Let’s get down to business announcing a few things.
SMUGs
I’m heading the Utah County SMUG. (Smug Mug User Groups)
What is that? It’s a photography group meetup, sponsored by SmugMug but anyone can come even if they have no clue what SmugMug is… just a chance for photographers to get together, network and learn stuff. Oh and eat!
The SMUGs will be typically once a month on Tuesdays with guest speakers and fun events. If you have ideas pass them along.
In addition to guest speakers, possible photoshoots, training, we’ll probably combine past UPES events as well as Meet the Photographer events that more or less ceased when I no longer had a projector.
Yes people from other counties are invited just as we’ll be announcing and encouraging you go to the SLC SMUG group which meets every 3rd wednesday.
BBQ – Smug (September 14th)
The first event for us will be September 14th – It’ll be different. It’s a photographer BBQ – It will take place in Pleasant Grove at the residence of Jeremy Hall. More information to follow.
When I made the decision to cut back on the number of weddings I made a decision to put more work in the weddings I do.
One of the things I started doing was double checking my edits, then triple checking and each time finding quick fast improvements that would make the pictures way better.
CHECK OUT THIS NEW AWESOMENESS -
(More about it in Posts to come)
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SELECTING
After those looks I would go back through and select pictures I think would look great in black and white. Now days after working on thousands of these I can often spot the picture that will look best in B&W but sometimes I have to double check by converting it quickly and then converting it back.
In Lightroom the shortcut is “V” you can check to see if it has potential if it does make a virtual copy and then make the second copy the one that will be B&W the shortcut for virtual copies is ctrl+’
I often find myself selecting the pictures with the most emotion and usually my favorite pictures are given that second B&W look.
One extra benefit
An extra benefit from turning pictures B&W is that going through the pictures is yet one extra look at them. And when they’re in B&W you often pay so much closer attention to exposure levels because colors (specially bright colors) are not playing with your perceptions anymore. I’ll therefore turn B&W see what needs to be done and make corrections before I create the virtual copy… so i don’t have to do things twice. B&W is also great for paying closer attention to making things sharper.
HISTORY
In times past I would tell my clients I could turn their pictures B&W but hardly anyone made reqeusts of me… I took that as a compliment that I was practically perfect. haha But in the end I figure they just don’t know what it might look like, and they might choose pictures that don’t look good in B&W
A little more history is that when I first started photography I wasn’t a fan of B&W… it seemed like cheating to me. I’ve grown to love it and recognize for me it’s spot in my work.
CREATING GALLERIES
Another fun thing I’m doing is creating a gallery of all the images from the session that I converted to B&W.
Usually I leave a copy in color because it often never fails that you do Only B&W and they’ll ask for the color… so if I just have B&W I either think the colors weren’t anything special or I was lazy and might pay for it later, it was probably an afterthought picture anyway.
To create a gallery of just B&Ws in Smugmug you’ll have to start in Lightroom (or similar program) keyword every B&W … I use the keyword “bw”
How to select all B&W the fastest… go to gallery go to the filtering options > select metadata options > change one of the columns to “treatment” > you’ll see you can filter by B&W > select them all > keyword them “bw” > then export > then upload to smugmug
In SmugMug: Add a new gallery seperate from the gallery that contains ALL pictures from the event the B&W gallery will be seperate with nothing to upload > when you get to the uploading section instead select Make Smart Gallery > select the from gallery option and select the gallery with all the pictures then add another qualifier and use that one to select by the keyword > then make sure to select the option that requires ALL requirements otherwise it will select all pictures from that gallery and all B&Ws you have on smugmug.
Anyway check to see if it works and then you have a gallery of all your B&W from that shoot
I have a lot of pictures on SmugMug which gives me peace of mind in case something ever happens to my SmugMugPro.Luckily nothing has
I have a lot of pictures on SmugMugPro which gives me peace of mind in case something ever happens to my DroboPro.
Because I could use a cool program and download the images.
USES
Luckily nothing has ever happened to them and I’ve never needed the pictures because of something bad going wrong. If I did need them I could re-download them from SmugMug for my clients. I did however once need the pictures while on the road away from the computer.
MANY TIMES i’ve wanted to put them on facebook, not just one or two but most of the album… I used to rt click on each picture… then I learned it was much faster to drag and drop into an album. Now i’ve learned it’s much faster to use a program that’ll download them for me, like all at x2 size and then upload to facebook.
Why get them from SmugMug? Because it preps the pictures to look mighty nice on facebook which is known to have problems… it also puts my watermark on, which saves me tons of time.
What’s out there
I have always used AlbumFetcher which works perfectly and only works for Windows. I haven’t used RapidFetcher which I’m told is cross platform.
SmugMug Downloader Review
But I tried out SmugMug Downloader which is a Java app – so I’m assuming it’ll run on both mac and windows. It looks nice, it seems simple. But it’s lacking a ton of functionality. I wonder if they’re just gonna keep it simple or make it more robust and usable?
For one: I have a client needing their pictures like right now for a political campaign. This program requires a password which I’m not going to give to a client. I also don’t see where to select the size pictures you want to download. Which makes it so it doesn’t help me out.
Organization can only be sorted in 3 ways and one of them is not date gallery was created. So for someone with almost 1000 albums of pictures yeah it makes it hard.
But I will say kudos to trying it out and making it look nice. I would hope there are some people out there with some good use of this program.
For now if you’re on Windows Album Fetcher is pretty complete.
I have a lot of pictures on SmugMugPro which gives me peace of mind in case something ever happens to my DroboPro. Because I could use a cool program and download the images.
Please be patient with MGM internet for all 300+ pics to upload. Later tonight.
Not only I give you permission but 1000% encourage you to make Facebook galleries or email or blog or Avatar them (Many have asked)
So have at them and tag these people… because frankly I can’t remember everyone and it’ll be a while before I can get the time to get them on facebook.
Did an impromptu SmugMug training, setup a new SmugMug account live and then went through pretty much all the functions of SmugMug
It was a first I’m sure for me to a group (and not just interns one on one) and it was a first for all that came.
Lots of pleased individuals when I left… I heard a lot of positive responses to what SmugMug has to offer.
My way of saying thanks to SmugMug for being great and dealing with me and all my massive amounts of pictures.
There was a suggestion by a couple people at the end of the evening that perhaps we could all write a comment if you were there. Everyone was passing around business cards and perhaps felt this was a good way.
I of course wouldn’t mind at all the comments… and feedback would be great, as well to show SmugMug how good a time we all had. haha
So SmuMug has released a feature I’ve wanted for a long time ever since David Terry told me about the idea.
(BTW happy birthday David)
I’ve been waiting for a version of coupons that would ease the way to let the clients choose their pictures straight from the site.
Like a little shopping spree. But allow me to still be in control of the end result.
As a photographer I want to focus more of my time on creating better pictures and not spending so much time picking pictures and dabbling in business things and I would hope my customers would appreciate this.
I also like the fact that it all still goes through me when they select pictures, and I’m sure that’s what the customer hopes for as well…
I love their print delay feature… having a few days to review their order and enhance the pictures before they’re sent to the printer is perfect.
I’m mostly interested in the last of these… which is also probably the most complicated type.
“Print Credit – This functions just like a gift card. If a customer does not use it up in an order, the balance will remain to use on future orders. You can optionally set a start and end date for its use.”
So thanks for the coupons SmugMug and I hope my customers love the idea as much as I do and look forward to incorporation of coupons in 2010 packages.
Since now I own a camera that does video it makes it so easy to record video, upload to smugmug and imbed that video here on this blog.
My disclaimers are:
This is the first video on my blog, my first video I’ve recorded for a blog. So I did several takes because I wasn’t about to spend the time to edit and splice stuff.
But I still made verbal mistakes and since I only have owned the camera for a few hours I still don’t have a handle on the focusing.
I also did hand hold it…
So basically don’t get too after me about the quality of filming.
But I do aim and can promise I will get much better.
D300s
Rundown on new notable features.
Video
7 frames per second without grip
faster access to live view – 2 button clicks to start recording
on camera mic and plug in for external mic
better d-lighting
quite mode – means take a picture without much noise. (forgot to mention on video)
dual CF and SD slots
Better latch for memory card slots
the cool center button I love (like introduced on D700)
If you want me to talk about anything else… I might be persuaded to make a few more videos.
This blog also happens to be a test of the amazing video features of SmugMug – the place where I happen to put all of my pictures.
I searched for a while to figure out how to embed video into this blog (it being my first time) there were ANY good resources I could easily find online (we know how a mess the internet is)
So I’ll quickly say I grabbed the embed into web code from smugmug much as one would get the embed link for a picture.
You must keep in mind this is code and not a URL or link… so you switch over to HTML on your wordpress editor and drop it into its place.
This suposes you know how to do a lot of what i just explained. But for me that’s exactly what I was hoping to find out that took me 20 minutes to figure out on my own because there were no good sources.
Shameless plug: Who wants to buy a used D300 (or even a much less expensive D200)
