I spent a glorious Saturday shooting with John Prado in Temecula, CA. Jennifer and Ken’s wedding was an incredibly fun event. The newly married couple were not only a blast but were also just great in front of the camera. The evening was spent at Oak Meadows, a beautiful facility set up for weddings and events. We had the warmest welcome from the families, friends and fellow vendors who were all great to be around. They made us feel very appreciated and that made the day so much nicer. Some highlights:

After attending a seminar today, I’m in tech mode. So, please forgive my geeky rant. -jan

Earlier today, I attended a one-day seminar on Adobe Lightroom given by Photoshop master Scott Kelby. I’ve seen him in action on his podcast and his work is quite amazing. I’ve been using Lightroom now for about 3 months and it’s been such a great tool for handling my RAW images. I still shoot JPEG and use iPhoto (which I L.O.V.E.) for all my personal images but for all my portrait sessions and weddings, I shot RAW and needed a capable system.

I tried using Apple’s Aperture for one shoot and I was pulling my hair out. As an Apple worshiper, I will always give their products a shot and really want to use them all. While I love the interface and the organizing features are awesome, it is slow and the batch options for tonal adjustments are clunky. I haven’t tried the latest revision, but from what I hear, the batch features that I was looking for has not appeared. So, I dumped Aperture and was using Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW to process and organize all my images. But since Lightroom was released, it has been a great tool for me. While it’s organizing features are not the most intuitive, Lightroom is amazing for making batch tonal adjustments and even some new tonal adjustments not available even in Photoshop (Recover/Vibrance). But since you cannot make selections in Lightroom, making fine-tuned touch ups are just not possible. No feathering, no softening, no blurring, no stam tool, no filters. So, there is still a definite need for Photoshop. I was thinking about changing my proofing system to incorporate Lightroom tonal adjustments only but in some cases I need my selection tool!

RAW Tools, I have used: (Clockwise from top left: Bridge (w/ Camera RAW), iPhoto (for personal stuff), Lightroom (my current tool of choice) and Aperture (beautiful interface but clunky editing).

While I enjoyed the seminar and Scott’s presentation, I was a little bummed that it was geared towards beginners. I knew most of what he was showing, but it was still a good reinforcement of my decision to go with Lightroom. Eventually, I did learn some cool new things that I never really bothered to delve into. I guess, sometimes, it’s just nice to know how other professionals work. I do like how Scott uses Photoshop with Lightroom. I used to always export the files into another folder, work on them in Photoshop and just leave them there. Now, I realized that it’s ok to edit them using Photoshop and save them back into Lightroom. I was always worried about the extra file it creates and the file size problems, but I guess that exporting them was doing the same thing. iPhoto uses the exact same system when using an external editor. But, there was one thing hat Scott preached that I disagreed with. For choosing images, he is an advocate of the Pick/Reject Flagging method while I prefer to stick with the Stars/Labels method.

For picking images, I use stars but with a twist. Lightroom uses a 5 star rating system, but I only use stars 2-5. After backing up and importing all image files, I assign stars to every image. Two star photos gets deleted, 3 star photos are proof worthy, 4 star photos are slideshow worthy, and 5 stars is album stuff. So, for a typical wedding, I’ll have about 600-900 3 star photos, 80-120 4 star photos and about 30-60 5 star photos. For me, it’s a little more flexible that just flagging yes/no. I also use the color labels to determine which photos I use for the blog or which I want to print. I’ll usually end up with 15-25 blog picks with a red flag.

Below is what Lightroom looks like in my desktop. You can see the ratings on the images and the red label on a few of them.This is the grid view of the Library but it is filtered to show only 4 stars or higher:

Below is Lightroom in the Develop panel. I really love the way Lightroom handles batch changes (Copy/Paste Presets or Sync/Auto-Sync). It’s really a time saver. I’ll still make small tweaks here and there, but most of the time, it’s good to go. I’ve set up a few of my personal presets on the left panel.

It’s funny because while using Lightroom for the past few months, I’ve made some cool discoveries like the Recovery and the Vibrance settings which I thought were just amazing. Then, today, Scott says how they are just the greatest things on earth. So, I’m glad that I’m on the right track with those tools.

For me, the best things in Lightroom are:

1. Presets,Presets,Presets (individual photo or batch)
2. The preview thumbnail on the top left corner
3. Adding vignettes using the lens correction panel
4. Easy split tone adjustments
5. The little click and drag/eyedropper adjustment tool on the Curve and Hue/Saturation/Luminance panels
6. Recovery and Vibrance tool

So unless Apple steps up and makes Aperture more useable (for me, at least), I’m with Adobe on this.

Geeky rant is done!

For a change, we went to Chinatown in LA for some dim sum with Tey’s family. Almost every week, we try to have mid-morning dim sum on Sundays. Most of the time, we go local instead of hassling with the 25 minute drive. But this time, Empress Pavilion was the place to be and the wait can be more than an hour. So, we got there a little early and let Lucas run around a bit. He loves to see Uncle Brian (Tey’s little brother) and cousin Joseph. We also met the newest addition to the fam, baby Naija. Wish we got to walk the streets but Lucas knocked out and we took him home to take a nap instead…

Lucas doing his natural smiling pose!

Doing some shopping.

You little thief!

Gawking at the sales people.

“Please Do Not Play!” – Don’t they know Lucas can’t read yet?!

Lucas trying to play with the big boys.

Uncle Brian concentrating.

Cousin Joseph with a big smile.

Welcome Baby Naija!

We spent a very special afternoon taking pictures of little Amber Duke. How perfect is it that Diana and Tad’s little baby girl was born on Valentines Day! So cool. She is now about 10 weeks old and is such a cutie. She was sleeping when we arrived, but soon after, she treated us with her huge gorgeous eyes. She was great the whole time and I see some modeling in her future ;)

Here’s a small sample of Baby Amber Duke or B.A.D.!

Amber and her Mom were matchy, matchy!

We did some very nice classic black background stuff.

Such cute little arms, hands, eyes, nose…

Awesome moment with Daddy.

Needed a change right in the middle of our session. You think it’s a girl’s room? :)

I took this at the very end of our session. She was still bright eyed and ready to go! The ones from this sequence are my favorites.

We met up with Devon and Stephen at their place in LA and drove to the nearby Venice beach area. It was an unbelievably cold Sunday afternoon and I want to thank them for being so awesome in the cold weather. The crazy weather brought some amazing light and great backgrounds. I just love, love, love scary looking clouds! The laughter and the smiles never stopped and we had a great time. On top of being an ER Doctor, Stephen is also a photographer (check out his work), so, yes, I felt the pressure :) They will be getting married over the Memorial Day weekend next month in Santa Barbara, CA. Some favs:

Meet Cecilia! She is their 15 year old pug. Such a sweetie.

The clouds were just amazing that day. In this picture, the wind chill must have been around 30 degrees. I swear!

They have awesome smiles.

We got some “illegal” photo time on the lifeguard tower.

This was in the alley way towards the beach.

Hugs all around!

This is our J Crew shot for Stephen :)

Along the Venice canals, such a cool area.

Cool shot right before going home.