Dave Nelson

Had a great time at the 2008 Wings over Marietta Open House & Airshow. This was my first opportunity to see the USAF Thunderbirds.  It was a beautiful day with a wide variety of aircraft to see.

Photos of the 2008 Wings over Marietta Open House & Airshow Gallery or you can view the photos as a slideshow.

Today was a beautiful day for baseball. I had a great time photgraphing the Red Sox and Dodgers playing a great game at Pinckneyville Park. Photographs of the game are now available.

For DragonCon this year I decided to give Lightroom 2 a try. I have changed a lot of things in my photo processing procedures, not the least of which has been the change from Windows to Macintosh OS X, and Lightroom sounded like a good fit.

On Thursday evening I installed the Lightroom 2 30-day trial on the Apple PowerBook G4 laptop that I would be using for the weekend. Chris [insert last name] helped me get started with Lightroom showing me some of the basics. The biggest thing that got me excited about Lightroom is the ease that metadata could be added to images and the ability to easily search for and filter images making it really easy to find images that have been tagged.

During DragonCon I would be out shooting from about 9:30 AM until around midnight at which time I would go to the hotel room fire up the laptop and spend 3 or 4 hours process all of the images in Lightroom. I would first copy the memory cards to my image bank and then onto the laptop so that there would always be two copies of every image.

Then I would import the images into Lightroom with my default metadata, which included a basic set of keywords, copyright information, and my contact information. Once in Lightroom I flagged the images that were unacceptable and should never be seen again and when I had made my way through all of the image I deleted the rejects.

The next pass took a lot longer as I went through and rated every image using 1 through 5 stars with the idea being that all images with 3 or more stars would be turned in as keepers.

On the third pass I visited each one of the keepers and used Lightroom to color correct, rotate, and crop where necessary. Luckily the Canon EOS 40D auto white balance is very accurate for this type of photography and with the lenses in my kit I am able to get the shots I am looking for with much cropping or rotating.

The final step is to export the images from Lightroom with my custom file naming convention of “Firstname_Lastname_YYYYMMDDHHMMSS_####.jpg” and I used a thumbrive to transport the images to the show computer to copy them over to the Director of photography.

By the end of the show I shot around 3,600 images over the four days of DragonCon and turned in 717 keepers. For my personal use I had about 3,800 pictures and published 1,181 onto my SmugMug web site.

Lightroom 2 is a really amazing tool. This is the first event where I did not spend hours in Photoshop pouring over each and every image that was designated a keeper. It is also the first event where I had every keeper tagged with keywords that will allow me to search for images later. In the past I would add keywords and captions to the images in SmugMug, but that did nothing to help me find images on my hard drive.
My next goals for Lightroom are to read a good book on the subject and then spend the next year or so going through my entire image library adding keywords and other meta data.

Resources:

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
• The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby
• The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening

I had a great time at DragonCon this year, the costume contests were fantastic, the guests told wonderful stories, and the fans were a lot of fun.

Here are some links to take you directly into the gallery:

• Gallery Homepage
• Costume Contest
• Parade
• Dawn Contest
• Masquerade

I hope to write a post about how I processed images this year. Lightroom 2 is really fantastic, I did not use Photoshop to edit any of the 1,181 images in the gallery.

On Saturday August 23rd I spent a beautiful night participating in Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk in Atlanta Georgia around the Buckhead – Lenox area. At 7:00 pm about 45 photographers gathers in front of the Terminus 100 building at the corner of Peachtree and Piedmont eager to attack the neighborhood.

I did not really feel inspired until I got to Dante’s Down the Hatch where I stepped inside and got a couple pics of the crocodiles inside. The energy inside the restaurant and seeing the reptiles fired me up to get out there and take a lot of photos.

But even then I did not start capturing photos that made me happy until the light started to fade and the street lights turned on. Using a tripod very close to the ground along with a remote shutter release I took many photos with the lights from cars and trucks blurring across the image.

I think may favorite image is of the fire hydrant. It is an atypical image for me, just not the kind of image I think about.

After being rained on for a bit and another trip up and around a parking deck I returned to where we started and entered the restaurant Bricktops where many of the photographers were enjoying food, drinks, and conversation.

We spent about an hour talking about scanning services (http://www.scancafe.com/) Microsoft Pro Photo Tools (http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/tools.aspx) and one of us spent the night taking photos of the food and drink.

I would like to thank Judith Pishnery for leading our band of photographers. She can be found at www.pisconeri.com and her blog is at www.pisconeriworkshops.blogspot.com.

It was a great experience and I hope to participate in another photowalk soon.

Links

• Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photo Walk: [Atlanta/Buckhead] Flickr Group
• Scott Kelby’s Blog
• Dave Nelson’s Photos from the Photo Walk

It is almost that time again, DragonCon is less than a month away. I am a staff photographer for DragonCon and have 7 years of DragonCon photographs on my web site.

This year I am most excited about meeting Hayden Panettiere, James Kyson Lee, and George Takei of Heroes, Sean Astin and Brad Dourif from The Lord of the Rings, Gareth David Lloyd and James Marsters from Torchwood, Beau Bridges from the upcoming Max Payne movie, Joel Hodgson the creator and host of MST3K, James Callis, Aaron Douglas, Michael Hogan, Tahmoh Penikett, and Katee Sackhoff, from Battlestar Galactica, Jewel Staite and Morena Baccarin from Firefly and Serenity, Randal L. Schwartz computer geek extroidinaire, and my favorite science fiction author Mike Resnick.

Come back after September 2^nd to see pictures of the guests listed above along with costumes, fans, and events from DragonCon 2008.

Below are some of my favorite pics from previous years.

I have had my suspicions for a couple of years that Photoshop had been stripping out the EXIF data that I inserted into my images with Exifer, and now after a bit of testing I have discovered that Photoshop CS3 does indeed remove EXIF data when saving JPG files.

Here is the workflow that I have been trying out lately.

1. Take pictures in JPG format
2. Use Exifer to add EXIF and select IPTC data
3. Use Microsoft Pro Photo Tools to add GPS and address information (geotagging)
4. Copy all images into an “Originals” folder
5. Edit the images being very selective as to what pictures are to be Photoshopped and shared with the public
6. Publish to SmugMug, Facebook, Flickr, and/or my blog.
7. Copy images to the Storage Area Network device

Meta data in the form of EXIF and IPTC information makes it much easier to search for files years later and web sites like SmugMug will take the EXIF data and use them for descriptions, locations, and more on their web site.

But I now have proof that during step 5 Photoshop is replacing the EXIF description with the IPTC description and if there is not an IPTC description then the EXIF description is now blank. If the IPTC Description and Author Name are filled out they will be copied to the EXIF fields when the file is saved in Photoshop.

I originally thought that this issue also affected the geotagging location set using Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, but after testing it on a couple images that does not appear to be the case.

EXIF data is very important to me and is used to search through thousands of files using web based and software based tools. I find it very disappointing that Photoshop would manipulate the EXIF data without the user explicitly requesting to make a change. From now on I will be adding both EXIF and IPTC data in Step 2.

Related Reading
http://www.exif.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPTC
http://www.iptc.org/pages/index.php

Almost every day I use Google Reader to read RSS feeds from many different web sites, 44 of them today, and I would like to share the photography feeds.

The Big Picture

The Big Picture is a blog over at boston.com where they post some of the most amazing pictures of the week. These picture regularly inspire me to get out there and do that thing that I do.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

Blue Pixel Musings

Blue pixel is a site billed as “Inspiring and Educating Photographers Worldwide” and I learn something from them every post.

http://www.bluepixel.net/

Hyperphocal

Hyperphocal posts tend to be pretty basic stuff, but I like the subjects they choose and I find something interesting in every post.

http://hyperphocal.com/

News: Digital Photography Review

DPReview covers everything that is new in photography. It is a great place to learn about new and upcoming cameras.

http://www.dpreview.com/

Photo Attorney

Photo Attorney is written by Carolyn E. Wright is an attorney who works for photographers. The posts are always relevant to photographers and photography. This is a great source of information on the war against photography.

http://www.photoattorney.com/

Photo-Resoures.org

Photo-Resources is full of posts similar to this one, bringing attention to other web sites and resources with every post.

http://photo-resources.org

Photo Permit

Photo Permit is a great blog to keep you on top of what is happening in the war on photography.

http://www.photopermit.org/

Photoshop Insider

This is Scott Kelby’s blog about Photoshop and photography. It is also where you can keep track of the worldwide photo walk (http://www.photoshopuser.com/photowalk/).

http://www.scottkelby.com/

Rob Galbraith DPI

This blog is usually very short posts about anything that may be happening in the world of photography from photo slideshows to new equipment reviews and announcements.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/

Sisters

Jason Lee is a great wedding photographer who has made a project out of taking and manipulating photos of his two daughters. The results are amazing an fantastic!

http://kristinandkayla.blogspot.com/

Strobist

The Strobist has a cult-like following for the great posts about lighting and photography. There is a lot to learn as it is not just a blog but also includes tutorials about off-camera lighting.

http://strobist.blogspot.com

StudioLighting.net

Studio lighting dot net contains a lot of tutorials and the blog feed contains new camera and accessory announcements.

http://www.studiolighting.net/

TWIP

I have written about This Week In Photography as a podcast before, but it is also a great blog with tutorials, product reviews, and more.

http://twipphoto.com/

Zack Arias

Zack is an Atlanta based editorial and music photographer who also produces DVD tutorials. I like the photos that Zack shares via his blog and the local Atlanta flair appeals to me.

http://www.zarias.com/

Vincent Laforet’s Blog

Vincent is in China shooting the Olympics and is planning to blog about it all along the way. Including an awesome post about what he has packed to capture the event.

http://vincentlaforet.wordpress.com/

Sports Shooter

I do not look at Sports Shooter every day and do not subscribe to a feed from them, but I do recommend checking the site out on a regular basis for lots of great information about being a professional photographer.

http://www.sportsshooter.com

We really enjoyed ourselves at Stone Mountain Park Thursday night with the laser light show and fireworks display. I get excited about any opportunity to take pictures of fireworks and this night proved to be exceptional. I didn’t get a lot of pictures, but having the carving at Stone Mountain as a backdrop to the fireworks makes for some wonderful pictures.

It was a great game and want to thank Sam for the opportunity to come out and take photos. Head on over to SmugMug and check out the pictures of Raptors T-Ball action.

When taking pictures of children playing sports I prefer to be at eye level or lower to the players, with the Raptors I was able to sit on the field and get the type of shots that I really like. I am making a lot more pictures available than I normally would since I probably won’t have a chance to shoot another game this season.

Please don’t get to distracted by the slideshow, there are much larger versions for viewing and for sale over at SmugMug.