Sharpening in Lightroom

Before getting into the sharpening protocol in Lightroom it’s important to point out that I don’t think LR has the best sharpening abilities available. It works well as a first stage sharpener to rid the camera of any softness caused by the camera’s Anti-Alias filter. Thereafter I recommend using a sharpening protocol in Photoshop which I'll be posting shortly, but is also available on the legacy link here. If you are wanting to sharpen straight from RAW then I would also suggest using either a plugin for Lightroom like Nik’s Sharpener Pro (sadly now discontinued of support, but still working for the time being) or a plugin like that from Topaz Labs.

Overcoming GAS

Gear Acquisition syndrome that is, not the flatulent kind. I’m not really sure when the term GAS was first coined (possibly it was Eric Kim), but I suspect it’s been used for a long time and if not named has been around for as long as photographers have set their tripods up and peered down a brass encased lens. To this day I don't think I have met a photographer who doesn’t have some level of GAS. There are varying degrees of affliction admittedly, but we all have it. The worst is obviously the silver bullet chase…seeking out the piece the of gear that will make your photography better, will transcend everything you have used before, and turn you into a Cartier-Bresson overnight. Those with not quite as serious an illness will still spend hours poring over the minutia of the equipment that they are looking to invest in, deliberate for weeks, and then still wonder whether they have acquired the right kit once it is finally in their hands.

Four More Lightroom Tricks that Work to Speed Things Up

Last year I wrote a brief article suggesting some tips to spending up your workflow in Lightroom. To whit, these were to learn some shortcut keys, learn to copy and paste settings as well as use the ‘previous’ button and figure out how to create presets. These are still extremely important, but here are a couple more to digest and hopefully increase the speed with which you work through your images. 

Exploring the Island Continent - Madagascar Photographic Recce

Several years ago, sitting in the dry heat of Namibia sipping a beer, I asked Nick van de Wiel, my partner with Nature's Light, "what about Madagascar?"
I remember him laughing and saying something along the lines of, "sure you organize it, we do it", not for a second actually thinking that we would actually manage to put together a photographic trip on the odd land mass floating off the east coast of Africa. That conversation was on the tail end of our now annual Composing The Dunes workshop in Namibia. Typing this, I am sitting on a Airlink Avro plane with the ochre coloured rivers of Madagascar shimmering in the late afternoon sun far below us. Somehow we managed to put it together.