MaineSight

My family (last weekend) stayed for several nights at Maine Huts & Trails’ Flagstaff Lake Hut which is on the northeastern shores of Flagstaff Lake. To the south lie the Bigelow Mountains (whose peaks the Appalachian Trial passes over). It’s a beautiful location where the nightime sounds are consist of owls and plaintive loons, and some of the darkest night skies I’ve seen.

The actual story behing the creation of Flagstaff Lake still leaves a bad taste in many people’s minds—read more at this link.
Despite the history, the hut is situated in a beautiful spot and landscape photography opportunities abound. Our first night there, a short walk down a peninusla, and we were treated to a peaceful sunet with some dramatic light.

I could see, as the sun lowered in the sky, that it was soon going to be behind the clouds and anticipated the rays of light, and deliberately underexposed this image slightly to help preserve highlight detail.

But how should I frame the scene? Conventional wisdom is to not center your subject in the frame (and for some people not to take a photograph of a sunset!); so if you say that the sun & the dark central clouds are the subject, I’ve clearly violated this rule. In many cases, this rule is a good one to follow, since a central subject placement can me very static (i.e. boring). So, is there another framing of this scene that would be better?

Perhaps, but my eye sees this image as well balanced with the heavy blacks at the bottom third of the image and the sky occupying the rest. Furthermore, the dark edges of the clouds form a “v” shaped (or a nearly oblique line rising from left to right). I find the shapes of the mountains make my eye wander naturally from bottom right to bottom left and then up toward the sun and clouds. The sharp contrasts lead my eye around the image naturally, and in a way that seems pleasing to me.

I like this image, and I think the framing works well. I think this image is a good example of when it’s a good idea to ignore the “rule” of avoiding central subject placement.

Technical details:  this image was 1/640 sec at f/8.0 70-200mm f/2.8L at 70 mm, ISO 100 -1/3 EV, processed in Adobe Lightroom 3  and converted to B&W using SilverEfex Pro.

I’m busy delving into the newly released Lightroom 3, organizing my library and doing some much needed keywording. In the course of doing so, I came across this photograph taken last fall at the Upper Falls, Cathance River, ME Thought it would make a nice blog post.

I must say that I am completely delighted at the image quality improvements in Lightroom 3. The new Lens Corrections are fantastic and I now have no reason to maintain my license for DxO Optics Pro, which is a time and money savings.

Only 1800 images left to sort through! My mid year resolution is to finish this task and never to fall behind on keywording and organizing again.

For those of you that use White House Custom Color for making greeting cards, I’ve made two (5″x7″) Lightroom 2.6 RC templates (one for a Landscape format, and the other for a Portrait format). These presets make a uniform 0.25″ white border around your photos. I made these on a Mac, and don’t know if they’ll work on a PC, though I’d love to know if they do.

To install the templates, first download the zipped Presets File and unzip it. Then you have two options:

1)  With Lightroom no running, drag the two template files to the appropriate location for Mac users: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Print Templates/ then you should be done.

2) Or, you may, while in the Print Module, right click on the “User Presets” folder (in the Templates Panel) and choose “import”. Find the files you’ve unzipped (NOT the .zip file!) and install them. You should be ready to go.

To use the templates, here’s my workflow: take an image that I want to turn into a greeting card, make a virtual copy, and crop it to a custom aspect ratio of 6.5 x 4.5. This will fit exactly in the either template without having to use the “zoom to fill” feature which will effectively crop your image in a manner you cannot control. Then choose the format that fits your image, and click “Print to file”. The preset makes a jpeg file with an embedded Adobe RGB profile which you can save to a folder of your choosing. Now you have the front of your greeting card. I then use Apple’s Pages application to make a back to the card which has relevant information about the image. I export (File>Export) that image as a pdf and then open it in Preview and save a 300 dpi jpeg to the same folder as the front image.  I then synchronize the folder and in Lightroom, and stack the front and back images, do appropriate keywording and I then have a print ready greeting card that I can submit using ROES to WHCC. Here’s what the back of my greeting cards look like:

The back image for the above greeting card.

By the way, don’t adjust the margins in the preset, even though it looks like I’ve messed up and made them non-uniform; the reason is that the WHCC cards are submitted in the dimensions 5.125″ x 7.25″ and are trimmed down (very accurately) to 5″x7″. As far as my experience goes, this trimming is performed symmetrically, and this allows me to make my templates so that the final trimmed card has a uniform border.