Photo © Niko Caignie

When I was asked by LVT/PR, Adobe Belgiums PR  firm, to host a Lightroom Workshop for some of Belgiums finest photobloggers, of course I gladly accepted the invitation.

Together with Ton Frederiks, Senior Product Manager at Adobe, we walked through a typical Lightroom workflow. For the occasion, we had set up Lightroom in ‘tethered shooting’ mode. That means shooting with the camera connected to the computer, making the images pop up in Lightroom on your anywhere-between-11-to-30-inch-color-calibrated-monitor instead of on your tiny 3 inch camera LCD.

By the way, that’s me you can see at the front of the room, luckily out of focus. As many photographers, I don’t like to be on ‘the other’ side of the lens. Thank God for Niko and his shallow depth-of-field lenses.

The event was – kudos to LVT/PR – very well organised and Easy Computing, the publisher of my ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’ book, was kind enough to provide the attendants with a copy of the book. That way, people could read on about the subjects we did not have time enough to cover in the workshop. Rumor has it that some even have it on their bedside table now,  although – as much as I like the book – I can think of more inspiring bedroom literature .

In future blogposts and videos, I will also tackle some of the questions. In between the workshop and a well-deserved drink afterwards, the bloggers were even put to work in a small competition: everyone got two raw files (a landscape photo by Ton and a portrait of my PortraitsOfAsia side-project) and was asked to ‘develop’ those files – using only Lightroom.

Because noone wants to work for free, especially not under the pressure of a 30 minute deadline, we even threw in 2 prizes: a Lightroom upgrade and a workshop of choice by yours truly.

Ton and I will vote on which conversion we like best, but following the logic of all those reality shows you see on TV, our votes only count for 50%. The other half is determined by… you!

So go to the Facebook-page of the event and tell us who you think should win (you do so by clicking on the picture you like and by clicking on ‘Vind ik leuk’ (‘I like’). You will find that the same raw-file can be non-destructively interpreted in a lot of ways, which is the beauty of Lightroom’s approach to image editing.

By the way, below you will find my conversion of the portrait.