To post or not to post . . . that is the question

There is no political content today. At least, that is the intention as I start to write this epistle.

During the past few years our neighbor’s sons have been members of St. Thomas Episcopal School's famous pipe band. J and I attended several past performances of the school’s Scottish Festival. My Pentax K10D arrived back from repair just in time for the spectacle last Friday. Over the years I have struggled with mixed success to capture good images of the performance. I have also struggled with the whole concept of proper use of photographs of somebody else’s children. This is especially true in today’s world where it is common to post pictures on the Web. Few Web systems offer any promise that postings can ever be completely deleted. Most web pages can be indexed, cached and stored forever by Google, Yahoo or one of the other search engines. With a little effort any user can download and store images and text displayed on their computer. It is both humbling and frightening. It is humbling because these words may already have been indexed by the time that you read them. It is frightening because people who are embarrassed or hurt by the content of a web page cannot easily have that problem erased or corrected. Posting on the web might almost be the modern equivalent of carving in stone.

And so my images of the Scottish Festival are destined to remain in the dark. The images from the Pentax were much higher quality than those from the old Olympus. That was expected. They taught be a little more about what works in that mixture of dark backgrounds and intense spotlights. They also suggest a compromise – an “artistic” shot that tries to capture the color, rhythm, beauty and excitement of the evening while cloaking the individual performers in mystery. I think that will be the objective for next year.

Lightroom - managing photos the easy way

I take a lot of photos of events and programs at my church. Often flash is not appropriate. The low light in church brings problems of wide apertures and narrow depth of focus and slow shutter speeds can lead to blurred subjects. In addition, high ISO settings bring the risk of increased noise. The mixed lighting at church events also causes difficulties with white balance – which has not been helped by the new paint color schemes recently adopted by our decorating committee. My strategy for all these concerns is to shoot RAW and use Adobe Lightroom as my primary post-processing tool.

Lightroom imposes a logical work flow on my post processing. Equally important, modifications to the images are maintained as separate files. This keeps the original files from the camera intact. Lightroom imports my RAW files, quickly allows me to crop and straighten, provides a one-click white balance adjustment and has powerful exposure enhancement tools. It even permits red-eye removal and simple retouching. Even better, it works well with JPG files from Point & Shoot digital cameras and can often bring enhancements when those JPG settings were not the best. Lightroom is not a replacement for Photoshop but I am finding it quickly handles almost all the adjustments I need to make to the many 4 x 6 prints regularly displayed on our church notice board. Lightroom also has a legion of very clever supporters who have produced and distributed

excellent add-ons. Among these are user-friendly interfaces for web–based slide shows. Simpleviewer is one Flash viewer that is very user friendly and I’ve tried on our church web to document recent Christmas events. Others (check here) are HTML based and are equally easy to use. Best of all many of these add-ins are free.