The most dreaded sentence to hear for anyone already having disk problems. As if this sentence would add insult to injury. And in a way, it does. It tells us that we have been even more careless than we should have been. Happily snapping away at the world, sharing a few of the best shots and reaping the likes, +1s and whatnot. Yet, one day, those pictures will be gone. Forever. Simply because digital data is perishable. Perishable as a frozen head of lettuce.

We all come across the situation where everything in a shot needs to be in focus, yet our equipment only allows for part of it to be in focus. So we stop down. F/11, F/16… still no good. F/32 is close, but still no cigar. The solution of “stopping down” may work, but still has its drawbacks. At f/32, there is little light left to work with and shutter speeds are getting too slow to handhold the camera. Cranking up the ISO to counter that reveals too much noise. Apparently there’s no way to win.

With the ongoing push of cloud storage nowadays, it seems like a logical solution for everything. Storing your photos “in the cloud” (not “in the clouds”…) is commonly accepted. Some exceptions apply, though. Lightroom is one of them.

It has been a while since I wrote the first two parts. Mainly because things happen, like “life”. So, to get back to my workflow, and to complete the series, what is left to be done to my pictures before they go out into the world? Until now, I have culled and re-culled them, leaving only the workable pictures. I have added keywords to them so that I will be able to find them again one day. I have geotagged them, so that I know where they were taken. What’s next?

In quality

Today, nearly everyone has a cellphone in his or her pocket. And it takes pictures. For years now, cellphone companies like Samsung, Apple or Google have touted to have the best cameras in the world, better than the competition and most of all, just as good as the cameras from reputable camera companies like Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Fuji, Sony and more. Basically, it’s only because one always has a cellphone on his/her person, not always a DSLR or Mirrorless.

Is Adobe going to sue me for using older products?

You may have heard about the ongoing lawsuit between Adobe and Dolby Laboratories over the use of Dolby copyrighted code. Articles like these https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xk3p/adobe-tells-users-they-can-get-sued-for-using-old-versions-of-photoshop or , here: https://petapixel.com/2019/05/14/adobe-warns-that-using-older-cc-apps-could-get-you-sued/. In some cases you may have received an email from Adobe containing this text.

Is Adobe going to sue me for using their Photoshop CS3? Or for my Lightroom 4 that I bought (and paid “dearly” for) so many years ago?

Lately I have seen a lot of questions on how to make Lightroom work more comfortable. There are many ways to improve a workflow, but none have made it more comfortable to work with Lightroom than a second monitor.

Everybody with a camera likes to think they are suitable to be a pro photographer. “Mistakes? Not me!”, is usually the reaction to that question. And yet, I see so many people taking pictures that could have been so much better… If only they were taken with a little bit of thinking *before* the shot. Let’s take the example of a wildlife shooter (pro/beginner/anything goes). The idea of shooting wildlife has one drawback that is that you cannot direct your models like a fashion photographer. If you try to direct anything (say: a deer), you will lose your shot instead of getting a better one. So what settings will you use? High shutter speed, wide open aperture and high ISO. At least all the pics will be sharp, right?

Lightroom is a database. I have written about that before. One of the key features for me was that each picture could have an infinite number of keywords associated to it. You could then search for the keywords and find the pictures wherever they were in the catalogue (database). I used the search function of the keyword list, which was very limited in functionality. But hey, it was way better than to scroll through hundreds if not thousands of pictures to find that one picture you were looking for.

For a while the news about Facebook refusing any third party apps to post seemed like miserable to me. For a few years now, I have had the habit of setting the caption for my pictures in Lightroom, drag them to the FB Publish plugin and press publish. Sharing of the uploaded picture was still to be done on Facebook. I created collections in Lightroom and FB followed by creating the corresponding albums and put the photos where I wanted them. That worked great.

Until August 1st, 2018.