Popular posts

Red Grouse

Once again I find myself writing an apology for not posting for a few weeks.  I guess people who try to read my ramblings regularly already know that I am not regular…but I do try to post more than once a month…honest!

Anyway, without anything interesting to post, I thought I would recycle the three most popular posts in the past year.

However, the most popular post is a rather random rant I made about a well known security software company but as it is not what I want my blog to be about, I have chosen to ignore it (well, it is my top 3 list!).  So the ‘edited’ top 3 are:

1. Lightroom 3 Beta - Save photos to the cloud

2. Zip photos in Lightroom

3. Lightroom plug-in for Nature Photographers

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Norfolk

Barn OwlI recently spent a few days in North Norfolk, concentrating on Snow Buntings and Barn Owls.  The Salthouse Snow Buntings put on an excellent show as usual with up to 70 birds present, coming to seed.

I have been regularly visiting a new spot for Barn Owls and finally managed to get the camera pointed at one!

Click through for some images of the Snow Buntings

 

Snow Bunting in flight

Snow Bunting in flight

Snow Bunting in flight

Snow Bunting in flight

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Snow and some birds

MJMW_AVIAN_1000023_NPN_720

I have managed to get out to wave the camera at some birds this year with a particularly productive short session at Salthouse on the 2nd January.  I woke that morning to find a fresh coating of snow, so headed to the beach to play with the Snow Buntings and Teal there.

Click through for more images.

Eurasian Teal in snow

Eurasian Teal in snow

Snow Bunting

Snow Bunting on a cloud

Black-headed Gull Portrait

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Delayed comments

A sincere apology to those who left comments over the past month – I switched moderating on in mid-December after getting a significant increase in spam comments.

Then I promptly forgot about it and was stupidly wondering why I hadn’t had any comments for a while!

All comments now released and rejected as appropriate…

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Happy Christmas!

_DN_3812

Wishing everyone a fantastic festive time and a great New Year!

 

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Not photography or birds…

…but very cool.  Especially if you like the Black Eyed Peas.

 

 

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Christmas animals…

…with scary mouths.  The telegraph do it again with a great video like the sheep.

Very funny but a good message – go visit:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/breathingplaces/

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Fast big lights

Reading my RSS feed over breakfast this morning and David Hobby was drooling talking about Profoto’s various lighting systems.

Which lead me to digging through the Profoto website and once again working out which of my family and friends I could sell to get some proper big lights…

…and they don’t come more proper than when powered by the Pro-8a Air.

Anyone for “Sensational fast recycling time 0.05–0.9 sec”?

So, what could you do with 10(!) Pro-8 packs and a Canon 1D mkIII body?  Watch to find out.

 

There is more info on the Profoto website, including the finished video.

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Lightroom 3 Beta – export to zip

Ruby-throated Hummingbird

Just a quick post – my ‘Export to Zip’ plug-in designed for version 2.x seems to work just fine in Lightroom 3 Beta. Let me know if you have any problems!

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar

Lightroom 3 Beta – Save photos to the cloud

LR3Beta-Logo

One of the new features in Adobe Lightroom 3 beta (Lr3B) is the Publish services.  These provide a new way to ‘export’ images from your catalog, but also keep track on which images have been published where and if they have been changed and need to be re-published.

This also struck me as a great way to get my files easily backed up onto ‘the cloud’.  Click through to find out more.

Overview of publish services

LR3Beta-PublishBefore we get all excited about saving our photos online, lets take a quick look at what publish services do. Rather than redo the work myself, I’ll point you at Gene McCullagh’s excellent write-up of the Publish to hard disk: Lightroom 3 Beta Publish Services - Part 1.

 

What do I mean by ‘the cloud’?

For the purposes of this post, I just mean online storage rather than anything more fancy.  There are a fair few services out there – dropbox, drop.io etc and dedicated online backup solutions such as carbonite, jungle disk etc.

I am going to concentrate on dropbox for this example.

Why?

It is free, and you get a couple of gigabytes storage.  They also keep a months worth of incremental backups of your files for you, so you can go back in time to recover a changed or deleted file.

 

First step - get Dropbox and set it up

- Go to www.getdropbox.com and create your own account (if you sign up using that link I get extra free space on my account).

- Install dropbox on your computer, following their instructions

- On your desktop, go to My Dropbox (PC) or Dropbox (Mac) and create a new folder called “Lightroom Photos”

- If you login to your account on www.getdropbox.com, you should see this new folder in the files tab

LR3Beta-Dropbox-files

Setup Lightroom 3 Beta

- Open Lightroom Publishing Manager by clicking on setup alongside ‘Hard Drive’ in the Publish Services panel or right click and ‘create another hard drive connection’ if you have already configured the first one

LR3Beta-Dropbox-Publish

- Create the new hard Drive connection, call it something like ‘Dropbox’ and set the export location to the ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder you created earlier in Dropbox.  You can then set the other options as you require.  For a backup I set the file to be ‘Original’ and stuck with the original filename.

LR3Beta-Dropbox-Folder

- With these settings saved, you can start to add images you want copied to Dropbox by dragging and dropping them onto the new ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder.

 

How do they get onto ‘the cloud’?

LR3Beta-Dropbox-PublishButton

Once you have some photos in the ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder in Lr3B, you can publish them to dropbox by selecting the folder and clicking the Publish button.

Doing this creates the photos in the ‘Lightroom Photos’ folder in My Dropbox and they will be ‘copied’ to Dropbox on the internet in the background.  This all happens outside of Lightroom, so you can carry on working as normal.

It will take a while for your files to be copied up to Dropbox, depending on how many and how big they are.

 

What next?

A great feature of the Publish Services is that it keeps track of when you change a file that has been published.  The next time you look in the Lightroom Photos folder, it will list the files that need to be updated.  All you have to do is press Publish again and they will get updated.

 

Can I automate any of this?

Yes and no. The folders in Publish Services are very similar to collections, so you can create smart folders that automatically populate based on the rules you set.

LR3Beta-Dropbox-SmartFolderFor example, I use star ratings – 5 stars for my best photos.  By creating a Published Smart Folder that gets all photos that have 5 stars, I can back-up my best photos to online storage with a single mouse click.

However, it is not currently possible to automatically trigger publishing the files…so you have to remember to manually publish the folder.

 

and finally…

This is only the start of what you can do with Publish services. Dropbox isn’t the only service like this, anything that has a virtual ‘folder’ on your computer can be configured in the same way.

There is also much more you can do with this on the Dropbox side – recover old versions of files, share photos with people etc.

Whilst not an ideal backup solution, it is one easy way of securely saving your most precious files away from your PC.

 

Click here for more on Lightroom 3 Beta

-!-

Click to read more...

Stumble Upon Toolbar