraitsOfAsia verschenen. Bij het schrijven ervan hadden we net de cultuurshock tussen Singapore en India meegemaakt, en dat merk je ook aan de tekst.

Meer info over abonnementen op ‘De Fotograaf’ vind je hier. Leden van de Vereniging voor Belgische Beroepsfotografen kunnen een abonnement nemen aan groepsvoorwaarden. Meer info daarvoor op www.beroepsfotografen.be.

Aflevering 5 (alsook de vorige vier afleveringen) over PortraitsOfAsia kan je – met dank aan De Fotograaf  - hier in PDF downloaden.

De volgende – en laatste – aflevering zal ietwat anders zijn. Hoe juist, verklappen we nog niet…