Well, that’s coming to an end.

What you’re about to read is a totally inclusive, top-to-bottom, front-to-back workflow for organizing, sorting, and managing your digital photos using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Similar techniques will, I’m sure, apply to Apple Aperture, though all keyboard shortcuts and terminology will be Lightroom-specific.

For the record, I use Lightroom on a Mac and chose it because of Adobe’s openness to beta testing and feedback from the photography community, which I believe has made Lightroom the best tool for the job. Let’s get to it.

Organizing Files on Disk

First, why? Why organize your files on disk when Lightroom is such an apt cataloging tool? Why add another layer of complexity to your photo import workflow when Lightroom can just “take care of it,” assuring you that each RAW file is placed in a location appropriate to its metadata?

Because that’s totally wrong, that’s why. Lightroom is an amazing cataloging and organizational tool, but what if you couldn’t use it? What if your catalog, and its backup, and the backup’s backup, got destroyed? Or what if your operating system was in some state of utter bedlam, preventing you from opening Lightroom at all? Or what if you brought your external drive full of photos with you on a trip and found out that Lightroom on your laptop wouldn’t work?

Applying at least some moderate level of organization to your physical RAW files will make finding them that much easier if you ever have to do so without the aid of Lightroom. Surely not an eventuality we all hope for, but one that we should nonetheless plan for.

My Method

There are an infinite number of ways to organize your RAW files on disk, but I don’t have an infinite amount of time (and neither do you) so I will only tell you how I do it.

1. My top-level folder is called “Photography,” then
2. Within that folder there are three folders for the main categories of my work, “Events,” “Places,” and “Portraits.”
   1. Events contains folders named for each event and those folders contain the photos.
   2. Portraits contains folders usually of models’ names, and those folders contain photos. If I have done more than one shoot with a model, there are folders by date for those.
   3. Places, however, contains a geographical hierarchy like “United States,” then “California,” then “Death Valley NP,” and
      1. As with portraits, if I’ve been to a location more than once, there are folders by date.

I know that list might be a little bit complicated to absorb, so go ahead and re-read it if you want to. The basic idea is to have your major categories represented as folders on your hard drive such that you can locate, at the very least, the group of photos you’re looking for in the event you can’t use your catalog for it.

Enlisting Lightroom’s Help

You can get Lightroom to help you build this structure. Let me tell you what I would do if I were importing photos from a location shoot that I did in a place I had never photographed before.

1. Open the import dialog and choose the photos I want to import from the thumbnail view.
2. Choose “Copy Photos To A New Location And Add To Catalog.”
3. Browse for the correct geographical folder. I usually use the browse dialog to create the folders I need along the way. For example, I might browse into “Places,” then “United States,” and then I may have to create a folder for “Massachusetts,” and then another within that for “Boston.” There is a “Make New Folder” or “Make Folder” button in the dialog (in Windows and OS X, respectively).
4. In the future, if I already have the state folder created, I may simply select that and check off the box next to “Put in subfolder” and type the city or location name in there. That’s completely up to you.
5. If you want to organize the photos by date within the folder you’ve selected (and this precludes using the “subfolder” option above), select “Organize: By Date” and Lightroom will create a subfolder for each date in your import (by the photo’s created date).

A quick side-note: this is the time to select your metadata preset and choose some basic keywords to apply to all the photos you’re importing. This article isn’t really about keywording, but that won’t stop me from giving you orders: keyword your photos. That is all.

Awesome! Now all of your RAW files are organized in a coherent way on your hard drive. But you still have thousands of new photos that you just imported and unless you’re Ansel Adams they’re not all keepers. Actually, even if you were Ansel Adams, they still wouldn’t all be keepers. So what you need to is treat your catalog like an emergency room.

Treat Your Catalog Like an Emergency Room

What I’m talking about is triage.

tri • age n.

1. The determination of priorities for action in an emergency.
2. Sweeping through your photos and separating the good from the bad.

Obviously the second definition is not exactly Miriam Webster material, but… I reserve the right to exercise my creative liberty.

Anyway, the idea is to prioritize photos by their quality so you can spend more time sorting through the really good ones and less time staring at the really bad ones. Doctors do this in emergency situations to make sure that patients who most need care get it first, to maximize the survival rate. For a doctor, determining priority among patients can be a real challenge, and prioritizing your photos can be tricky, too.

Luckily, Lightroom gives us some very helpful tools that come to our aid in this situation. You probably already know of them. They are:

1. Flags (picks and rejects)
2. Ratings (on a scale from one star to five)
3. Labels (colors)

Any given photo can have a flag (picked or rejected), a rating (one through five stars), and a color label, although all three attributes are optional. By default, a photo has no flag, no rating, and no color label.

With two possible flags, five possible ratings, and five possible color labels, that’s a whopping 50 potential categorizations a photo could fall into (if you use all three attributes)! So how can you best put these attributes to use to streamline your workflow?

I don’t know. But I can tell you how I use them.

My Method

The very high-level outline of my process goes something like this:

1. Eliminate rejects (using the reject flag, “X” on the keyboard)
2. Mark potential keepers (using the pick flag, “P” on the keyboard)
3. Light, experimental development to test the viability of the keepers
4. Un-flag bad picks (if development doesn’t work out; that’s “U” on the keyboard)
5. Complete development
   1. Label completed images ready to go to the gallery in green (green for gallery, get it?)
   2. Label experimental or fun images that will go to Flickr in blue (no mnemonic device for that one, I have a Post-It note on my monitor to remind me)

I then I use either the Export to Photoshelter or Jeffrey’s Export to Flickr plugins within Lightroom to send the images where they need to go.

You may notice that I don’t use star ratings at all. I used to use star ratings to differentiate between images to throw away, edit, or which had been completed, but since the advent of flagging and color labels I find that star ratings provide more specificity than I need. There are only rare occasions when I have a few photos that are very similar where I might use star ratings to indicate which ones I like more, just so I can remember later when I come back to them, but that isn’t part of my everyday workflow.

You’re Done!

You have absorbed my entire workflow and read all of my suggestions for using Lightroom’s sorting and cataloging tools. I hope that this helps you to keep your images in order!

Have you heard of the fabled “neutral density” filter before? Whether or not you know what one is, I’m about to blow the lid off this mysterious piece of kit, totally demystify the nineteen (well, four…) ways their strengths are measured, and give you some awesome tips for using them effectively in the field.

Starting from the top, what exactly is an ND filter, anyway?

What Exactly Is an ND Filter, Anyway?

ND stands for “neutral density.” “Density” refers to optical density or absorbance. The absorbance of a substance is basically the amount of light it will absorb as opposed to the amount that will pass through it. By “neutral” we mean that the absorbance of the filter is the same across all wavelengths of light.

To put it in simpler terms, ND filters only transmit some fraction of the light that hits them, and when the light comes out the other side the colors should be completely unaffected. Okay, so that’s great, but why do we care?

As you may recall from reading Mastering the Only Five Camera Settings, there is only so much you can do to change the characteristics of the scene you’re capturing.

When I wrote that article, I wasn’t making stuff up; those five settings are really the only ones. By adding an ND filter into the mix, however, you add another variable you can control. We love control, don’t we?

In effect, adding an ND filter is most similar to reducing your ISO sensitivity, which may be the only way to get slower shutter speeds in situations where light is ample and your ISO is already as low as it can go. So then the next question is, why do you want slower shutter speeds?

Why Do You Want Slower Shutter Speeds?

The most often cited reason is to get the “veiling effect” that water produces during a longer exposure. Normally, you might have to go out just after dawn or wait until dusk before the conditions would be right to make a several-second exposure of a natural waterfall.

Check out the awesome photo on the right from skycaptaintwo. Without an ND filter it could be challenging to get the low-light situation that would make that photo possible. Now, I don’t know for sure that this photographer used an ND filter, but the image is a great example of where having one might definitely come in handy.

There are three main reasons for using an ND filter that I know of (but I’m sure you can think of more):

1. To get a “veiling effect” when photographing water (this works for waterfalls as well as the water’s moving surface, e.g. the ocean, lakes)
2. To capture a sense of movement by adding motion blur (e.g. when people are walking around, cars driving by, and so on)
3. To get an increased depth of field (more background blur, or “bokeh”) when light is ample

The first two require slower shutter speeds, the last requires a larger aperture opening. All three necessarily require that more light enter the camera, which is why you may need to use an ND filter to reduce the amount of light that enters in order to keep your exposure correct.

Swell. Now we know all about what ND filters are for. But how do you size them up? ND filter specifications can be pretty confusing. That’s why I will explain ND filter specifications to you now.

ND Filter Specifications, Explained

There are four measures that can be used to describe how much light an ND filter blocks and/or transmits, and they are:

1. Attenuation factor (or “filter factor”)
2. Optical density (or “grade”)
3. F-stop equivalence
4. Percent transmittance

Only two of the above are regularly used to describe filters when you’re buying them (grade and density), but it can be helpful to know the others to get a better idea of what it all means. Some sites, like B&H, may also list the remaining stats in the “specifications” tab for each product, though the product title itself will only contain one of the four measurements.

The filter factor or attenuation factor is used often when labeling a filter product. Generally it’s written as “ND8” or “ND64.” The optical density or grade is also commonly used, and will always appear as a decimal number, “0.3” or “3.0” and so on. Just to be completely clear, a filter labeled ND1000 is equivalent to a filter labeled ND 3.0. They are exactly the same.

Now, technically, filters above a 1,000 grade exist. You aren’t going to see them around too often, and I’ll tell you one reason why. With an ND1000, or ND 3.0 filter, you’re blocking out 10 stops of light, which means you’re only receiving 0.1% of the total light in the scene. The ND1000 filter looks like a disk of black glass; you can barely see through it with your naked eyes. When using an ND1000 filter, you have to compose and focus your scene on a tripod and then screw on the filter, because once it’s on you won’t be able to see anything at all, unless you’re pointing directly at the sun… And why would you do that?

Let’s Talk Brands

Filters made by B+W are among the best quality you can buy; the the materials used and the fit and finish are top notch. An ND1000 filter from B+W can run $100 or more.

If you are a Canon “L” or Nikon “Nikkor” shooter, you require a 77mm diameter filter. Here are some nice ones made by B+W from my favorite store, B&H:

• B+W ND 0.3, $49 (same as ND2, 1 f-stop)
• B+W ND 0.6, $49 (same as ND4, 2 f-stops)
• B+W ND 0.9, $94 (same as ND8, 4 f-stops)
• B+W ND 3.0, $97 (same as ND1000, 10 f-stops)

You will find the biggest selection of filters from B+W and Tiffen. Tiffen makes reasonably priced and solidly performing glass filters. You may also want to look at Cokin or Heliopan.

One thing to note when shopping for filters is that a brand like B+W offers each of their ND filters with a variety of options such as a multi-coated surface to reduce flares and ghosting, or in a slim form factor for better performance on wide-angle lenses. Prices vary depending upon the options.

Let’s Talk… Brands… Again

An important thing to think about when you’re looking at adding filters to your kit is the combination of different brands of threaded filters. Although filter threading is standardized, you can sometimes run into trouble when you screw a B+W ND filter onto the front of a Canon UV filter, and so on. Mixing and matching brands is somewhat discouraged.

If you don’t use UV filters (a subject for another post entirely), or if you don’t intend to stack effect filters, then buy whatever brands fit your needs and budget.

Happy filtering!

No, no, not you. Other digital artists, like those guys who spend ten days recalibrating all of their equipment before developing each photograph. I hope you don’t do that.

What I mean by “functionally retarded” is, ironically, that these artists are smart—very smart. Genius level, in some cases. However, their intelligence draws them into an irrational attention to detail and measurement, which incurs a logarithmic increase in effort for each fractional gain in image quality.

As a digital artist, you are faced with an ever-expanding array of tools that can be brought to bear on your work. The mere existence of such tools is an invitation, to some, to spend the rest of their lives tweaking and re-developing a single image, printing it on every possible paper, using every possible ink combination, surface treatment, and mounting option. This is not what I would call art, it is completionism, pure and simple.

com•ple•tion•ist n.

1. Video gaming. One who seeks to unlock every secret and acquire every bonus in a game.
2. One who seeks to explore every potential facet of a problem area and implement the most exhaustive, imperforate solution.

Antonym, incrementalist.

There is a certain enjoyment to be derived from discovering better ways to do things. Surely in my own work I have spent countless hours trying different approaches to development challenges, applied newly learned Photoshop techniques, and prepared images for print in different ways until I settled on what I thought worked best.

The type of completionist that this diatribe is focused on, however, is he or she who ruminates at great length over technical minutia, arguing the theoretical proofs of each item’s superiority. Surely it is important to have an understanding of the mechanisms at play in one’s work, but do you produce recognizably better art when you have round-tripped your photo through the LAB color space to maximize each pixel’s adjustment potential?

Depending upon what type of work you do, perhaps. Though I think for the average photographer (and I mean average in the statistical sense), understanding the broad strokes of the technology involved allows for at least 95% of the possible image quality to be achieved. The few percent toward unachievable perfection come at a cost almost too great to consider, unless that journey is one you savor, or you’re independently wealthy and have time enough to spend on it.

Each photographer must, as a necessity, evaluate his or her own final product, criticize it, and grade it. If it is found to be lacking in some way, a solution to that shortcoming certainly exists. Weigh each problem against its solution until you have reached the best possible product for you.

My point is simply this. That Professional Photographer X says better results are gained by performing Process Y is no reason in itself to change your workflow. Try the technique, see how long it takes and whether its marginal gains are worthwhile for your style and in your own eyes. Only then should specific, technical proofs have any influence on your work.

That is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to wrangle the proprietary formats of your camera manufacturer, or to take arms against a sea of sidecar files, and by opposing, end them…

But enough pseudo-Shakespeare for one post.

There has been some chatter on the Interwebs lately concerning the DNG format: there are quality and archival concerns, whether it’s worth converting one’s entire library to the format, what the benefits might be, and whether one ought to care. Today, I weigh in. For what it’s worth.

Coincidentally, I’ve used the same post title as Matt Kloskowski did in his take on the subject on Lightroom Killer Tips. Matt didn’t add a pseudo-Hamlet line, though, so I feel like I’ve done the headline proud.

After the break, a complete rundown on DNG; trust me, it’s going to be technical and editorial.

What Is DNG?

Skip this section if you already know what DNG is, or read it if you want to know what I think DNG is.

DNG is the “Digital Negative” format, spearheaded by Adobe. It is an “open” format, and a “standard” in some sense, though not an official ISO standard (yet). When we say that the format is “open,” we mean that the precise contents of a DNG file, its byte offsets, containers, methods of generating and reading the files, and so forth, are publicly available. This is not the case with any other RAW file format out there. The ability to read and write manufacturers’ RAW files (e.g. Canon, Nikon, et al.) is either licensed from the manufacturer or reverse-engineered.

Adobe created the standard out of, apparently, a desire to “universalize” (if you will) the ubiquitous RAW file formats that all manufacturers have created for themselves, and to introduce a truly interoperable format that any software or hardware maker could employ without 1) wrangling many different formats at once, or 2) singling out particular users of particular products¹.

The DNG format is based on many existing standards owned by prestigious “standards development organizations” (or SDOs), some of which you’ve probably heard of; they go by the names TIFF, JPEG, XMP, IPTC, ICC, CIE, and ZIP, to name a few. So, although the DNG format itself hasn’t been embraced by an SDO such as the International Standards Organization (ISO), it comprises previously standardized formats and is only a snippet of red tape away from being SDO-backed.

You can read a lot of nitty gritty on the format itself explained by Barry Pearson on his DNG Specification page.

Why Would You Want to Use DNG?

There are three main reasons that are generally cited:

• Archivability (future-proof-ness, if you want)
• Interoperability (openness, we like to say)
• Efficiency (YMMV, more on this later)

Archivability (which I’m pretty sure isn’t even a word) means that fifty years from now, when Canon owns the world and Nikon is completely extinct (har har), flying cars are a reality, and everyone has an army of robotic servants, your DNG files will still be supportable by manufacturers of hardware and software alike, because no secrets about it have been kept from the public.

“[I]f Nikon decides to not support my raw files one day, there’s some 15 year old in his room that’ll code up a raw conversion program in his sleep.”
—Matt Kloskowski

Does this claim hold water? I don’t know, you can download free software right now that can read the Photoshop version 3.0 format, which is already decades old, so it seems to me that if the ability to parse a format is out there (even if it was obtained semi-legally or with much effort by third-parties), it will be difficult to lose it. Moreover, a format such as Canon DNG or Nikon NEF will likely remain supported by anyone you care about, or, as Matt Kloskowski put it, “…there’s some 15 year old in his room that’ll code up a raw conversion program in his sleep.” So I am not worried about losing access to my RAW image data.

Interoperability means the ability for you to take the same file and use it in many different places. Of course whether this is an advantage to you or not depends on the places where you want to be able to use your RAW files. For me, Lightroom is the only program on my entire computer that ever sees a RAW file. I suppose if I round-trip through Photoshop, Lightroom is going to pass the CR2 through Camera Raw, but we’re talking about two closely-integrated Adobe applications there; whatever formats one supports, the other is sure to. Photomatix is going to see TIFFs, on the web you’ll see JPEGs, etc.

So why does interoperability matter? Adobe’s point in creating DNG is that it may matter in the future. If Great New Software X decides they can’t support your camera’s RAW format, and if you’ve converted it to DNG already, well, problem solved. Because Great New Software X will certainly support DNG given that the format is completely open and drop-dead simple (not to mention free) to implement, you have a much better chance of being able to drop your existing DNG images into any new, shiny tool.

“I actually tried ZIP compression in prototype versions of DNG, but the compression ratio was much better using lossless JPEG.”—Thomas Knoll

Okay, what about efficiency? This is where things get kind of cool. The Adobe DNG format stores the actual pixel image data in what is called Huffmann lossless JPEG format. What that means is that DNG files can sometimes be as much as 20% more efficient at storing image data on disk than a comparable RAW format, thus DNG files may be as much as 20% smaller. Lossless JPEG is completely pristine; there is no image-altering compression done, so the data is totally preserved, albeit compacted. The Huffmann algorithm for this compression happens to be more efficient than ZIP when there are more than 8 bits of data per channel (RAW is 12 or 16), so the Huffmann algorithm was used.

But here comes the kicker… Canon’s RAW (CR2) format already uses Huffmann lossless JPEG for its internal image data storage. So if you shoot Canon RAW, you will see no increase in data compression, since the data is stored in exactly the same way already. If you shoot in Nikon RAW (NEF), you will immediately see a 20% decrease in file size and no change in image quality.

For non-Canon shooters, that’s probably the most compelling reason to convert to DNG right now, which I should point out Lightroom can do automatically for you at import time. You’ve seen the option, right? There are a couple of ways to convert to DNG in Lightroom, and there are three of them explained on TheLightroomLab.com.

Sidecars Aren’t Just for Kids

No, seriously, most motorcycle sidecars could definitely seat an adult…

Joking aside, what we’re talking about are metadata “sidecar” files, typically named something like IMG_0195.xmp and so-called because they are saved alongside your original RAW image files, like the sidecar on a motorcycle. Sidecar files have been around since the invention of metadata and metadata libraries. The XMP format for storing image metadata in a sidecar file was developed by (guess who…) Adobe. XMP is necessary because the metadata support within RAW file formats and other imaging formats may comprise only a subset of what, for example, Lightroom is able to save and search.

Certain formats such as PSD, TIFF, and JPEG have pretty flexible metadata support in them already. DNG is no different. The “sidecar bonus” of the DNG format is that when you’re using DNG, you don’t need sidecars.

But who does, anyway? The fact is, Lightroom stores all of your image metadata in its own catalog. This is done 1) to make it quickly searchable and editable, and 2) to centralize it. If you want to write metadata to disk for certain files (or the whole catalog), then Lightroom will decide, based on the source format of each image, whether to save it directly into the file or to create an XMP sidecar file.

The purpose of XMP is to give your image metadata a place to live when the image file itself can’t accommodate it. So why would you need this ability? Two reasons. (Assuming your RAW files are in NEF, CR2, or similar; non-DNG).

1. If you share images with other people who use Lightroom and you want them to be able to see what you have done in the Develop module, as well as the IPTC tags, you will need to send them XMP sidecar files. This is preferable to sending your entire Lightroom catalog or creating a new one to house only the images you are sending.
2. In the event of a catastrophic disaster where your Lightroom catalog backups are corrupted, you can restore 95% of your data using the source RAW image files and associated XMP sidecar files. What you would lose is virtual copies, your history, and any collections. All edits and other settings are stored in the XMP files.

There are some major caveats here, though.

1. When you’re sharing images, you can always export them to DNG, which makes XMP unnecessary.
2. In the event of a catastrophic disaster, you’ll only have XMP files if you’ve previously selected batches of images within Lightroom and triggered the “Export Metadata to Files” function. Presumably you would carry out this procedure on images you have finished editing as part of your backup strategy. For the record, I do not do this.

Conclusions

So where does this leave us as far as DNG goes? Should we all run back to our computers right now and convert our whole libraries to DNG format? Once again, here are the major advertised benefits of the DNG format:

1. Archival (future-proof)
2. Interoperable (widely compatible)
3. Efficient (storage-wise, at least)
4. All-inclusive (obsoletes XMP sidecars)

It seems to me that the “archival” and “interoperable” characteristics of the format are bonuses, and as a supporter of free and open standards, I tip my hat to Adobe simply on principle. These characteristics don’t, however, increase the immediate convenience or reliability of my workflow, nor do I think the archival nature of the DNG format will have a measurable impact on my workflow in the coming years.

Since I am a Canon shooter, my Canon RAW (CR2) files already compress image data using the same Huffmann lossless JPEG system that DNG does, so I get no benefit there. If you you Nikon, et al., you may see an immediate storage benefit from converting your library to DNG.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to convert your library to DNG, or to start using DNG for your imports going forward, is the fact that DNG files are capable of storing all Lightroom-specific metadata directly within themselves, without the use of XMP sidecar files. If you are diligent in writing metadata to the files when you are through editing them, those files then fully encapsulate all the work that you’ve done, in one place, suitable for backup.

Even in the event that you lost your Lightroom catalog, you could still restore the final, edited versions of the images (which is where all of your hard work goes, after all), as well as tags and other helpful metadata. The only things you’d lose are virtual copies, history (of limited long-term utility, anyway), and catalogs (which can be rebuilt without nearly as much work as re-developing all your images).

To DNG or not to DNG? I think I will.

1. Like yours, for example.

When you come on a workshop with Chris and I, you get to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a total of 20 years of photography experience, heckle us with questions, meet people, and generally have a good time. Two instructors, awesome locations, and, here’s the sweet part… I’m giving you a discount.

Because you are still reading my humble blog after months of silence and because I value your loyalty and participation, I am offering you a great deal on my workshops this year. If you register for any workshop before March 1st, I’ll give you 10% off the price, just by mentioning this blog article when you sign up.

I’ll tell you what else. Just because I’m in such a good mood and excited to teach this year, if you want to register for more than one, I’ll give you 20% off of each of them. All you have to do is mention that I said so in the comments when you’re signing up on my website.

Look at this great lineup of workshops we have coming up this year!

I hope you have a couple of days to spend with us, I promise that our workshops will push your skills to the next level!

This time, though, a piece of “news” hit my screen that I had to share, and I hope that by reading it here you will receive the whole story and not just 1/3 of it as some people did when they got the information from digg, reddit, or similar.

We’re talking about megapixels, and we’re talking about marketing, and we’re talking about lies. Lies perpetrated by the manufacturers of point-and-shoot cameras with tiny little CCD sensors who keep increasing the megapixel count and marketing it like it’s the end-all be-all of imaging performance.

Not so! Read on…

This issue surfaced when a nameless blogger (literally, I have no idea who this person is) posted an article (you might call it a “diatribe”) about the “suicidal march” of point-and-shoot cameras toward more and more megapixels (spurned by the Consumer Electronics Conference, or CES, which was earlier this month in Las Vegas), and the results of cramming lots of pixels into a small area. You can read that article here.

In order to understand some of the background, though, you’ll want to read his or her other article about optical diffraction and Airy disks, which is very interesting, and then read his or her follow-up article where he (or she) addresses some of the anonymous Internet’s criticisms.

Now, I know it’s a gamble to spread anonymously written blog posts around as though they’re primary sources and laud the nameless, faceless author for their courage in uncovering what seems to be a pervasive scam, but to be honest I was blown away by the apparent truth of the whole thing.

I find it somewhat amusing that they chose to throw on the EF 50mm f/1.4 for their promo shoot; a lens that, for me, spontaneously stopped auto-focusing after only a couple years of use and that exhibits pretty significant vignetting. Nevertheless, the EOS-1D Mark IV is a fairly intense camera body, with its 10 frame per second burst mode, and ISO settings up to 102,400. You should be able to lay your hands on one here in the States for a mere $4,999.

Personally, I don’t think I’ll be purchasing a 1D Mark IV, if only because it has an APS-H sensor with a 1.3x crop factor and I am utterly spoiled by my 5D’s full-frame sensor. It is worth noting, also, that for the $4,999 that a brand new 1D Mark IV is going to cost you, you can pretty readily find a pre-owned 1Ds Mark III, which is 21 megapixels of full-frame goodness.

Over on the right you see a photograph taken by Michael “Nick” Nichols (and his team) for National Geographic, which is on the cover (well, part of it is on the cover, it’s a huge photograph) of the October issue of the magazine.

The image was made by jigsawing 83 separate photographs together (which you can probably tell by the jagged edges), each of which was taken by one of three DSLR cameras mounted on a gyroscope-leveled, pulley-lowered rig that Nichols and his team designed for the purpose. You can check out the photo on Hack a Day of Nichols with his rig; it looks like they’ve got six Pocket Wizards on there (I don’t know what the other three are for) and maybe a couple of bicycle wheels. All in all, a very righteous hack.

This particular redwood is allegedly the “most architecturally interesting” tree in the world, with several forks and bends stretching 300 feet into the sky. It’s only been standing there for over 1,500 years(!!), but now it has been recorded in the annals of photographic history forever.

Via (one of my favorite blogs) Hack a Day, via National Geographic, via NPR

Buchstabensuppe, by tillwe

For those of you Nikon shooters out there who ritualistically browse the B&H catalog and wonder What on Earth is a f/4.5-5.6G ED-IF AF-S VR DX lens, anyway?, now there is an answer for you, straight from our favorite bringer-of-technological-clarity, Bob Johnson at Earthbound Light.

In his post Nikon Lens Designation Alphabet Soup, Bob explains the meaning of all of those little acronyms that Nikon seems to throw around like confetti. At last, an understandable answer!

As the sun got lower, the sky got even more interesting. Here’s one of the keepers from that group that I can show off because it’s my blog so I get to subject you to whatever I want:

Coming up, we’ve got a really cool workshop in Acadia National Park in Maine (that’s October 16th through 18th), and then in November we’ll be doing yet another one-day Boston workshop if anyone wants to walk around the freezing streets of Beantown and pick up some tips.