Lightroom is Mobile

I probably couldn’t have asked for a better birthday miracle than Lightroom coming to mobile platforms. I spent about an hour just playing with different cell photos from my Galaxy to see how the port holds up to its big brother. Most of the functionality is intact. Trying to cram a full Adobe program’s functionality into such a small screen means that the interface isn’t as streamlined as something like Snapseed, but I’m willing to sacrifice accessibility for depth. I’ll keep playing with the program, but I’m confident I’ll be getting plenty of use out of it.

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Revenge of the Phone Dump

My phone’s camera was full, so I dumped them onto my laptop for proper editing.

The Phone Dump

Because of various weather issues, I’ve been spending the better part of the last week just catching up on landscaping. That means fewer big, DSLR shoots, and more shooting what I can find with my camera phone. I kept planning to upload these in the evenings after I was finished working, but wedding planning and other professional editing projects took priority. So now, I just edited them all in one go in one huge memory dump from my camera phone.

While shooting a wedding, I noticed that my setups are becoming more complex.

After about 14 years of heavy use, my mower finally quit on me.

Max helped me go through my books, looking for readings for the wedding.

As summer arrives, Max must defend the apartment from ever-fiercer insects.

We had some nasty storms, but the clouds were cool.

Was shooting a local event, and I noticed that I and the mayor are the only ones cool enough to not wear name tags.

I also wound up with a ton of flower photos. Since I took so many to be sure that I had at least one clear image, I wound up with a slew of surplus photos. I decided to get experimental with the editing, and I think that I wound up with some cool results.

Did I go too far with the Lightroom effects for these? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Experiments in Editing

I’ve been experimenting a bit with post today. I played with different Lightroom presets, did some more HDR, and merging obscene amounts of photos for panoramas. What I did for each shot is in its caption. Some of these are more extreme than others, so let me know how I did in the comments below.

I found a split tree while were hiking and wanted to emphasize the textures in post using high contrast black and white.

I wanted to shoot the full effect of standing in these rock formations, which is difficult to do with a 50mm prime lens. I decided to shoot it as multiple photos and edit them in post. I wound up with 28 photos that I put into Photoshop to combine. The image itself was a bit boring but I thought the fact that it turned out was worth sharing a screenshot.

We got some strange weather Saturday. This photo is a combination composite panorama and HDR. I worry the clouds on the right aren’t quite dark enough.

This was composed from seven horizontal photos stacked vertically in post. I then played with some Lightroom filters, contrast, and vignettes. I was going for a dream-like feeling, but I’m not sure if I completly pulled it off.

House Building

Lately, I’ve been helping a buddy and his family build a new house. It makes for some interesting angles, perspectives, and framing. I snapped a few frames on my phone between hauling heavy materials and playing with power tools. This shot was actually supposed to be a silhouette, but the image came out more evenly exposed than I thought it would, and then one thing led to another in Lightroom. What do you guys think, was I too harsh on those little cell-phone pixels? 

Too Cold For Rivers

Karen and my friend Lee were raving about how they wanted to go for a walk, so, naturally, I geared up and headed out. We parked downtown to wander the riverfront and… didn’t even make 100 yards from the car. Not even five minutes in, and both of them had decided to wuss out from the cold and head back. I made sure to grab some photos from the bridge, since I had to shoot something.

Just a shot of the river from the bridge would be boring though. So, I used an old fallback of slowing the shutter speed down to about 1/15 of a second to get the motion of the water and used the railing on the bridge to keep the camera stable during the long exposure. Even then, I felt like it was still too dull to share, so I had some fun with it in Lightroom. Now that I feel like I made it into an interesting image, I fear I may have overdone the editing. I wasn’t even going to post this here, but my friends who saw it kept telling me how much they liked it. What do you think?

The Riverfront

     Today, we have my lovely friend Lucy Merriman modeling at Kent’s beautiful riverfront. Now, observant followers of the site will notice that, while this is Lucy’s first time modeling, she’s been featured on the site earlier as a promoted artist. She’s a fantastic writer and has some awesome paintings, so if you want to see more of her work follow the link here as soon as you’re done checking out the photos.

     This was a quick shoot, but I think I got a few nice shots. I decided to get more experimental with the editing, giving one shot an antique look, and doing some dramatic work with the colors on others. I would normally use Lightroom presets for these photos, but I thought that it would be more of  a learning experience to break down what I wanted out of the presets and try to recreate them. I’m happy enough with how these turned out that I’ll try some more extensive editing soon.

My friend Lucy and I took some time to do a quick shoot down by the river in Kent.

 

Bonus photo! Someone decided to toss a shopping cart into the river.

The Insects are Coming

My old neighborhood is in something of a swamp, so the insects are out in full force with summer. The beetle was out by my grandparents’, and is actually a night shop I snapped the shot at night with my new flash and 50mm 1.8. The dragonfly was actually shot with my camera phone while I was mowing a lawn. I dropped it into Lightroom where I bumped the contrast and clarity, played with the saturation, and added some lens distortion.

Trying Lightroom

I’ve always used a combination of Adobe’s Bridge and Photoshop for my personal products, but I’m actually going full on Lightroom for this newest shoot. Let’s see how this goes.