12/06/2007 by jim.

I must confess that I have been having a love/hate relationship with Adobe Lightroom ever since it was released.

To start with I obtained the programme cheap as I was one of those foolish lucky people who had shelled out on Pixmantic’s RawShooter Premium shortly before they sold out to Adobe leaving loads of us punters high and dry as well as bitter and twisted. To their credit, Adobe, honored us by “giving” us Lightroom 1.0 “Free” of charge.

RawShooter was just a raw processor and Lightroom did so much more, I loved it.
My computer is a PC, under a year old and pretty fast with 1 GB RAM - well within the recommended spec for Lightroom. But I do quite a lot of other things on the same machine and Lightroom was so slow it was painful, I hated it.

I then added an extra 2 GB RAM and, like magic, Lightroom came alive, I love it.

The RAW processing engine is awesome, the search facilities amazing and, because I take photos for the press, I am not tempted to do any pixel editing that is so non-correct these days. At last I understand levels and the vibrancy adjustment  gives me digital Velvia.

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12/06/2007 by jim.

So, what is lighting 102 all about?

First of all Lighting 102 has nothing to do with me.

It is the brainchild of David Hobby, a Baltimore Sun photographer, who writes and teaches photographers to get those small strobes (What we English call flash guns) off the hot shoe of your camera and into a place that will improve the lighting quality of your photograph. No more burnt out faces staring back at you with red eye thrown in for good measure. As a bonus he does not like spending loads of cash on equipment to make all of this possible. What a guy!!!
This blog is not going to echo David’s good work and excellent web site, visit his site by clicking on the “Strobist” link to the right of the page and learn direct from the master. If your new to using flash with your camera see his pages on “Lighting 101″, by far the best primer on flash photography on the web.

David’s latest venture is a new teaching series that is inter-active with participants from around the globe posting their photos on Flickr and on their personal blogs just to share this wonderful learning experience. This new series is just about to start and I hope to post some of my lighting exercises on this blog. Feel free to join in, leave comments and generally participate. Just remember, when you get addicted to off-camera flash photography and it starts to take over your life - blame David and not me.

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12/06/2007 by jim.

Welcome to this new blog of mine.

As a full-time working photographer located out in the sticks (ie not in one of the major big cities of the UK) of Spalding, my work tends to be a bit of everything and anything that I can get hold of to earn a crust. Some of my work is studio and advertising based where content and quality go hand in hand but a lot is for the local press where content is the biggest issue and as long as it’s sharp that’s fine. This often causes a conflict in my working ethic whereby I have a deep seated need to shoot photos with good content, ace technique and at the highest quality possible (dream on).

One of the blogs that has inspired me in my quest to improve my press work is the strobist site of David Hobby who is a big advocate of off-camera flash techniques and he is the man who has inspired the creation of this blog in order so that I can document my progress through “lighting 102″.

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