Photography Musings
Over the last several years, I’ve become an avid amateur photographer. I use a Mac laptop and heavily utilized iPhoto as my “organizer”, but the editing capabilities were slim. I then had to purchase a little software gadget called “iPhoto Library Manager” because I filled up my hard drive and had no way to archive photos off and still be able to open them in the iPhoto library (which kept the organization structure). This software allowed me to have multiple iPhoto libraries, so I could have one for baseball, one for lighthouses, one for family trips, etc. and store them on an external firewire drive. Still, I found tagging photos with keywords arduous and a task often ignored. So my photo library became quite a mess as the years went on. My workflow consisted of offloading a card into the local iPhoto on my laptop and creating an album, then at some later date (usually when the hard drive was threatening to fill again), I would copy the album to a library on the external drive and then go through and delete the original photos on the hard drive. Time-consuming and not fun.
Then my mom (a 35mm photographer who is just entering the digital world) suggested I start shooting in RAW mode after being shown all the capabilities. That was fine and good, but I had to use a converter for my Canon’s CR2 RAW files before I could then use the photos in Photoshop. Blah - again, too much.
In my IT work, I worked a lot with the ColdFusion web application server, formerly of Allaire and then Macromedia, attending their conferences annually. Macromedia was bought out by Adobe, and my two worlds of IT and multimedia merged. For being a conference attendee, I was given access to the Adobe labs, where I first discovered Lightroom as it was being developed, although at the time I hadn’t a clue what to do with it, so I let my beta trial expire and forgot about it for a couple years. I was still shooting in JPG at the time and iPhoto was suiting my purposes just fine.
Then I learned how to shoot in manual modes and began exploring more options within my camera. My photos began getting noticed, one being published in the Washington Times, one published on a baseball minor league team’s website, and selling a lighthouse photo to a texbook publisher. I was maturing as a photographer and as I played with RAW mode, found I was limited with the software I had and needed to move up in my developing and organization techniques as I began amassing several thousand photographs while developing about 300 at a time. I read a review of Lightroom and decided to give it a go again. This time I was happy to discover it wasn’t over my head at all and I instantly began using it, dropping iPhoto altogether. Of course, that also meant dropping $300 on a license after the trial expired, but I think it will keep me happy for a long time. I subscribed to Lightroom Killer Tips video podcasts and have been discovering little tips that I was unaware of, although also getting validation that I’ve been using the software correctly without any training.
I imported all the historic photos I photographed at the Archives and was able to easily tag all of them with copyright info, where they came from, the lighthouse name, state, and caption information if any. This will make preparing the book SO much easier. I can browse tags, so I easily dumped all lighthouse photos into the directories I created for each one. Organization has always been a bit of an issue for me, so this is lifesaving! I can also look at baseball games by date and tag. Nice. Plus, the developing is quick and easy. I shot my brother-in-law’s wedding a couple weeks ago and once I figured out how underexposed most photos were, I created a preset to “fix” them and applied to all photos taken in a particular setting, then just tweaked quickly and easily. Mistake photos can very easily be turned into sepia or B&W to salvage and look artistic. Much less time-consuming and I think now that I’ve sorted out the tagging, organizing baseball games by inning will be even easier than the way I did it in iPhoto which was to create albums labeled 1st, 2nd, 3rd,.. 9th and then dragging the photos from the game album into the appropriate inning, then exporting using “album name” as the file naming format.
Of course, now I feel I’ve outgrown my Canon Rebel XT 
The price jump to the professional camera level is a bit prohibitive though. I’d also like to take a sports photography workshop (I figure I can apply lessons learned there to photography in general), but the cost is $3,000. A workshop in NM recently posted on the Killer Tips site is $5,000! The lens I want to shoot baseball games and lighthouses at a distance is $4,500. So this “hobby” can become quite expensive with little return in revenues. Yikes. To train myself a little, I did purchase the “Lightroom Basic Training” DVD which was a much more palatable expense.
I’ve also been doing some video work and am outgrowing iMovie. I looked at Adobe’s Creative Suite Production Premium, but again the price tag is a bit much for a hobbyist. Although, it includes everything I need, including Photoshop, which I’m also running a trial of at the moment. My wish list is becoming quite extensive! My husband has begun buying lotto tickets. Heh.
Anyway, it’s been a fun road thus far, and will be interesting to see where I continue to grow with it and end up in the years to come. I need to schedule a couple days to tour the Maryland lighthouses so I can have a few “then” and “now” photos to show in the book.