This blog is for those interested in the photography side of the website.

It outlines the equipment and software used and outlines the approach taken.

Key Points

• Camera equipment
• What colour should that be?
• Adobe Lightroom 3 and Adobe Photoshop CS5
• RAW and JPG
• Presets speed up the processing and provide consistency.
• Preparing for Import – renaming, keywords, presets, file structure
• Titles, Captions and Keywords
• Individual photo improvements
• Selection for the Photo Gallery – Collections.
• over to the Web Module…

I’ve been taking photos since the early ’60s. Mainly using Canon cameras – the FX, and FT, and still have these although they are now retired. I had a couple of compact digital cameras and, although they can take reasonable pictures, my real gripe with them is the delay between pressing the shutter and taking the picture.

About September 2009 I took the plunge and bought my Canon EOS 50D on the internet – at last – no shutter delays. I was not impressed with the sharpness of the results and eventually sent it away for a service – both the lens and the body needed adjusting. However, no more excuses, the pictures are properly in focus now…

Most of the photos now are taken using the Canon EFS 17-85 lens and occasionally with the Canon EF 70-300 – usually opened out to about f8-11 to give some depth of field. Usually the Turning Club photos are taken with the Canon Speedlite 430EX II pointed at the (low) ceiling and reflected forward using a DiffuseiT reflector to avoid harsh shadows.

Fluorescent lights give a colour cast and I often use the ColorChecker Passport to provide reference colours for later processing. My computer monitor is also colour calibrated using the X-Rite eye-one display II.

The digital photos are processed using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom with additional enhancements occasionally using Adobe Photoshop CS5. Lightroom is an excellent tool for this sort of work – the complete batch of photos from a shoot can be processed quite quickly.

What Processing? These days higher end cameras create a RAW file from the photo censor. This includes ALL of the detail captured by the camera’s sensor.

The more common “jpg” format photo takes some of this information and the camera processes it to give the normal image seen. Unwanted information is thrown away by the jpg process.

Lightroom, Photoshop and many other imaging programs take the RAW image, now called Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), and allow the photographer to ‘optimise’ the image they want by allowing adjustments of colour balance, exposure, contrast, brightness, sharpening, lens corrections, filtering and many other effects.

This is done in a non-destructive way by creating a data file which records which adjustment controls were moved. The photographer can prepared the image in many ways – black and white, vivid colour, sepia colour etc, keep a copy and still go back to the original at any time.

The settings wanted (presets) can be saved for later re-use on the same or other photos.

So, the photo-shoot batch of photos are all processed automatically using one of these presets. I select photo renaming options so that they can be sorted, or identified when required. At the same time keywords like “Woodturning Club”, the meeting detail e.g. “Fun Day 2011” can be added to all of the photos.

These steps all take place as the batch of photos is imported from the camera memory card into Lightroom, where they are all placed into a nominated folder of the computer directory/folder system. Lots of time and effort is saved. This whole process takes 5-10 minutes for the batch.

Each individual photo is then looked at in Lightroom and further Keywords, a Title and a Caption are added. Detailed changes are made to the image – getting the best range of highlights, shadow detail, contrast, colour (against the ColorChecker Passport standard), sharpness and last but not least by cropping the photo so that the subject is shown to advantage.

Often with wood the image is made slightly dark so that the detail of the wood can be more clearly seen. Occasionally more detail processing is wanted so the image is transferred to Photoshop CS5 – for work with layers, captions etc. It is returned to Lightroom after processing.

The photos are then reviewed – the poorer ones, duplicates, etc can be discarded. The chosen photos are then selected and become a Collection – those which will be sent to the web site. Within the collection they will be manually sorted – by subject, or by the name of the person who created the piece.

Ready for the next stage – creating the Photo Gallery which will go onto the web site… they could, at this stage, follow a different route and be exported for emailing, as a .pdf file, turned into an Album for processing by a Photo Shop, or be sent to a printer.