Hey everyone! I’m psyched to see Google Buzz taking off. If you’re interested in following me, head over to my Google Profile, and follow me.  I hope to see you soon! (And I promise I’m going to try and start writing on this blog more often.)

One of the things I’ve long wanted to do with Lightroom is get a graph of my lens usage.  You know, I’d like to see the focal lengths with which I spend most of my time shooting .  Unfortunately, getting this information out of Lightroom has been practically impossible.  Knowing that Lightroom stores its catalogs as SQLite databases, I tried to use some SQLite knowledge to pull this information out of Lightroom.  You know what? It possible.  If you’re not comfortable with terminology such as DOS/Command prompts on Windows and/or Terminals on OSX, you might want to turn back now, otherwise, keep reading.

First I must say something very important!!!

Doing this may break Lightroom for you. While I don’t believe it will, I take no responsibility for what may happen. To be safe, work on a COPY of your Lightroom Catalog, and delete the copy when you are finished.

Here are the steps you need to pull data out of Lightroom.  I’ve tested this with Lightrom 2.5 and it worked perfectly.  It’s unlikely this will work with Lightroom 1.x or the Lightroom 3.0 Beta. (UPDATE: Troy Gaul, engineering lead for Lightrom dropped me a line and said that this will likely work for Lightroom 3 Beta and Final as this part of the catalog isn’t scheduled to be modified.) Let’s get to it!

1. Make sure you quit Lightroom. Don’t have it running while you do this.
2. Open a window and go find your <catalog name>.lrcat file on your disk.
3. Copy your <catalog name>.lrcat file to another folder.  We’ll be working from this copy.  I will assume you put this file in c:\catalog.lrcat
4. Go over to the SQLite download page and download the precompiled binaries for your OS. (i.e. Mac, Windows, etc.)
5. Open the downloaded file, and you’ll be looking for sqlite3.exe on Windows or sqlite3 on OSX.
6. Copy sqlite3.exe (or on OS X just sqlite3) to the same location where you put the copy of your Lightroom catalog. For me, that’s just inside c:\.
7. On Windows you need to open a DOS prompt. Goto the Start Menu, goto Run, and type: cmd.exe and press <enter>.
8. On OS X, you’ll want to goto Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.
9. At this point you’ll want to go to the directory where you put sqlite3.exe (just sqlite3 on OSX) and your catalog.lrcat.  Since I put it in c:\, I’ll type: “cd c:\“.
10. Now, you’ll want to copy and paste the following command, note the bolded text.  You’ll want to replace the text in bold with the name of your catalog copy.  Here we’re using catalog.lrcat:
11. sqlite3.exe -csv “catalog.lrcat” “SELECT focalLength, COUNT(focalLength), AgInternedExifCameraModel.value, AgInternedExifLens.value from AgHarvestedExifMetadata, AgInternedExifCameraModel, AgInternedExifLens WHERE cameraModelRef = AgInternedExifCameraModel.id_local AND lensRef = AgInternedExifLens.id_local GROUP BY focalLength, AgInternedExifCameraModel.value, AgInternedExifLens.value ORDER BY focalLength ASC;” > analysis.csv
12. Now, the results are stored in a file called analysis.csv.
13. You’ll need to do some of your own processing of the data using Excel or Google Docs, but that’s beyond the scope of this tutorial.

The lines of the file analysis.csv will look something like this:

13,9,”Canon EOS 40D”,”EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM”

13,5,”Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XTi”,”EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM”

14,21,”Canon EOS 40D”,”EF-S10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM”

The first number is the focal length in mm, the next number is the number of photos that were taken at that focal length, using the camera and lens specified.  From this, you’re own your own.  Perhaps some enterprising person will write a tool to extract and generate the graph automatically, but I don’t have the time right now.  Hopefully you found this useful!

If you’re curious to see what I was able to make, take a look:

This is a graph of what focal length’s I’ve used over the previous 2 years.  It is interesting  I tend to use the extremes on my zoom lenses more than anything else.  Note the position of 10mm & 22mm, coinciding with my use of the Canon EF-S 10-22mm ultra-wide angle lens.  The same thing occurs for my use of the Canon 24-105mm, Canon 17-40mm, and the 70-200mm lenses.

Two weeks ago I was supposed to fly to Tokyo.  On the way to the airport I felt slightly sick.  I arrived at SFO three hours before the flight was scheduled to take off, and in the Japan Airlines lounge I felt even sicker.  I took the usual dose of travel sickness drugs, but to no avail.  I felt bad, looked green, and ultimately thought that I’d never make it on a 12 hour flight to Japan.  At the gate, as people were boarding, I told the gate attendants that I didn’t think I could get on the plane.  The Japan Airlines staff were very helpful and they quickly pulled my bags from the cargo hold.  I went home and ended up missing my trip completely, as I spent the next 2 days in bed.  Talk about timing, right?

Two days after that I managed to make it into the office, and things were getting back to normal.  Well, the next day, Sara came home from work and she was pretty sick.  I took her to the doctor, who diagnosed her as likely having H1N1.  I say likely because they gave up testing for it, since everyone seemed to be coming down with it last week.  The next day, I got it too!  I was sick pretty much all of last week, and it was just horrible.  I’m feeling better now, thank goodness!

So, anyway, on Friday Sara’s dad and Charlotte came to visit.  Today we ran up to San Francisco and while walking around I grabbed this photo of a fire engine in one of North Beach’s fire stations.  I haven’t taken a photo in weeks, and despite the fact I still feel weak and somewhat tired, it felt really good to snap off a few frames.  Photography is just what the doctor ordered!

Lightroom 3.0 Beta is now available for download. Go give it a try and see what you think? More thoughts coming later, but right now, it’s time to play. Let me just say the new import tool rocks! And check out that noise reduction, it’s like magic! Fancy stuff, good times ahead for all of us Lightroom users.

Go Get Lightroom 3.0

..mike

So my friend Brandon pinged me this evening to say that Flickr had killed the DMU group, which stands for “Delete Me — Uncensored”. The way the group worked was kind of a sadistic game. You would submit a photo to the group pool. People were then invited to comment on your photo and say whatever they felt like. Their comments were literally ‘uncensored’. After praising or trashing your photo, they’d vote save or delete. As soon as your photo received 10 saves or 10 deletes, its’ fate was sealed. If it was saved, it was moved to the Lightbox,  a collection of some of the most amazing images on Flickr.  If it received 10 delete votes, it was banished and kicked out of the group completely. In order to submit a photo, you were required to vote on 15 photos first.  You effectively bought your right to be criticized by criticizing others.  Sweet, eh?

Why would be people do this? Well, everyone is a monster inside!  Haha.  But seriously, it was a place that attracted some very talented photographers, and was a place where you could get honest feedback.  On too many sites people will praise everything, or leave pointless feedback like ‘Great Capture!’.  Participating in a forum where people were brutally honest was pretty unique.  It also made it extremely rewarding when people said nice things.  You really had to have made something special to be praised.

It’s sad to see Flickr act like this.  Too bad there are no other photo services out there that have established a strong social component.  Once I find one, I’m signing up.  Social photo hosting is far from a solved problem.

I’ve been watching CSI for a while now, and the season 10 premier last Thursday had perhaps one of the most visually impressive openings ever. In fact, it was all done with one take and it takes the Matrix’s Bullet Time effect to a new level. If anyone knows how this was done, I’d love to hear from you. Watch it below if you haven’t seen it yet.

About 6 months ago I had the awesome opportunity to photograph several SWAT teams during training exercises. I had an all access pass to follow them as breached a building, saved the hostages, and got the bad guys. The opportunity to document such activities is something I’ll always remember. This afternoon I had to urge to take a photo that I really liked and reprocess it using a different technique. The original effect was a simple but harsh b&w conversion. I think I like this better. It’s definitely gritty and sharpened, but I feel that it adds something to the character. The atmosphere and situation these guys work in seems to demand such an effect. I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Well hello there again! I see you’ve decided to come back for more thoughts from a first time wedding photographer. This is the big post, in fact, it’s so big that I’m splitting it up into 2 parts. You’ve done your reconnaissance. You have your shot list. You have your group photo ordering optimized and ready to go. It’s less than 24 hours to the wedding. What should you be doing now?

• Clean all of your gear. Make sure your sensors are free of dust spots. Make sure there are no fingerprints or smudges on anything. Double and then triple check everything!
• Make sure the clocks on all of your camera bodies (remember you have more than one camera) are synchronized and set to the correct time. When post processing, if you have photos from the reception mixed up with getting ready photos, you’ll want to pull your hair out. Of course you can go shift the capture time using a tool like Lightroom, but why bother? Get it right the first time!
• Make sure all of your cameras have the same settings. Make sure white balance, metering mode, shooting mode, ISO, etc are all set to some sane default values. You don’t want to accidentally have one camera on spot metering and another on matrix.
• You’re going to need more memory cards than you think! With my 5D Mark II, CR2 RAW files are 20 – 25 MB. At the wedding I shot, I took 3965 photos. That equates to almost 97 GB of images. Do you have enough storage? Get more! Flash cards are cheap enough running out of space shouldn’t be a concern.
• Format all of your flash memory cards using your camera. Don’t format the cards on a computer, as the camera puts special files on cards when it formats them.
• Make it a rule that you will NEVER format a card on the wedding day. The risk of accidentally losing images is too high.
• You’re going to have a bunch of flash cards all freshly formatted and ready to go. This poses one subtle problem on the wedding day, how do you know what cards are used and what cards are clean? I didn’t use a fancy wallet to keep track of this, I used a idiot proof system. I put a piece of paper around each CF card before putting it into its’ little plastic case. When I pulled out a new card, I put the strip of paper in my pocket. Any plastic case containing a CF card without paper was used, and any CF card with paper wrapped around it, was clean. Easy, right?
• Get extra batteries for your cameras. BorrowLenses.com rents batteries for all major camera brands. Pickup an extra battery or three.
• Give all of your batteries a full & fresh charge the night before the wedding.
• You’ll want extra batteries for your flashes too! Costco sells a 48 pack of AA batteries for like 12 bucks. What have you got to loose? Your flashes and your TV remote control will thank you.
• If you don’t own a battery grip, head on over to BorrowLenses.com and rent one. I couldn’t imagine shooting a wedding without a battery grip. Does it make the camera heavier? Yes, but having the extra shutter button, and being able to take vertical shots without straining your wrist is a small price to pay. As an added bonus, if your camera batteries die, you can put AA batteries into the grip as a last resort!
• You need to make sure you have backups for all your important gear. For most of the reception I had a 24-105mm f/4L on my 5D Mark II and a 17-55mm f/2.8 on my 40D. If one camera died, I wouldn’t loose coverage of a critical focal length.
• I used 4 main lenses on the wedding day: 24-105mm f/4L, 17-55mm f/2.8, 70-200mm f/4L IS, and a 85mm f/1.2L.  I wish I had a 50mm f/1.2L or a 24mm f/1.4L for my 5D Mark II too.

Well that’s it for this post.  The second half of this should hopefully come next week.  Thanks for reading.  I hope you find this useful!

For the past two weeks I’ve been wanting to take a new photo of myself that I could use on my Facebook and Twitter profiles.  Unfortunately I’ve been starved for ideas and I haven’t gotten around to it yet.  Tonight, for inspirational purposes, I started looking through my Lightroom catalog.  While doing so I had the idea of making a simple collage containing photos I found interesting.  I used Lightroom’s Print Module to save the spread as a JPEG and I’m sharing it with you here.  All of these photos are from 2009.  Let’s call this a Year to Date Collage.  Why don’t you make one, and share it with everyone as well?  It’s a quick and easy exercise to see what you’ve accomplished in the past 8 months!  I look forward to seeing your’s!

N.B. The next update to my wedding photography observations is not abandoned, I’m just pushing it back until Tuesday morning.  Stay tuned!

So this summer was phenomenal.  In the span of less than two months we had Zack Arias, renowned Atlanta based music photographer, and Joe McNally, who needs no introduction, come by Google and teach us.  Why?  I dunno. These two photographers took time out of their extremely busy schedules to come and talk to a group of engineers about lighting and photography.  I’m humbled and thankful that they’d want to come by our offices and share knowledge they’ve spent a lifetime learning.

I’ve thanked them both numerous times, and yet, it never seems to convey the true gratitude I have for their willingness to share their time and insights with us.  Then it hit me, “We can sit around and attend all the talks we want, but unless we put what was shared with us to practice, we didn’t learn anything!”  I’ve kept in touch with the models who worked with us at both workshops and  I’ve started organizing weekly photo shoots in the area surrounding our offices.  A group of us wanders around and tries to put what we learned into practice.  (One thing we’ve learned is that it’s much harder when Zack or Joe isn’t standing 15 feet away ready to offer advice, but skin or swim, right?)

Today we had our second photo shoot/walk.  Brittany, who volunteered her time as a model for Joe’s workshop, came over and we started wandering around Shoreline Park in Mountain View.  There were 6 of us, and we took turns assisting each other, offering advice and opinions.  Did we come up with award winning photos? Probably not, but for a bunch of newbies running around a park at sunset, we didn’t do too bad.

Some in our group had never used off camera flash before, so I gave a very quick spiel about aperture controlling flash exposure, shutter speed controlling ambient light, and ISO just shifting everything in some direction.  I could hear myself repeating what I heard Zack and Joe say.  I’m not 1/1000th the photographer either of those two men are, but when I started explaining the absolute basics, it felt good.  Perhaps that’s what it’s all about, not hording experiences, but sharing them with others.

So that brings us to tonight.  All three photos of Brittany were taken with an Apollo 28″ softbox.  I had two speedlites inside the Apollo, as even on full power one just wasn’t able to put out enough light.  It was quite bright outside and I was stopping down my lens to try and darken the overall scene.  You can see a complete set of my photos from tonight over on my Flickr page.  Let me know what you think, I love getting constructive comments!

Hopefully I’ll be able to keep this going.  Looking at the shots I got last week and comparing them with those from this week, there is a noticeable improvement. Perhaps one day, this will all start to make sense, but until then, I’m learning and doing.