James Popsys explains how he picks the best photos from his shoots. Video is pre-pandemic. It’s refreshing to hear someone mention going out to photograph and not mention social distancing.
“In the field” shoot a black image if you see “the one” that works.
In Lightroom import your photos immediately. Do not sort and choose when you get home.
He uses stars in Lightroom. In the first round he awards up to three stars:
Single star – photo must be interesting and sharp (in the right places)
Another star – does the composition work?
Another star – is it exposed correctly?
For the second round, he only shows photos that have two stars or more. So that should show photos that are interesting and sharp, and either composition works or exposed correctly. In this round he changes composition by cropping and/or fixes exposure. Should have a few more three star photos.
At this point he’ll do more editing, and the best photos get another star. The very best get five stars.
I’m blogging this because I’ve had this video open in my browser tabs for months, meaning to try out this technique but I learn a process like this better if it’s written down. Hope it helps somebody!
Happy new year! As if living through a pandemic wasn’t bad enough, and Ireland is worse than ever with more than 7000 confirmed infections yesterday. Christmas and New Year celebrations really did a number on the country. Last night the US Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters. Check out Saul Loeb‘s photos of the event. I grabbed screenshots of the pages. Getty has more photos here.The contrast between politicians and rioters is striking.
My Facebook account was permanently banned on Wednesday along with all the people who take care of the Cork Skeptics page. We’re still not sure why but it might have something to do with the Facebook algorithm used to detect far-right conspiracy groups.
When your account is disabled you’re given the opportunity to upload some form of ID. That is the price of requesting a review. Unfortunately if you are permanently banned you will only be informed after uploading the photo that permanently banned accounts cannot be unbanned. It’s a particularly evil but clever way for Facebook to gather real world identifiable information about a user who may be desperate to get back into their account.
The good news is that our accounts were restored last night after two days in which we tweeted about it and contacted everyone we knew who might be able to help. Thank you to everyone who RTed, liked or commented on those tweets, or helped in other ways behind the scenes. I really do not know how this decision was reversed so don’t bother asking, sorry. We’re not the only group to be banned in error. It happened to a group of seventeenth century historical re-enactors who were banned but then unbanned.
The first thing I did when I logged in again? I downloaded all my information so if it happens again at least I have a copy of what I posted there. I haven’t come across the photo of my ID in my downloaded information however, though it might be there. I haven’t looked at all of it yet. Thank you GDPR.
If you have a Facebook account you should download your information too because it could happen to you too, even though you did nothing wrong. Go here and click the “Create File” button now.
Yeah, I know you won’t do it but you really should.
People say the age of personal blogging is over because everyone is on social media but I beg to differ. At least I won’t be banned from my own self-hosted blog any time soon.
Inchydonney Beach, December 12th 2020.
Update: All the admin users of Cork Skeptics were once again banned from Facebook on Friday, January 22nd 2021. If you know anyone in Facebook I would appreciate a word with them!
Update: Much later. Our accounts were restored and the Cork Skeptics page was restored but that’s twice now so we have deleted the page to avoid any more problems.
Make sure you do regular backups of your Facebook data!
I can’t imagine going into a restaurant or pub for a long time still. The lockdown in Ireland has managed to reduce the infection rate of Covid19 in the country dramatically compared to levels last month but it hasn’t gone away.
Unfortunately the lockdown itself has decimated many businesses and put medical procedures on hold that would normally happen. I hope people take more seriously the advice to wear masks in busy public areas so we can avoid another lockdown in January but it’s almost guaranteed we’ll have another one in the new year. 🙁
SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station and the first thing I notice is that they are probably one of the few groups of strangers on or off the planet who can safely hug right now.
If you haven’t seen 1917 yet you should go see it before watching this parody set in 2020. It’s so good, but only makes sense if you saw the original movie.
Lightroom Classic comes with 20GB of space on Adobe’s cloud service (Lightroom CC/Web/app) but did you know that you can sync photos to the cloud and then edit them on your phone without using that space?
The original photos are not synced, but a smaller cut down smart preview is which in most cases will be indistinguishable from the original.
If you create a collection, all the photos in that collection can be synced with the cloud. They’ll appear as an album of the same name in the Lightroom app on your phone or iPad. They won’t take up any of that valuable 20GB of space. Right-click on the collection and click “Sync with Lightroom”. You can also click the checkbox to the left of the collection name.
Unfortunately Adobe won’t allow you to sync smart collections, and I presume that is intentional for whatever reason. However, with the help of the Any Source plugin you can configure it to sync smart collections with the cloud. This very handy plugin syncs the smart collection with a dumb collection that can then be synchronised.
I use it to synchronise the following smart collections:
Published photos.
Unpublished photos.
Photos on my TODO list.
Recent Photos from the last 3 months.
The plugin has a free trial but is PWYW and well worth paying for!
Syncing my recent photos with the cloud is simple.
Create a smart collection.
Call it “Recent Photos”.
Add one rule: “Capture Date” “is in the last” 3 “months”.
Save.
That will create your new smart collection. Now follow the instructions to synchronise smart collections on the Any Source homepage. It might take a few minutes for the album to appear in mobile Lightroom but it will eventually.
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