b3nj1's photostream  

Updated: 19 Aug 2009

I love photography. I am always looking for ways to improve, so if you have suggestions and constructive criticism, I welcome it! I'm mainly interested in getting great results in camera instead of spending time post processing. I spend enough time on the computer for my job :-) . As a result, I mostly shoot in JPG. ... Still try to minimize effort on the computer, but I got Adobe Lightroom 2 this winter. I love it for organizing (though I have some nits) and for quick photo edits (mostly white balance, cropping, exposure saves). Though I've switched to shooting RAW, I'm on the fence. The file size is annoying (slow to work with, more disk space, bigger/slower backups). I'm not sure it really matters so much for me in terms of quality and ability to stand up to Lightroom tweaks. The main thing I enjoy from it is Lightroom whitebalance presets are only available for RAW not JPG (lame).

Workflow ....

I do spend a fair amount of time on the computer managing my photos, and I'm looking for ways to optimize that. I like to minimize damage to my photos (lossless JPG rotation, retain original metadata, etc), but also add tags, geotag and keep my flickr content synced with my local home copies. I've written a Perl script using Flickr::API and Phil Harvey's Image::ExifTool. I use that to upload and do some amount of batch tagging. It syncs tags, captions, and descriptions between flickr and my local copies, and it backs up comments and set information. I'm ready to add geotagging to it, but am thinking I'll port it to a GUI with Java before doing that. Not only do I want to learn Java, but I want to have my program absorb more of my workflow... My typical flow is:

- Canon ZoomBrowser to download and delete photos from SD card
- IrfanView to auto-rotate (lossless)
- Picasa to "star" pics that I want to make public
- Geotag (http://geotag.sourceforge.net/) with exiftool to geotag photos
- my Perl script to batch tag and upload to flickr
- On flickr tag and organize the photos


That was tremendously laborious which is why I moved to Lightroom. Picasa could do a number of those steps, but does them very poorly in my mind. Picasa corrupts metadata whenever it modifies a photo, and it does not support multi-word tags.

Lightroom could go a bit further in some areas. Integrate support for more metadata searches/editing. For instance, focal length searches along with other common photo attributes. Preset whitebalance settings for JPGs would be great. It could also show some more love for videos (at least import them off the camera please).

I've played a little with AEB and HDR using Photomatix. It's very push-button.

Equipment....

My wife and I have a Canon 40D, Canon SD600 and we each have Apple iPhone 3G S-es.

Holux M-241 GPS datalogger

Canon SD600
Canon underwater housing for SD600
- for our scuba trips and hanging out in the water
- on our next scuba trip, I plan to use CHDK firmware for SD600 to capture RAW. This should help the images better stand up to the post-processing required to deal with the challenges of white balance and loss of red underwater.

Canon 40D
Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash
Lenses:
Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM
Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II
Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM
Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS USM

I sold my motorcycle, so I've been going a bit crazy buying lenses! I feel I've way overstepped my abilities. I decided to sell the 70-300 after we had a kid. The 70-300 was nice for travel as the 70-200 was too much when I wanedt to travel light. But, travel isn't in the cards for a while (at least traveling light isn't).

Before we had our kid, I didn't use the 50mm much. It was cheap, and I feel it shows. I'm somewhat tempted to use it for low-light shots, but most often those tend to be in fairly close quarters (like at a dinner party). When my wife got pregnant, I started to love the lens. Well, I started using it a lot more. It's very sharp around f/3-5, and that's a good range for portraits (most of the pregnancy portraits were shot with the 50 in that range). The main frustration is that it's not great at focusing, so I tried to be closer to f/5 to get some margin on the DOF.

I picked up the 10-22mm off ebay. The combination of wide view and macro focus is pretty fun. I'm getting a GND (graduated neutral density) filter for it soon. It's fun to take hiking, and I think my "landscape" shots will benefit from that.

The 17-85 is a great everyday lens and probably spends the most time on the camera. I rented the 24-105 and would love to get that. I might just wait and pick it up in a kit when I take the plunge into full frame. I'm waiting on Canon to improve their flash system and focus system. Or maybe I'll just switch to Nikon :)

What time is it!?
Before our trip to Australia & New Zealand in September/October 2008, I decided to set our cameras' clocks UTC. I figured there were a few benefits:
- easier GPS geotagging; GPS tracks are anchored to UTC
- traveling through multiple timezones wouldn't suffer my forgetfulness
- daylight saving time confusion. I figured this benefit out after the fact. In the Australia/NZ trip, we visited many timezones. Karen's phone and my phone almost never agreed on what side of DST we were on. In Australia, some regions follow DST while others don't. Don't we have bigger problems to solve instead of resetting the rules for DST every season?

Issues with using UTC....
- organizing pictures by "day" as I like to do requires manual intervention
- general confusion around time shift. I'm going to leave them in UTC format.

I think I can address those issues pretty easily with my little helper program. Assuming I have geotagged photos, I can do a lookup to get an idea of what the UTC-offset is, and add a bit of meta-data (IPTC tag or maybe there's a better field) to indicate the local time.