Good Day All:

I think it usual when contributing to a blog like this to post a few images and invite comment. I've never been very good at this as my blog-posted images too often end up upside-down, on the wrong side of the page, the wrong size, overlap text etc - in short, blog gremlins are sure to come visiting. So instead let me supply links to galleries of pictures I've been taking recently.These "galleries" are all hosted by an outfit called Smugmug which I am sure many have heard of.  This operation, for a modest fee, does an excellent job of showing images, allows all sorts of controls as to who can or cannot see, download, or print images as well as provide a number of other useful services. 

Posted below are links to three galleries. The first shows some pictures taken on our early morning foray to Green Spring Gardens. The second shows some pictures I've taken this year, including many that would count as traditional "landscapes". The third gallery is of pictures taken in connection with the course: learning Lightroom, LR5 in particular. It consists of a large number of pictures taken at the Gay Pride Parade held here in Washington a couple of weeks ago.

A word about this last gallery: although most of the pictures are fairly innocuous, some could be regarded as quite offensive.  Certainly not for those chaste in mind, clean in thought, decent in habit, proper in behaviour - or whatever description fits. Many of the hundreds who march in GayPride intend to provoke:  some wear next to nothing, many cross-dress and some  simulate Acts of Congress. Several fellows posed when they saw my camera and we got to chatting; hamming it up, joshing, laughing and asked for their pictures to be taken in positions not exactly approved by Missionaries. (Why this is so is, to my mind, an interesting question.) Anyway, be warned.

Allow me to share a few notes about this shoot and my subsequent experience with Lightroom 5. (If you, the reader, are not interested, then please skip to the end and click on a link to be directed to a gallery - again if interested.)

The photographic aspects proper of the Gay Pride were, I found, quite challenging. First, a very bright sunny afternoon with huge lighting contrasts; absolutely no way a camera can capture the range. Second, fast moving flow and action with next-to- no-time to compose and focus. Third, People shots - have to make sure not to give offense. 

The last was the easiest: I just asked permission whenever I could. 

I shot with a small compact, the Sony DSC Rx100, and  - a bad decision in retrospect - shot jpegs rather than Raw. This particular camera has an HDR mode operated in-camera, a three- stop difference which only works with jpeg shooting; given the lighting conditions, I thought I might use this feature often. Further, the longer zoom capability of this camera can only  be used if one shoots jpegs rather than Raw, and so another feature I thought I would use.

In the event the HDR feature proved useless; one has to wait several seconds as the camera whirs and does its thing while the HDR shot is being "developed". Meantime the action passes one by. Judging from the LCD screen, the HDR images weren't noticeably better than the middle-stop exposure. This might just be the algorithms peculiar to this particular Sony camera; other cameras with an HDR feature may well perform better. On the other hand, the  longer focal length available in jpeg mode did prove very useful.

When it came to looking at the pictures in LR5 two things were fairly obvious. Most of the pictures would benefit from being cropped - this harks back to the point above of not having enough time to frame compositions; as one would like. Most of the pictures in the gallery are, therefore, cropped from a larger image; a lot of information has been thrown away. The second point was the expected blowout of highlights. Whilst shooting I exposed - whenever I remembered - with a spot or center-weighted exposure, aimed at the point of interest, occasionally using exposure-compensation. Then let the highlights fall where they may.

The effort was not successful. 

Cropping aside, for many if not most of the images in this gallery, I've had to play with the tone sliders in LR to get better looking results - a really significant expenditure of time. For the most part this meant raising the exposure to brighten the image; then trying to get some highlight recovery, and finally getting more light into the shadows. 

The biggest problem was the failure of Highlight recovery. Jpegs simply don't contain the information. As a result there are simply too many blown-out patches, especially in faces and bodies, and in the backgrounds  in this lot of photographs. Next time, Shoot Raw, and do a better job of getting the exposure right.

The best things so far I've discovered about LR5 as compared to LR4 are the radial development feature, which allows one to selectively  focus on a particular part of an image to develop it; and the cloning/healing brush which I experimented with occasionally to quiet down an excessively busy background. The Clarity slider, I found, helps in giving back an image some punch, but it also often leaves darker and unseemly noise patches. 

 In the interest of learning more about merging catalogs in LR I decided to create a separate catalog for this Gay Pride shoot and "develop" the images on a (Windows) laptop. I kept a copy of the original images on a desktop. The merge worked well. I copied the new catalog, which contains the usual metadata, as well as information on all the edits I had done, from the laptop onto the desktop. I then used LR's "Import" command to import this catalog into my main desktop catalog. LR had no problem finding the desktop folder with the original jpegs, and had no difficulty in showing up the edited images as edited. 

So much for GayPride. There are a few pictures here I like as photographs; otherwise I think of them as a documentary.

If anyone cares to look at Gallery #2 which contains images taken this year, the locations are Great Falls, along the Canal, Patuxent, Pohick Bay, the Susquehanna, Manassas, DC, and two separate shoots at Antietam.

Finally, to the Gallery of immediate interest, the first Gallery, Green Spring Gardens. I spent almost my entire time there walking a 20 yard length of path, shooting a patch of backlit flowers receiving the benison of the earliest light. I don't think the images capture what I saw. Don't know why.

(i) Green Spring Gardens
http://krishnadharma.smugmug.com/Other/Green-Spring-Gardens-June-2013/30013839_z7KTMd

(ii) Recent Landscapes
http://krishnadharma.smugmug.com/Other/2013-Show-and-Tell/29679987_4SxNgR

(iii) Gay Pride 2013
http://krishnadharma.smugmug.com/Other/2013-Gay-Pride-Washington/30143377_WVLwbV

I've used the "link" feature of this blog for these galleries. I hope it works. Otherwise one may just have to cut and paste into the link into a web browser. Here are truncated versions:

(i) http://tinyurl.com/l9wtfj3

(ii) http://tinyurl.com/kmzy7l7

(iii) http://tinyurl.com/klldp5n


Best,

Farid