As you probably know, I’m a big fan of Lightroom. Well, Lightroom 4 was released minutes ago, so you might be able to say you saw it here first.
Get more info from Adobe.
I really liked the preview version that was released earlier this year and I’m sure they’ve integrated a lot of feedback into the final version. Not sure if they integrated any of my feedback…
I took some pictures with Supermodel Georgia last month, and those pictures have been getting some great reviews Flickr. Let’s go behind the scenes on that shoot briefly.
Behind The Scenes shooting Georgia
As you can see, I have a large white paper backdrop lit by two Alien Bees strobes. There’s a Canon 580 EX on manual mode as a hair light just out of frame on the upper right. The yellow tool caddy is my stand-in for checking exposure and lighting.
Most of the shots are full-length on the white background but sometimes girls look better with a lower key background. When I want to switch to a black background quickly I use the Botero 037 black/white foldable reflector hanging from a lightstand. It’s really quick to switch from the room-filling white backdrop to a 3/4 length black backdrop and the only real drawback is the length, as you can see in this shot:
Behind the scenes with Georgia - black backdrop
I just put the lightstand holding the backdrop straight on the white paper. You can see the home-made snoot for the hair light in the upper right corner. The black rectangle on the left is a large piece of foam core board I use to block the camera’s view of the left strobe, to but down on lens flare, glare, and washout.
Once you’ve got the lighting mostly right, two backdrops to switch between quickly, and a model, the only thing left to do is shoot! The results are here on Flickr and there’s a mix of black and white backdrops. Notice how the black background shots don’t include the feet?
Well, there’s one more thing left to do, and that’s clean up afterwards. Somehow that reflector folds into box the size of a large pizza and sometimes it’s not obvious how to do it. You especially want to look like you know what you’re doing when you’re in front of a paying client, so watch the following video and practice!
Fold a large reflector like a pro
or if you hate music: http://youtu.be/sIn4_wHwfL4
A lot of major websites are taking themselves offline today, or at least changing their logos in protest. We here at Brian Johns Photography World Headquarters are not altering the website, but we still want to raise awareness of the issue.
PIPA and SOPA are toxic to to the culture of user generated content on the Internet and here’s why: SOPA means that if a user uploads somebody else’s copyrighted content to a website, the website can be liable for extreme damages. If SOPA/PIPA are enacted, websites that rely on user-uploaded content will have to either strictly police every single upload (which probably isn’t possible) or change how they do business.
The main proponents of SOPA/PIPA are the big media conglomerates which love to sue people out of business. You can see how this would stifle the online creativity and sharing. Most “2.0″ style websites would probably have to shut down and small companies with no legal staff would be foolish to start up.
How does this affect Brian Johns Photography? Well, we don’t accept user uploaded content here, so I don’t have to worry about that. In fact, this law might even be good for us in the short term – let’s say a website posts a photo of mine without permission. I could theoretically take over the domain as punishment!
So why are we opposed to it? It’s the principle of the thing. I support every single SOPA/PIPA protest action I’ve seen today and I encourage you to learn more about the issue and express your opinion on it.
There were two recent headlines about large ships sinking in the last week: First, a ship that ran aground on a reef in Australia or New Zealand finally broke up. Second, a brand new, modern, huge, high tech cruise ship ran aground and sank off the coast of Italy. The cruise ship that just sank was only a few years old and cost $500 million dollars.
I was at lunch with coworkers when the Australian ship was on the news and a coworker said “Ships still sink?” What he meant was why, in 2012 with all the technology we have, do ships still sink?
My first reaction was to dismiss his question for being so naive, and marvel about how sheltered Internet geeks always think that “real world” problems don’t exist at all, just because they don’t exist in the world of sheltered Internet geeks. I’m always amazed at how “theory people” don’t understand that in the real world, there are physical consequences when things go wrong.
In our world of software things go wrong all the time – code fails, data gets lost, processes get restarted, etc., but the consequences are usually tiny. These are all the results of mistakes or carelessness somewhere in a complicated system. Well, the same things happen in other professions too. And when they do, bad things happen.
But yeah, it sucks that big ships still hit reefs and rocks these days.
Adobe just turned the public beta of Lightroom 4 loose! You can can all the info here: http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/2012/01/lightroom-4-beta-now-available.html
I’m going to make this entry short because I want to go watch the 8 youtube videos they havejust posted, which you can see here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL66FBC9F268C533EF But I’ll take a minute to comment on the marque features they’re touting:
I just wanted to post this quick note so perhaps you could say you saw it here first. I know what I’m going to be doing for the rest of tonight! (watching videos, downloading, and processing)
The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl is Saturday afternoon and I’ll be on the sidelines shooting. Held at AT&T Park again (yes, it was built as a baseball-only stadium, and yes, it’s a horrible layout.)
Look for me on ESPN on New Year’s Eve!
After a 7 month remodeling job, the world headquarters of Brian Johns Photography is ready for prime time again! The house was lifted and a new photo studio was built below!
You can see the progress over the last 7 months here: on flickr
This year has been super busy with construction details, extra daily travel time, and general craziness which has really cut into the photography time, so I haven’t produced much photography this year. But never fear – I’ve got a photo shoot planned for this coming week to break in the new facility, so stay tuned here for the results of the shoot.
[editor's note: I wrote this in August when Steve announced his retirement but I never published it. Steve Jobs' death was announced this afternoon.]
Today Steve Jobs announced he is resigning from Apple, although he is retaining his role as Chairman of the Board. He has been on medical leave for most of the year but this is his admission that he will not be able to return to full strength in his role at Apple.
This is not just about the CEO of a large electronics company stepping down – What this really means though is that he is admitting he is done with his multi-decade tenure of shaping the personal computer industry.
To say that Steve Jobs “made computers” is the understatement of the century, so really this announcement is admitting the end of his influence on the cell phone industry, the personal electronics industry, the music industry, and dare I say, the entire Internet.
There’s a very personal aspect to this as well, since Steve Jobs’ products and vision have influenced me since the very beginning. My first exposure to computers was an Apple ][ in elementary school, programming in Applesoft Basic. In high school I moved to Macintosh. By the time I hit college I had a NeXT, later becoming the NeXTStep admin for the network of NeXTs. I applied to work at Apple in 1997 on the CHIRP (Common Harware Reference Platform) team but that team got shut down when Steve returned to Apple. I ended up being an intern for Apple as a grad student in 2003 which fulfilled a life-long dream to work for Apple.
Because I worked in the MacOS group, my office was in Infinite Loop-1, the same building as Steve, but two floors down. I parked next to him in the parking structure and I thought it was cool that he parked right next to the “rest of us.” I crossed paths with him a few times but most people just stayed out of his way, lest they incur his wrath by catching him on a bad day. There’s a long-told tale that Steve Jobs had a reputation for arbitrarily asking random employees what they did for Apple and firing people who didn’t have a good enough answer. They say “never get into an elevator with Steve Jobs” because in the time it takes to pass a few floors you might be grilled about your value and lose your job.
One day I was walking across the lobby back from lunch and I saw Steve walking across the lobby for the elevator to his 4th floor office. I’m on the second floor and I usually take the stairs but the chance to take the elevator with him and perhaps have a chance to defend my purpose was too much to pass up. We both got on, he hit ’4′ and I hit ’2′ and looked off into space, not giving him any undue attention or otherwise acting “weird” around him. The doors didn’t close. The silence got awkward. He looked at me, looked at the lit buttons on the elevator, looked at me again, and walked right out, leaving me (at the fitness peak of my life) standing all alone waiting to take an elevator up one floor.
Sure, I was probably wasting his time by adding an extra stop. Sure, I was just some pukey intern trying to stand next to Steve Jobs for a minute. It was selfish but it was worth it. I got into an elevator with Steve Jobs and escaped with my life!
I haven’t worked for Apple since then but I live in Silicon Valley and I have a lot of friends who work there, and it is clear that the work they do is still directly influenced by Steve.
Some photos I did last Fall for a client are now live on their new website:
Click on the various tabs along the top and watch the pictures change. Go buy some brandy from them!
I’ve always had a things for books, and photography has only increased my love of books. When it comes to photography, I love a physical print. And when it comes to physical prints, I love a luscious coffee table book full of them. Combine that love with my lifelong addiction to other non-fiction books and I’ve ended up with a lot of books.
How many books? I don’t know. And thus my recent desire to catalog my book collection. It’s especially bad when I go to a used bookstore or the book sale at the library and see a book I’m interested in and sometimes I honestly can’t remember if I have that book or not. I used to have this problem with CDs all the time. I would find a good deal on a CD I like, get excited about it and buy it, bring it home and then find I already owned it. I solved that problem by getting an iPod, so I have a good portion of my music collection with me at the store. I don’t buy duplicate CDs anymore!
I want something similar for managing my books (photographic and other) and I’ve started too look at the options. The first obvious option is Delicious Library from Wil Shipley. I was a huge Omni Software fan in the 90′s and on the surface it looks like he’s come up with something cool for managing libraries.
Here’s my list of desires:
That’s it for actual requirements. But since this is 2011, most software is Internet aware so I’m open to some cool Internet-enabled features. Also, there are a few other features I’d like to see, even though they’re not deal-breaker requirements:
I have something to say about that Internet thing. The main benefit I see in adding networking functionality is to help me discover new books. I can already go to Amazon for any given title and see what other books people like so this software should do more. I’m talking full-on social networking here, but anonymously if I choose. Two points here:
The first point is huge. As I mentioned, Amazon can already tell me what other books I might be interested in based on one single book. But this software knows more than that, so the suggestions should be better. I’m thinking of a use case where it says “Everyone in your friend group who owns these 4 books also owns this one other book.” The smarter the software, the better the suggestions should get as it has access to more data.
So I’ve downloaded Delicious Library and I’m trying it out. I’ve hit a few snags already (no Library of Congress numbers, haven’t figured out the best way to export for my iPhone, can display a virtual bookshelf with covers but not with spines, half of the help entries seem broken, not sure if there will ever be another update) but I’m persevering. My main problem is that all my books are in boxes right now which makes it hard to build up my library and really test it, but these are the snags I’ve identified already.
Do you use Delicious or any other competing software? Let me know in the comments. I’m especially interested in what other alternatives are out there.
