WayWest

Staying atop the flood of images

Amid all the great books about digital shooting, there's precious little about what's probably the most common—and daunting—issue: how best to weed down the flood of images. This wonderfully detailed post by Carl Weese over at The Online Photographer wrestles that beast to the ground:

The trouble with a dense forest of captures is how to find the best trees. There's also the issue of "what was I really trying to do with this shoot?" That question may not apply to conceptual artists who start with an idea and set up a shot for the camera, but for any photographer who likes to work by going out into the world just looking for the unexpected, the unedited take can be completely confusing. The whole collection is overwhelming so the trick is to slice it into manageable chunks.

While Lightroom is a terrific, powerful tool, how-tos like this one really help in the day-to-day work of staying atop your personal flood of images.

Sample Lightroom chapter to help you decide

If you need help deciding whether to jump on the March-only discount price for Lightroom 2 VQS, you might want to read this sample chapter. Taken from Chapter Four, it highlights one of Lightroom's best features: The Library module. The Library module is what gives Lightroom an edge over its more well-known cousin, Photoshop, and it's where you'll do most of your organizing and reviewing of images.

Only 9 days to save $9 on my Lightroom book

Save 30 percent at Barnes and Noble on select Visual QuickStart Guides—including my own Adobe Lightroom 2 VQS. That's $9 bucks off the regular $20.99 price. But deal ends March 31, so click now!

(Via Peachpit Press)

Get your downloads: Lightroom 2.3 + Camera Raw 5.3

Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 are now available for download.

In addition to added support for a few newer cameras (the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30), there have been lots of little tweaks to Lightroom overall. Nothing major, but all signs of Adobe's continued dedication to keep Lightroom the best tool around for digital photographers. Adobe's installation PDF has the details.

Bad by any name

Gristmill's Gar Lipow on what to call the global climate shifts driven by rising carbon dioxide levels:

What about the term 'global warming'?…Scientists don't like it because it describes only one result of the disaster we are creating. On the plus side, it is a known 'brand,' and most people know it is not a good thing. On the minus side, the flaw that most climate scientists dislike also makes it vulnerable to delayers who use every snowy day as an excuse to exclaim, 'ha ha! Where is your global warming now?'

What about Amory Lovins' term 'global weirding'? Accurate and a good crack, but I think it would be a mistake to make a joke the primary term for a topic of serious discussion. 'Climate disruption' is better. It's both accurate and a description with a negative connotation. But I think it has too many syllables for maximum emotional punch. 'Climate chaos' carries almost the same connotation, but to me comes across as a stronger term.

Department of explanations

Editor Kevin Roderick of LA Observed gives credit where it's really due regarding yesterday's all-safe landing of a US Airways Airbus A320:

An airline pilot uses his 40 years experience to bring his stricken jetliner down safely in the Hudson River, and the governor of New York dismisses it as 'a miracle'?

Exceptions are everywhere

Photographer Ctein is talking about judging individual cameras amid a sea of performance stats but his words ring true across the board:

Exceptions are not the norm (that's why we call them exceptions) but they're ubiquitous.

It resonates with something psychologist Steven Pinker notes in his New York Times primer on genetics and personality in which he tries to tease out which is which and why we can't yet:

Even in the simplest organisms, genes are not turned on and off like clockwork but are subject to a lot of random noise, which is why genetically identical fruit flies bred in controlled laboratory conditions can end up with unpredictable differences in their anatomy. This genetic roulette must be even more significant in an organism as complex as a human, and it tells us that the two traditional shapers of a person, nature and nurture, must be augmented by a third one, brute chance.

Full piece worth a read in the Jan. 11 New York Times magazine.

Visualize globalization

Ethan Zuckerman's blog My heart's in Accra uses the map below as the starting point for an insightful essay on making concrete the often abstract notion of globalization:

From Turkey to France, people are finding themselves sitting in the cold due to a dispute between Ukraine and Russia over natural gas.

Most of us don’t think about the global infrastructure that makes our connected world work so smoothly until something fails. When it does, we reach for maps…

Rx for holiday camera lust

In an article that starts out as a classic gear-head piece, Mike Johnston over at The Online Photographer compares digital cameras with full-frame sensors to those with more common (and way less expensive) APS-sized sensors. He reveals hot tech specs, even shows a pixel close-up to get us really worked up. Fortunately, he also offers this Rx for all of us suffering gotta-have-it camera lust:

"What's the cure for camera agony of any sort? Just work. Shoot. Get interested in something. Take stock of what equipment you already have, and figure out what it can be used for. Go shoot. Get involved in the pictures. If your camera isn't the last word in high ISOs, then find a little more light and shoot at lower ISOs. You'll live."

Keep it in mind—camera fevers can be especially contagious this time of year.

Gridding for tough times ahead

I've never quite understood those hearty souls who regard hand coding as the only true way to build Web sites. In the heady economic times now gone, building sites by hand—and starting from scratch on each and every site—seemed proof positive that you were a real Web person. WYSIWYG web editors, such as Dreamweaver, were…well simply beneath contempt. Nothing like shrinking budgets to bring all of us back to reality.

With everyone now looking for ways to do more with less, the use of grids in designing and building Web sites is getting new, and well-deserved, attention. After all, why reinvent the wheel with each new Web site? A vital design tool, grids let designers cut to the chase. And grab eyeballs to boot.

A relatively new site, The Grid System, is serving as a nice clearing house for all things grid and Web. Lots of articles to help you get started on creating XHTML and CSS pages that will display well on big, old computers and the growing pocket universe of Blackberrys and iPhones. Jeffrey Zeldman has been preaching much the same gospel for ages over at A List Apart.

(Tip of the hat to Subtraction's Khoi Vinh for pointing to the site. As one of the chief architects of the gridlicious NYT site, Vinh definitely walks the talk.)

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