What is a lesser photographer?

Writer and photographer C.J. Chilvers describes why he started his photography realted blog,  A Lesser Photographer, over a year ago.

An entire generation is being led to believe that the features on their cameras are more important than the photos they produce.

This is a blog for the rest of us; for the ones not interested in what’s marketable, but what’s remarkable. In other words, it’s a place for what the arrogant in our hobby would deem “lesser photographers.”

I've been guilty in the past of focusing more on the technical side of photography.  I still do. I would talk about megapixels and lenses and sensor size as though just having the right equipment would help me produce better results.  It didn't.

Starting sometime late last year, I decided that none of that was making my photography more compelling – to me. I was not enjoying my hobby as much. I had forgotten that what had brought me to photography was capturing images for my own enjoyment.  Not for sale.  Not to impress other people.  Just for me.

I wanted to bring the joy back to my hobby.   That's one reason I started a 365 project this year.  I wanted to experience the wonder – and the personal challenge – of seeing how well I could capture the experience that was before my eyes.  I wanted to make my photography compelling again.  At least to me.

Export from Lightroom to Gallery 2

I'm participating in a group 365 photography project with members of the PHOTO-FUSION meetup. The 2011 Journey 365 — Daily Visions is a challenge for the group to have fun and learn over the year.  We are being challenged by the meetup organiser to take one photo each and every day and post it to a photo album he created specifically for the project.

The PHOTO-FUSION meetup organiser has chosen to host the photo albums on his web site using Gallery, an open source web based photo album organizer.  With Gallery a web site owner can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface accessible from any web browser.  But after exporting a few photos from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 and then uploading to the gallery I realised that I wanted a more efficient work-flow.

One of the things I like about Lightroom is the plug-in architecture. Plug-ins extend the capability of Lightroom allowing integration with external image-processing software such as Nik Software's HDR Efex Pro and Photomatix Pro. Adobe maintains a list of free and commercial plug-ins on the Adobe Exchange web site. I'm a big fan of Jeffrey Friedl's export Lightroom plug-ins which allow me to upload images directly to online social media services such as Flickr, Facebook, and PicasaWeb. Jeffrey offers these plug-ins as "donationware". A small donation — as little as one dollar cent to cover the PayPal fee— is all that is required to unlock the full potential of the plug-ins.

A few minutes on Google and I had a link to two plug-ins for exporting from Lightroom to Gallery. The first plug-in, written by German photographer and blogger Moritz Post, works with Gallery 2 — which is what PHOTO-FUSION is hosting — and the other is written for Gallery 3. The instructions below are for installing the Gallery 2 export plug-in for Lightroom on Mac OS X.

Installation

First, quit Lightroom if it's already running. Download the Gallery 2 plug-in from Sourceforge and extract the plug-in file from the zip file. Copy to Lightroom’s Modules folder. This will be different depending on operating system.

  • Windows Vista or 7: C:UsersusernameAppDataRoamingAdobeLightroomModules
  • Windows XP: C:Documents and SettingsusernameApplication DataAdobeLightroomModules
  • Mac OS X: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Modules (where ‘~’ is your User directory)

Lightroom Modules Folder

Launch Lightroom and go to the Plug-In Manager. Scroll until you find the "Gallery2 Upload" entry.  Select it and verify that it is enabled.

NOTE: If the plug-in does not appear in the list, you can add it by clicking "Add" and navigating to the folder where you copied the plug-in.

Gallery2 Upload Enable

Creating export preset

Before we can use the Gallery2 plug-in, we need to create an export preset.

From the Lightroom File menu select the "Export..." menu item.

From the ExportTo drop down list select "Upload to Gallery".

Export Preset

Click "Add" to create a User Preset. Give the preset a name and click "Create".

Name the Preset

In the left hand section of the Export window, select the newly created preset.  Click "Add Server" and enter the requested information about your gallery server. The server URL is the same address you would enter in your web browser to get to the web site. Click "Save".

Add Server Info

Click "Login" to login to the server, then select the Gallery album from the drop-down list.

Select Gallery 2 Album

Make any other changes to the preset as necessary.  The PHOTO-FUSION server limits individual images file uploads to 2MB so I made sure to set that in my preset (2MB = 2048KB). I also made sure to enable the Watermarking feature. This will ensure my copyright information stays on each image.

When you are done making changes, right click on the preset (in the left hand section of the Export window) and select "Update with Current Settings".  Click Cancel.

PHOTO-FUSION preset

Using the export preset

From your Lightroom library, select the photos you would like to upload and then from the Lightroom File menu select "Export...".

Export ...

Select the export preset.  Click Login.  Select the album to export to then click export.

PHOTO-FUSION preset

Who gets the interview?

There are fifty people applying for a job. Forty nine have great credentials and beautifully standard layouts on their resumes. One resume was hand delivered to the CEO by his best friend, together with a glowing recommendation about a project the applicant did for the friend’s non-profit. Who gets the interview?Seth’s Blog: The ubiquity of competition was just what I needed to make my point about referrals being the key to getting the next job/gig.