The 30 day trial is key — there’s almost no chance I would have picked LR v2 up without being able to try it “for real” for a while.

I’ve been feeling the pain of inadequate management tools for my slowly but inexorably increasing photos directory tree. My workflow prior to Lightroom was (is, since I haven’t really committed to LR yet):

1. Shoot lots of photos.
2. [Download all the pictures using Downloader Pro onto the laptop; manually copy them to an external disk.]
3. [Look through them with Breezebrowser Pro.]
4. At home, copy all the photos from the external disk to the desktop (or download them using Downloader Pro if the photo shooting if I was home the same day as I shot the photos, as in when I am not traveling)
5. Sort through them in Breezebrowser Pro tagging the ones I like, using Photoshop and Camera Raw to prepare any I like to post or use for something. If they’re to post, ruthlessly edit down to very few with multiple passes in Breezebrowser untagging photos that do not make the cut. If they’re for family, the bar is a bit lower since I get flack when I shoot hundreds of shots and share .. four with them.
6. Use CR/PS to open, crop, jigger exposure, sometimes edit; post and/or write to DVD-R appropriately.
7. When I post, I add metadata (title, keywords) to the file using PS and carefully use the export path that preserves that and the EXIF metadata (not Save For Web…, but Save As…JPEG). This metadata can be consumed by both Flickr and my own photo album software. Lots of other things too.
8. Once and a while I’d use Bridge to tag the entire shoot’s worth of photos with something to identify them later, but not usually because Bridge is just too slow even when fed only one directory/shoot’s worth of photos.

I didn’t have any good way to store or search on metadata across the whole tree. And the PS/BR/DL workflow is kind of clunky.

With Lightroom, once it’s all configured, it’s more like:

1. Download using LR, having LR copy to the backup drive when applicable (*) According to forums, I have not set this up yet, but will certainly do so before the trial runs out..
2. Sort, choose, tag photos in LR.
3. Jigger exposure, crop all in LR for shots that make the cut.
4. Export from LR with metadata intact. The only bummer about this bit is that when I used to do bulk exports, BreezeBrowser made it easy to just extract the embedded “thumbnail” in the raw file, which was much faster than converting the raw file and the “thumbnail” with my current cameras is 3MP or more, plenty for web.
5. Metadata remains searchable and browsable far more easily than the huge tree of directories I have.

LR is not as fast as I’d like (BR is just crazy fast at display even when fed hundreds of shots in a directory) but it’s fast enough for its other wins to be very enticing. I need to put it on the laptop and see how it works as if I was traveling and then came home. Some forum surfing indicates this flow can be very nice.

Also the fact that it’s easy to Stack the original with any edited versions (in the rare cases I need more than LR’s built-in nondestructive edits like cropping or exposure/curves/etc) is very nice.

I’ve already unearthed some shots I liked but missed using my old workflow. One thing I really, really like about LR: it’s easy to configure it (with a performance cost) to always keep metadata with the actual photos (embedded in JPEGs, sidecar .XMP files for raw files). Some things don’t get represented this way (e.g. Stacks).

A big reason I’ve avoided tools like this for so long is I got thoroughly burned once by Thumbs+ when I spent an afternoon carefully adding metadata to all my photos which got stashed away in Thumbs+’s db .. and then it blew up and lost the db somehow. Not even my normally relatively diligent backup procedures saved me there (nightly).

It seems like a win. It’s big enough that I may need to pick up a book on it to really leverage it well, but even without anything other than a cursory surfing through some forums and its own help it’s looking like a big improvement to my workflow.

It’s a visible upgrade from the 50/1.8.

I prefer chilly, clear days to mild, rainy days, so the last couple days weather has been a treat.

It feels like a nice, brisk fall day in New England.

Meanwhile, it has been unseasonably mild in New England this winter. I was there over the holidays and it felt like spring.

My 5D arrived late yesterday. I took it down to Monterey via Santa Cruz along the coast to get a feel for it.

It’s sort of anticlimatic to hold — it feels just like the 20D. The viewfinder is nicer and it’s nice that I can use all of the lens now. My workflow is completely crippled by the fact that Adobe hasn’t updated Camera Raw yet.

My initial plan was to visit Seacliff Beach and possibly downtown Santa Cruz, but as I approached the area for both of those I was struck by the urge to go somewhere I hadn’t been before. So I got on Route One south and drove for a while. Eventually I came to Moss Landing State Beach and got out to walk around and see if anything was worth shooting (the shot above came from there).

It was windy. And chilly. I was glad I decided to throw the jacket in the car despite it being hot out near home. I walked down the beach a ways, shooting at birds mostly. Especially these small, flocking birds that would swoop up and down the beach in big flocks (they looked like schools of little fish).

I’ll post more pictures and descibre the rest of the day later.

This also is only my second prime lens (the other being the 50mm). I need to shoot more with prime lenses. It can be educational.

Today (July 4, 2003) was the first real trip out with the new gear. I took the 10D/70-200 out a few times last week but less than an hour each time and mainly to familiarize myself with the new UI. The UI on the 10D is similar enough to the D30 to make me think I already knew how to use it .. and different enough for that to be untrue.

The camera’s detailed technical specs are described in DPReview’s 10D review. A summary is: It’s nice. It focuses noticeably faster than the D30.

I walked around downtown Santa Barbara and along the waterfront for a few hours snapping photos with the 70-200 f4, my older sigma 17-35, and the 28-135 IS. It was the first time I really used more than one lens in a single trip and I carried a lot more gear than I usually do. Carrying more gear was an experiment to see if I’d actually switch lenses — I did. The 28-135 choice was mostly because it fit into the shoulder bag which was more handy than the backpack where the 70-200 was stowed. I probably wouldn’t have used the 28-135 at all if I hadn’t been in a hurry to switch from the 17-35 to something with more telephoto. The 70-200 f4L is nice. It on the 10D focuses fast and is very smooth to use.

This was also the first time I really used the 17-35 on a digital SLR — I hardly ever got it out to use on the D30, I had convinced myself it was too annoying to carry two lenses and knew I wanted telephoto often enough that just the 17-35 wasn’t enough range. Today I realized: I miss wide-angle. It’s fun. I’ll be shooting more with it in the future.

I shot a lot from the hip with it — those experiments worked a lot better than my similar attempts to do so with the 28-135. They did not, however, turn out very well.

I haven’t finished going through the shots from this afternoon yet.

Tonight I went to the Goleta fireworks display with my new tripod (which I had not yet used outside — it was a Christmas present) and set up along the sidewalk. I started out with the 70-200 on the camera but switched to the 17-35 once the fireworks started after seeing how much of the sky had fireworks.

It was fun; it was also the first time I used the cable release in bulb mode so I could manually control when the shutter opened and closed without using a timer. I experimented with exposure settings and lengths and tried to time having the shutter open for when the pretty colors were visible.

I settled into a pattern of holding the shutter open during the ‘shoot up’ phase of the rocket and through the explosion and fade-out, trying to get one or two bursts in each frame. More than that and they blurred together and /or blew out. Some exposures were more successful than others.

Once I had an aperature and ISO that seemed to be working for the typical burst I settled into controlling the shutter and watching the fireworks without paying much attention to the shots in the review window. It might have been nice to have something with a bigger screen to review the shots on while I was fine-tuning, but I already had more gear than I had carried in the afternoon (everything i had then plus the tripod).

I think this shoot was pretty successful, especially for a first attempt.