Wasted Continuum

Adobe has always been good about releasing betas for Lightroom. Today they released Lightroom 5 beta. The three new features that they are highlighting are an advanced healing brush, a radial filter, and a perspective transforming tool the call Upright. From the video demos, the all three new tools seem great and I would definitely make use of them.

I have been using Lightroom 4 since the first day they released it in beta. One of the features I was excited about was the new Map module. I am fairly meticulous about organizing and tagging all my photos. This is a major reason why I love Lightroom. It excels at that. The thing that I have had to do manually (since both my Canon 5D2 and Canon S95 don’t have GPS logging) is geotag my photos when I upload them to Flickr. It is tedious and at times very difficult when I can’t remember the exact spot I was at when I shot the photo.

Since Lightroom 4 has made it easier to geotag your photos, I decided to give it a try. In order to make this work, I had to find a way to track and import my GPS data for my photos. I should note that Lightroom only supports GPX files. After trying a bunch of GPS tracking apps on my phone and testing a bunch of desktop that exported to GPX when it was necessary, I was disappointed that most of the software out there did not work well with Lightroom. The last app I tried was My Tracks by Google. I forgot that they made one. I wish I tried it first because it works perfectly with Lightroom.

I tested it out yesterday when I was shooting along the Mississippi River. There is only one thing to remember before you start using My Tracks. You should make sure your phone has an accurate reading from your GPS signal. Acquiring your location takes time if it’s a cold start. I turned on my GPS a few minutes before I got to my destination to give my phone plenty of time to lock onto my location. After My Tracks has a good read on you, just start recording and then begin taking photos. One last thing to be aware of, you should check to see if your camera’s time is set correctly. Lightroom syncs your photos to the GPS data with that time. You can correct this by setting a time offset after you imported everything, but you’ll save yourself a possible headache if you just check the time beforehand. After everything your GPS data and your photos are in Lightroom, it can sync them up with a few clicks. It saves the location data into your photos as metadata so when you upload them to Flickr, Flickr will recognize and map them for you. You can check out the photos that I tested it with on my Flickr.

If you have any questions about this whole process, leave a comment below or you can ask me at @JavaJunky.

It’s Friday the 13th and I decided to start a new 365 project. This will be my fourth. I think I will focus on pushing my creativity more while still honing my technical skills. My last 365 really improved my understanding of lighting. I have no idea where this project will push me, but I know it will. Here is my first shot. I set up my strobe lighting and everything. You can check it out on my Flickr and let me know what you think.

P.S. I edited this and another photo with the new Lightroom 4 beta. I am loving it so far. I will probably write up a short post on it this weekend. In the meantime, you can download the beta yourself and play around with it.

Adobe just released their Lightroom 3.6 update and as not surprising, also released Camera Raw 6.6 update. You can get them on their software update page. It doesn’t seem to be a major update, just some support for new cameras like the Canon Powershot S100, which looks pretty sweet. I have the Canon S95 and I love it. By the way, if you’re looking for a really good deal on a high end compact, the S95 is one to look at. Its price dropped a lot since the S100 came out.

This was taken outside of Salut in Saint Paul. I was there to celebrate my mom’s birthday. There are more photos on my Flickr.

I took this photo earlier this month after dropping my friend off at the airport. The sun was just rising and the whole park was foggy. This little flower caught my eye. There are a few more photos from this morning on my Flickr.