Well. It’s been a month since I posted. I did mention that I’m posting photos daily over at http://lostconcepts.aminus3.com, so if you’re not looking over there, you’re missing out on about 40 photos at this stage.
On the news front, I’ve just launched LRB Exhibition, a new plugin for Lightroom that creates websites for photographers. I also discovered that I could create a basic shop page on E-Junkie, my download delivery provider, so I set one up.
Last weekend, I made the trip to Cong/Clonbur woods to recce locations for shoots, and for potential landscape photos. While it was a bleak day I still made some nice discoveries.
Next weekend, I’m a little tied up as I have the first of 3 Saturdays doing a beginners course in makeup. I know it’s an odd enough choice, but I think it’ll really help with Beauty photography, something I love doing.
I’m prepping for a talk on Lightroom at the Phototraining4U stand at Focus on Imaging in Birmingham next month. It’ll be a talk on Lightroom 3 Beta.
I’m also onto Chapter 5 of my book on creating web gallery plugins for Lightroom.
That’s the short of it anyway.
ScreenFlow, the software I use for making my video tutorials has been updated to 2.0. There was a beta program that I was invited onto and in the process was given a free update. This is nice, but has nothing to do with how I feel about the software. I have to date purchased 3 video screen capture programs for Mac, and this is easily the best, for one simple reason: It allows you to capture and then edit that footage. You can also bring in external media, such as video clips and audio files. (For those wondering, the other 2 are Snapz Pro X and iShowU-I still use Snapz for image capture)
Other features in the application include the ability to create zooms and pans in your captures, along with text and callouts. As you create a capture you can opt to add to a previous file, or can create a new one. Features that are new in 2.0 include reflections, clip speed and direct YouTube publishing. All in all, I think it’s much more versatile than others previously available.
To be balanced, there is a new piece of software to the Mac market and that is the king of PC Screen capture, Camtasia. While the 2 programs are quite similar in design and control, I think the new features in ScreenFlow give it the edge. One thing I do like in Camtasia is the arrows they use for callouts. Still, it’s not enough to convert me, and of course, I have been converted in the past.
Obviously you can now do video screen capture with Quicktime X for Snow Leopard, but then of course you have to edit it into something usable. And that is why a program like ScreenFlow is so useful.
ScreenFlow 2.0 is $99 from Telestream and available now.
I’ve used a number of products on Mac to create video/screen capture for Lightroom-Blog.com. I do have to consider my options when I purchase, but not exactly being new in the game, it’s been a case of using things as they became available. PC users, sorry, but I don’t use PC, but all I can say is, if you’re not using Camtasia, you need to start there. It’s not cheap, but it does everything.
Snapz Pro X: This for a long time was the only ball in town. If you wanted video capture with audio, this was it. There were a few freebies that did video without audio though. You could record audio, then record the video as the audio played and match them up. If you scripted, this was perfect. I don’t, or at least I should, but I tend not to. So I bought Snapz. While it’s not longer my video capture tool of choice, I do use it for screen capture. I actually own 2 licenses to this as I got a second one in a software bundle.
iShowU & Stomp: I bought these as a bundle. iShowU is a great little package for video and creates amazingly small videos, while still retaining quality. I used this until this week, and I see it used by “The Photoshop Guys”. It is great, but my needs have been changing rapidly. I’ve stopped using iShowU for capture, but I’m still squishing my video with Stomp.
Screenflow: When you’ve already spent a wad on software, you tend to be reluctant to buy something new. I’m about to do a series of video for an online training site, but they need panning and zooming. To an extent you can do this in the OS, but it’s really fiddly to do it while actually making a video. Screenflow lets you do it after. I can also save out the audio from the recording, normalise it and then import it back into Screenflow. By removing the original audio track in the timeline, I can get louder audio. Very cool. Thanks to Clicio Barroso for putting me onto this. I had it for an hour of the 30 day trial when I bought it. Besides the need to zoom and pan for a specific site, this control is something I’ve wanted for a long time anyway. I’m delighted.. Not to mention that I haven’t looked into the titling abilities yet either. Well worth the money.
It’s been a hectic week, and despite promising a post for fellow SWPP members from a recent Paddy Casey gig, I still haven’t had time to process them.
Galleries (skip this if you’ve no interest in my coding!)
I’m in the process of beta test on LRB Portfolio for what may become version 2.0. On top of that, I’ve been using a coding structure that allows me to mix Lua and XSLT to create a Flash gallery that will work on both the Mac and PC platform, rather than just Mac.
Basically, I noticed that SlideShowPro was doing this mix successfully and mentioned it to Matthew Campagna. Matthew then created a new version of his TTG Simpleviewer Gallery using this coding technique. And I, er.., followed suit. It became painfully obvious that when creating a Flash gallery that Lightroom only previews the SWF file and ignores any HTML that is embedding it. In Matthew’s case, that’s not a problem, because Simpleviewer will fill the space, as will SlideShowPro. Mine on the other hand is designed to be embedded in HTML.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also been working on a replacement HMTL gallery for Lightroom using Square thumbnails (cropped in CSS). I’ve a version that use a script to show the file floating over the grid ala Shadowbox/Lightbox, and one using strict HTML. Whether or not they see the light of day is another matter!
Shoots
As mentioned I’ve a bunch of live stuff to process and so I should really do that and add them here!
Aslan at Roisin Dubh
Paddy Casey at Roisin DubhI’m not one for Charity shooting, because people that work in a Charity organisation generally get paid. Of course there are volunteers that work for free, but I’m talking about core staff. The ads on TV for a charity organisation are paid for, so why shouldn’t I? That said I do give my time to projects where I choose to volunteer. So on Tuesday night I was standing up on a ladder for some promo shots for an upcoming charity concert/album, organised by local musician Don Phelan.
4 bands in one room?With tight time and not a whole lot of interest in the venue, I got this quick shot for them. It’s not an award winner by any stretch, but will serve the purpose of letting people know who’s involved! The four bands here, from front to back are: Mugger Dave, Voodoo Fire, The Kanyu Tree and Without George.
This week also saw some work with a visiting English model for some personal work, which I may feature at a later date. Phew. Said I was busy!
It appears that Google are finally releasing their photo editing and management app, Picasa, for the Mac. Despite being a hardened Lightroom user, I’m still going to give this a go. I’m more than a little sketchy about granting rights for Google to use my photos in exchange for using their program, but this might not bother lot of my friends. See section 11 of the user license for more details.
Ages ago I got a free Capture One LE license with a Sandisk card. Actually I got more than one, but I only ever activated one. Anyhow, it did entitle me to a free version of Capture One 4. I did download it when first announced, but I only activated it this evening (even though I’ve used 3.7LE since I downloaded 4).
I went onto the Phase One forums for a look and all I can say is Ouch! I know the Adobe U2U forums can be rough (after all it’s designed to deal with problems), but seeing people with very expensive medium format backs giving out about how bad they feel the system Raw convertor has become is another deal altogether.. Reading about tethering corrupting .CR2 files makes me thankful I’ve stuck to Lightroom! Anyhow, I’m still going to give C1 4 a go if nothing else just for a look.
