I’ve written articles in the past about color management—you know, ICC profiles, calibration, metamerism, blah blah blah—but the world keeps changing around us. In general, things change for the better, which is great, but as a photographer looking to display images on the web, there are always things to watch out for.

I found a great article on the burgeoning “Gear Oracle” site about web browser color management, which breaks down the effects of displaying images with different color spaces in different browsers.

It’s not all great news, but it’s important to know how things work so that you can mitigate any potential problems. Color management is basically a briar patch no matter how attentive and diligent you are, and trust me, I know this from close personal experience printing photographic reproductions for five years.

Read Web browser color management guide via Gear Oracle

Have you ever wondered about that “gamma” thing you keep seeing? You nerd.

Really, though, gamma is important and you have probably seen the word all over the place in photography and design. It’s actually a really cool thing and when you understand how it works you will likely feel better about yourself, your photographs, and about the universe. Well, you’ll feel smarter, anyway, and you will be. You’ll also be able to add another item to your lists of:

1. Answers to questions nobody will ever ask you,
2. Greek letters you recognize, and
3. Awkward things to bring up on a first date

You can already check off number two if you look up on the right there. Yup, that’s gamma.

Additionally, if you are friends with other photographers and they don’t know what gamma is or how it works, you might come out of this looking like a rockstar. At least to the extent that rockstars are knowledgeable about non-linear power-law expressions.

So what is gamma? Aside from being the third letter in the Greek alphabet and a type of brain wave, the word “gamma” is used in imaging (photography, design, broadcast technology) to refer to “gamma correction,” which relates to adjusting the luminosity of an image as it is displayed on (usually) a screen of some kind.

You have probably heard or seen things like “gamma 1.8” or “gamma 2.2” thrown around, especially in the photography world, and that’s where the math starts to creep in. But before I get all numeric on you, let’s take a look at what gamma correction really means, how it’s used, and why it’s important to you.

Gamma Correction, What Does It Mean?!

The truth is that gamma correction is pointless. Gamma correction is one of those things that was invented to solve a problem (and just in time, too), and then its use spread throughout the world and was written into standards that were carried through generations of technology until we reached the point where it wasn’t necessary… But it was already too late. So even though gamma is a vestige of a problem we more or less no longer have, we can’t stop using it or we’ll create even more problems.

Gamma correction is a way of adjusting the luminosity of an image in a non-linear way, which means that the change in luminance for a particular value in a source image depends upon that value. Uh oh…

Here comes a graph, look out!

Gamma 2.2

Now, the first question you should be asking is Why would you want to change the luminance values in an image? and the answer is quite simple. CRT technology.

Remember CRTs? Cathode ray tubes? Those big, heavy, glass picture tubes used in every single television set and computer monitor from around 1922 when they were first commercialized until about 2007 when LCDs first overtook CRTs in overall sales?

This is what a cathode ray tube looks like when it's drawn in MS Paint by a crippled giraffe.

They had a pretty good run, I’d say. Well, cathode ray tubes have what they call a “triode characteristic,” which basically means that the relationship between the input voltage (incoming image luminance) and the luminance on the screen itself is not linear. In fact, at low voltages, the luminance is far too low, and as the voltage increases the luminance does not quite increase in step.

This is demonstrated by the green line in the graph above. The “input voltage,” or “source luminance,” is on the x axis, across the bottom, and the luminance seen on the screen, or “output luminance,” is on the y axis, up the left side.

You can see that the output luminance is severely depressed, and you would be, too, if you were trapped inside a cathode ray tube. Anyway, to make a long story only slightly shorter, this is a big problem. This is a problem because you can’t just brighten the entire image or all of your very light areas basically get overexposed and wash out. What you need to do is “reverse” the effect of the triode characteristic… Which is exactly what gamma correction does.

The red line is the mathematical inverse of the green line. If you process your input image according to the red line and display it on a CRT, the image’s luminance will even out to the black line, which is what you want. A perfectly linear relationship between the image data you send in and what you see on the screen. Brilliant.

The Math

Let’s just talk about math for about one minute more. Remember equations? Right. An equation is what mathematically describes your output luminance based on a particular value of your input luminance. For gamma, it’s pretty simple:

Output = Input^gamma

The output luminance is equal to the input luminance raised to the power of the gamma value. In actual textbook mathematics of course they would use the actual Greek symbol “gamma” up there, but this is a photography blog. To get the opposite curve, you just replace “gamma” with its reciprocal, “one over gamma.” So, for the curves up above, this is the equation I actually used:

Output = Input^2.2

The infamous 2.2 gamma! Indeed. So when folks talk about a “gamma of 2.2” or a “gamma of 1.8,” what they are talking about is how much luminance correction is being done. You’re learning so much already! And I’m not even done yet!

What Gamma Setting Should You Use?

Powerrrr!

Once upon a time, when early Macs were the first home computers to have color screens and the ability to view and print color images, Apple engineers encountered this triode characteristic. Expectations were a lot lower then when it came to computer graphics, but when someone opened a picture on their snazzy Mac and then printed it on their equally snazzy color LaserWriter, they expected it to come out looking more or less the same as it did on the screen. But this was hard to pull off when the screen was lying to them about the luminance values.

Back then, Apple was not concerned with how accurate the color was in a universal sense—in the ICC color profiling sense that would come much later. They just wanted the images to look the same when printed on the color LaserWriter. So, they did some experiments and they found that a gamma correction of 1.8 would get it right in line with what came out of the printer.

A bit later on, another group of bright folks got together with a different purpose. They called themselves the National Television System Committee, or NTSC for short. The FCC created the NTSC in 1940 to standardize black and white broadcast television. By 1950 they were getting together to standardize color television. Ultimately they developed what is still referred to as the NTSC standard (or NTSC color television standard, sometimes), and saved the world of television. Alright, not really, but they certainly knew all there was to know about TV and they were intimately aware of the gamma problem.

Their solution was to use a gamma correction of 2.2 to make TV images look correct on your home screen in your darkened living room. When Microsoft Windows came out and started pushing more color computers into the home, they adopted the NTSC’s 2.2 gamma recommendation.

With the differing gamma values of 1.8 and 2.2 being used by Macintosh and Windows-based computers, an image that looked correct on one would often look too bright or too dark on the other. This is the way it was all the way up until last year when OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” was released and for the first time ever set the default gamma on a Macintosh computer to 2.2.

So What?

You just read 1,300 words about gamma correction, viewed a pretty graph, and learned a bit of history. So far, you have a handful of Trivial Pursuit ammunition and a radical ice-breaker for your next blind date, but none of this really helps you in your quest to be the world’s most awesome photographer (although reading my blog is always a good first step!)

The most common question asked about gamma is, “What gamma setting should I use?” Since OS X now defaults to 2.2 and Windows has used 2.2 for decades, the answer is 2.2. You will probably not gain anything by using a different value unless the lighting conditions where you’re sitting are totally extreme. Like the beach in July. Or a cave deep beneath a granite mountain (which is where my evil lair is located).

Thanks to color correction systems, ICC profiles, and soft proofing, you really don’t have to worry about gamma too much. Images in Photoshop (and Firefox 3.5 as well) will be adjusted based on their embedded profiles (assuming they have profiles).

The Most Important Thing

The one thing you need to remember is this: when you are exporting photos for use on the web, always, always, convert them to the sRGB colorspace and tag them with the sRGB profile. The profile itself contains a gamma setting (typically, guess what, 2.2) and folks on the web using Firefox will see the image properly adjusted while folks with browsers that don’t support color management will see the closest to what you would expect. sRGB is very reliable when it comes to this.

If you have any questions about gamma, if I didn’t explain something very well, or if you want to lavish me with praise, please leave a comment. I do read them. I really do.

camera dial by Lee Reynolds

Being an excellent photographer is 50% vision and 50% technical prowess. Seeing the art all around you is only useful for the photographer who can capture it, and perfectly executing that capture means wrangling the piece of hardware you love so much, the camera.

These days, most photographers are shooting digital. Digital photography is freeing in a lot of ways, but it is also more complicated. Camera manufacturers have sought to close the gap between the pro and the semi-pro by providing all of these different shooting modes, and even though I still believe you only need three, it’s not unusual to see mode dials with 11 or 12 settings on them! You don’t need all those settings to get full control! Haje Jan Kamps helps me explain after the break.

I’ve written about this before in Be a Control Freak, but the subject came up again today when I saw Haje Jan Kamps’ really cool article, Translating the mode wheel on pixiq. My article explains in some amount of gory detail what each mode does, Haje takes it a step further with example images and a plea to leave those silly program modes behind.

Haje says:

This little dial is called your mode wheel, and it’s your mortal enemy, the destroyer of creativity, and the root of all evil in the world including, but not limited to, wars, swine flu, and stepping in chewing gum with a new pair of shoes.

Definitely hop over to pixiq and read Haje’s article, check out my previous article if you haven’t read it before, and if you are hankering for even more information…

Learn Tips and Tricks for Real-Life Shooting

These three books are among the most straightforward guides to the real-life application of camera settings in a broad variety of situations that I’ve come across. They’re written by Scott Kelby, the publisher and editor of Photoshop User and Layers magazines, president and co-founder of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, and founder of the eponymous training website (kelbytraining.com).

He’s written over 40 books. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read these, and they’re awesome. They’re short, not too expensive, presented in plain language, and useful to photographers at nearly any skill level. The three books don’t progress in skill level or detail, they are simply three chapters of the same overall plot, so you can snag the one with the prettiest cover, flip a coin, or just buy all three.

Here are the three individual books, they’re each about 25 bucks or less, I think the second volume is the cheapest:

• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 1
• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 2
• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 3

Or get them all together in this B&H kit. I think you save about $1.50, so I guess the kit is offered for convenience, but hey, convenience has gotta be worth something, right?

• The Digital Photography Book, Vols. 1-3 B&H Kit

They’re really swell books, and I don’t usually jump on the bandwagon when it comes to these sort of corporate “training mill” publishers but Scott knows what he’s talking about and presents it in a very clear way so I’d be doing you all a disservice not to recommend them to you.

Moreover, if you click through these links here, you get the same books for the same prices you would pay if you went straight to B&H’s website yourself, but I also get a tiny little commission that helps me keep this site online, so if you are even remotely thinking about picking up a book or two, please use these links and help me out.

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs.

Why would I say that? I don’t even know them, and I am not prone to hyperbole or dirt-kicking. I’m really not. I’m also sure that all of those people are well-versed, smart individuals. It’s just that… I guess they don’t “get around” much in digital photography circles.

You see, I know something they don’t, and I learned it from an article by Michael Reichmann written some time back around 2003. I don’t need to tell you who Michael Reichmann is, do I? This information is not bleeding edge, it’s not new news. When Chris Blake and I teach our photography workshops, which I plug on this blog shamelessly and regularly, one of the first things we talk about is “exposing to the right,” and we’ve been doing that for three years.

Michael’s article is titled, with tongue pressed firmly into cheek, Expose Right. He means “to the right of the histogram” as much as he means “correctly.” Read that article if you want all of the technical “nitty gritty” involved in digital sensor attenuation and so forth.

You’ll read about how Michael was chatting with Thomas Knoll. You know, the guy who wrote Photoshop. You’ll learn about how they came to agree upon the fact that more detail lives in the brightest areas of an image than in the darkest ones. That’s all you need to know. You don’t need to get any deeper into the technology in order to use this rule.

Okay, so…

How do you use this rule?

I’m glad you asked. This is all you need to remember.

If possible, increase your image’s overall exposure until the histogram touches the right edge.

There are plenty of reasons that you may not be able to do that including subject motion, lack of light, and so on. Do the best you can. Tend toward the right of the histogram.

The image shouldn’t be clipped, which means that if your camera shows little blinking spots where things are overexposed, that’s still bad, but get that graph to move over to the right as far as you can without compromising the image.

If, like me, you operate in aperture-priority or aperture-value mode (Canon Av, Nikon A) all you have to do is use your “exposure value,” or EV, setting to increase the exposure of the image as far as you can up until the histogram data touches the right edge of the graph. If you can’t get it all the way over there without compromising the shot, don’t worry about it. This is a rule of thumb only.

Then what?

Then you take your photos home and import them into Lightroom and use the Develop module to adjust the overall brightness of the image using the exposure slider and curves and anything else you need to until it looks good to you. That’s really it.

Here are some things that you are going to complain about, and why you shouldn’t:

• On your camera’s LCD screen, an image exposed to the right may look very bright, and may look desaturated. It’s OK. There is just as much color data in the image as there was when it was center-exposed, and when you bring it into Lightroom you can draw that color out, but this time with more detail than ever.

Okay, so that was only one complaint. If you have other complaints, leave them down there in the comments!

Do you expose to the right already? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Leave a comment and let us all know!

To say that photographing the fireworks display in Washington, D.C. is a challenge might be hyperbole. Compared to those in Boston and New York City, which I’ve photographed two times each, getting a reasonable spot to shoot from is a cakewalk.

The National Mall opens at around 10 AM, but even at 3 PM there are still plenty of good spots by the Lincoln Memorial, so there’s no need to hurry. The real challenge, it would seem, is the complete and total lack of information about the strategy and considerations of shooting in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Have you ever searched for photographs of the D.C. fireworks? You should give it a try. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

There aren’t many. That is to say, there aren’t many great ones. It seems as though Getty and other stock agencies own most of the truly decent shots that exist. There are a few out there by random bloggers, or that you may find on Flickr, but it isn’t a landslide such as you will find when you search for New York City fireworks photos.

Where, When?

Okay, so there are enough shots to know where you want to shoot from, at least; there are a couple of decent opportunities. Many of the “classic” shots are made from the Tidal Basin near the Jefferson Memorial. From there you can frame a shot with the Potomac in the foreground and the Washington Memorial, Capitol, and Lincoln Memorial as your main subjects.

For a closer vantage, any of the areas around the front of the Lincoln Memorial should be ripe for the picking, and that’s where I shot from this year. You can almost tell where I was located when I took the photo below.

Reports of when the crowds start to accumulate around the National Mall are hard to find. Depending upon who you ask, you get entirely different answers. In order to best maximize the opportunity (for which I spent the better part of a day in a car from Connecticut), I decided to get to the National Mall as early as possible.

Things I totally didn’t have to do:

• Get to the National Mall as early as possible,
• Sit at the location I wanted to shoot from for 10 hours under the 97-degree sun,
• Forget to bring a folding chair.

So let me give all you guys and gals out there a hint. You don’t have to get to the National Mall ten hours early to snag a good location to photograph the fireworks display from. Unlike Boston and New York City, which both require a photographer’s attendance ten or more hours in advance, you can probably do very well at 3 PM in most places.

This is where the information bottleneck becomes the limiting reagent in the complex experiment of great Washington, D.C. fireworks photos. If only someone had told me, reliably, that I could get to the National Mall at 3 PM, would stand in essentially no line to go through the security checkpoint, and could still set up my tripod almost anywhere I wished… That would have been nice.

Oh, right, security checkpoints, I almost forgot.

Security Checkpoints

Before the 4th of July celebration, an enormous fence is erected around the entire National Mall. In order to get in, you will have to pass through one of the security checkpoints placed around the perimeter and be subjected to a search. At least, this was the gist of what my research turned up when looking into the logistics of this little photographic adventure.

Here’s what you actually have to know, based on my experience:

They don’t actually care what you bring in.

No knives, explosives, or personal grills. No glass bottles, thermonuclear weapons, chainsaws, etc. No alcohol, either (officially), but if you want to bring around nineteen coolers of food and drinks, a tent canopy, a load of chairs, towels, beach balls, and anything else you can reasonably carry, yeah, they’ll let you in.

Suffice it to say, a huge camera bag and a tripod isn’t going to be an issue, despite online warnings of “they won’t let you in with a bag,” etc., etc. They will need to look inside your bag, but it’s cursory and they aren’t even allowed to touch anything. They will use a wooden stick to poke around and make sure they can see everything inside.

It’s fast.

I was lined up with everyone else by 9:30 on the 4th, waiting for the security sweep of the park to complete and the checkpoints to open. That was the largest line I was ever in, and I was through within 10 minutes of when it opened up. I left the park area and came back in the early afternoon and essentially walked through without waiting at all. So don’t sweat the lines.

Crowd control. It’s an illusion.

Whenever you’re photographing fireworks, no matter what the location or occasion, you have to learn to hold your ground. Whether it’s another photographer or a particularly ambitious spectator, people will encroach on your space if you don’t make your boundaries known. Fortunately for you, the intrepid Washington D.C. fireworks photographer, you won’t have to deal with any serious crowd issues until around 5 or 6 PM. That’s when you’re going to start getting surrounded.

This is all very foreign to me, with experience only in the “Big Apple” and “Beantown.” I assumed that by the time the gates opened, a sea of tripods and camera bags would stretch out before me, blanketing every good vantage point imaginable… And that simply was not so.

Comparatively, photographing the fireworks show in Washington, D.C. was one of the easiest fireworks shows I have ever photographed.

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!

In my instruction I get asked a lot about how the five most fundamentally important settings of the camera work together to achieve the effects you desire. It can be hard to penetrate the curtain of photographic jargon, some of which can seem counterintuitive, so I decided to take a minute to explain all of this stuff at a very high level. If you have specific questions of your own, please leave a comment below and I promise that I will answer them.

The only five settings that you need to know are:

• Shooting mode
• Aperture (or f-stop)
• Shutter speed
• ISO sensitivity
• Exposure value (EV)

After the jump I will explain in detail.

Each of these settings affects the others. It’s like a five-way see-saw where changing one setting will require that you change another to compensate for it. So why change the settings at all? Because each setting has a different aesthetic effect on your image.

The shooting mode refers to Av, Tv, P, M on Canon cameras, or A, S, P, M on Nikon cameras. They mean:

• Av/A = You select the aperture, the camera selects the shutter speed.
• Tv/S = You select the shutter speed, the camera selects the aperture.
• P = The camera selects both (bad camera!)
• M = You select both (you’re a pro!)

The reason you might want to select your own aperture is to control the depth of field, which is how blurry things will get (or how sharp they will remain) the farther they are from your focus point.

You may want to change your shutter speed, also, in order to freeze motion or to get the effect of a long exposure.

By altering your ISO sensitivity, you can get longer or shorter shutter speeds and larger or smaller apertures, but the higher your ISO, the more noise you will see in the image, while the lower the ISO, the less noise you will see.

The exposure value (EV) is only applicable if you’re in Av/A, Tv/S, or P modes, and allows you to override the camera’s light meter to make it overexpose or underexpose the shot by a certain amount. I’ll talk about this feature last.

Learn to talk the talk

You will hear people talk about lenses or settings being “faster” or “slower.” You would think that they’re talking about shutter speed (because it’s a speed, right?) but you’d be wrong. We say “faster” when we’re referring to a larger aperture, which, contrary to common sense, means a smaller number. Okay, let me back up for a second.

• Larger aperture = smaller number = “faster”
• Smaller aperture = larger number = “slower”

Get it? We say a larger aperture is faster because it allows you to use a faster shutter speed. A larger aperture (smaller number, right?) means more light. More light means you don’t have to expose the sensor for as long, so your shutter speed is faster.

A Balancing Act

As I mentioned earlier, changing your camera settings, put simply, is like a balancing act. Once you understand the concept of “stops” and how each setting affects light, you’re on a roll.

What’s a stop?

A “stop” is a relative measurement of light, meaning that “one stop” of light is not an absolute amount. Rather, plus one stop means twice as much light, and minus one stop means half as much light. When you work with your camera settings, be aware that modern cameras typically measure their settings in 1/3 stops rather than full stops.

Shutter speed

The faster the shutter speed, the less light will make it to the sensor in total. The slower the shutter speed (i.e. the longer it remains open), the more light will make it in.

For each full stop longer that you leave the shutter open, twice as much light will enter the camera.

Aperture!

The aperture, as you probably know, is the opening through which light passes on its journey through the lens. What is confusing about aperture is that it’s measured by the “f-stop,” which is a number that gets smaller as the aperture gets bigger. As long as you can remember this odd, inverse relationship, you’re fine.

For each full stop that the aperture number increases, half as much light will be let into the camera. For each full stop that the aperture number decreases, twice as much light will be let into the camera.

ISO sensitivity

ISO is on a different scale, but it’s much easier to understand. As the ISO number doubles, so does the light, thus ISO 200 is twice as sensitive to light as ISO 100. That difference is… Yes, one full stop. Cameras these days frequently let the photographer select among half-stop or third-stop ISO increments as well, but it’s pretty easy to tell that the full stops are 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, etc., because the numbers double.

Metering

This is a tough subject. Metering is the process of evaluating how much light is in a scene, something that we generally let our cameras do because they’re much more accurate than our eyes. Nevertheless, sometimes what you want out of a scene, as an artist, is different from what the camera “sees.” There are a couple different common metering “modes,” which have different names based on your type of camera, but in general they are:

• Spot
• Evaluative (or matrix)
• Partial
• Center-weighted average

These modes have to do with what portion or portions of the scene the camera’s meter will take into account in its calculations. Spot means that it will only look at the center point of what you see in the viewfinder, usually 3% or so of the middle of the scene.

Partial is a somewhat larger measuring area, around 10% or so (check your camera’s manual to find out the specifics). Center-weighted gives more measurement priority to the middle area of the scene, but also averages it against the rest.

Evaluative or matrix metering is sort of like black magic; the camera basically meters for the subject and then also figures in adjustments based on the surroundings. It might use the focus point or other variables to figure out what the subject is. Like I said, black magic. Usually I keep my camera in evaluative mode because it deals with diverse circumstances very well.

In very general terms, the meter wants to look at some amount of reflected light and determine the settings necessary to make that area show up in your photograph as “middle gray,” or 18% gray. If you were using spot metering and you pointed that center spot right on a bright white piece of paper and took a picture, it should look gray. Why does it do this? Because when you take the average of a large area and make that whole area average out to 18% gray, it’s usually the exposure you want. Usually.

When it’s not the exposure you want, that’s where exposure value (EV) comes in.

EV compensation

EV compensation is only used in the auto-metering shooting modes, like Av/A, Tv/S, and P. If you are in manual (M) mode, you are selecting both shutter and aperture values, so the camera’s meter is informing you of its readings but isn’t changing any settings for you. Thus, if you want the scene to be exposed lighter or darker, it’s up to you to change either the shutter speed or aperture appropriately. Anyway, here’s an example.

If you are shooting a snowy, winter scene using evaluative (matrix) metering mode, your camera is going to look at its entire view (which is predominately white) and expose it to look gray. Obviously you want the snow to look white, so you “fake out” the meter by setting your EV to, say, +1 stop. This causes the camera to change its settings to expose the scene one stop brighter than it normally would, which should make the snow look white.

You might also need to use EV if the camera overexposes a portion of the scene that you didn’t want it to. To fix that, set your EV to a negative number (“stop it down”).

Why

Why have I told you all of this? How does this information possibly make you a better photographer? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t. My point in telling you all of this is that you need to closely control your aperture and shutter values in order to achieve the aesthetic effect that you want, but when you change any one of the values, you probably have to compensate by changing another value. By understanding how these five core settings interact, you can then focus your attention on composition, form, color, contrast, line, and the other artistic characteristics of your work.

If you want to learn more about how all of these things work, and you want to take some pretty pictures with me at the same time, sign up for one of my workshops. I’ve got a workshop coming up in Boston, and then another in Cape Cod!

I’ve read at least one account of how to move photos from one Lightroom catalog to another, which is pretty common if you travel with a laptop and make edits in the field (as I do). It’s a tremendous help to be able to spend hours on the flight home organizing and even editing images, but all of that work would be for naught if there wasn’t a nice, easy way to move those images and their corresponding metadata onto your primary computer.

Fortunately, there is! I will tell you how!

Prerequisites (and helpful tips):

• You have Lightroom installed on your laptop, which of course it’s the same version that you have on your primary computer.
• You’ve created a new catalog on your laptop for the trip that you went on, or the shoot that you did. Even though I only have one main catalog on my desktop, I create a new catalog on my laptop for every shoot.
• You have a home network, either wireless or wired. It seems like most people do these days, but it’s important for this method that you are one of those people.
• You understand the basics of file sharing between two Mac computers.
• It helps a lot if you save your Lightroom catalogs on your laptop in your “Pictures” folder, or anywhere within your “Home” folder.

Okay, you have all of those things. Now what?

Step 1: Get connected

Make sure your laptop is turned on and connected to your home network. You’ll need to be sure that File Sharing is enabled on your laptop. You can enable it within System Preferences in the Sharing panel. Tick the check box next to “File Sharing.”

From your desktop, use the Connect to Server dialog to connect to your laptop. From the Finder, click the Go menu and select “Connect to Server…” Enter the address shown in your laptop’s Sharing panel. It should look something like afp://192.168.0.3, though the numeric address will vary. If you know your account’s short name on your laptop, you can enter that at the end, like this: afp://192.168.0.3/john.smith.

If you used your short name on the address, it should prompt you for your password at this point. If not, it will probably present you with a dialog where you can choose which shared folder to open. You want the one corresponding with your short name (which is your home folder on your laptop). If you need help setting up file sharing between your Macs, you may like to read Mac OS X: About File Sharing on Apple’s support website.

Step 2: Get some photos!

At this point, you should be able to browse to your laptop’s Pictures folder from your desktop in the Finder. The name of your laptop should appear under the “SHARED” section in the left navigation panel of Finder windows. Time to open Lightroom!

From within Lightroom on your desktop, open the File menu and choose “Import from Catalog…” A dialog will open where you can browse to the Lightroom catalog file you want to import from. At this stage, find your laptop in the left panel, open up your shared home folder, and open the Lightroom catalog file itself. For me, it’s located in the Lightroom folder in my Pictures folder.

When you open that file, a somewhat trimmed down Lightroom Import dialog will open. The only thing you probably want to change in this dialog is the location where the files will be saved. You definitely want to choose “copy files to a new location and import” so that Lightroom will copy the physical photographs from your laptop onto your desktop.

Click Import and wait for a while… Voila! Your photographs have been copied onto your desktop and imported into Lightroom with all of your flags, tags, labels, and edits preserved!

I might have mentioned in passing that my “day job” brought me to New London, Connecticut almost two years ago. New London is a rather scenic city positioned on the bank of the Thames river—very near to its mouth—which empties into the Long Island Sound. Although not without its social and economic problems, it is a historic city with a great deal of architectural and maritime attractions.

I was absolutely floored to be reading The Online Photographer and to run across a stunning photograph taken literally five minutes up the opposite bank of my river (yes, I own the river) in Groton, Connecticut by Tom Kaszuba (check out the post in question, his website, and his Flickr page). As one would expect, he’s received over 60 comments on that photo on Flickr, probably many thanks to Mike at TOP, and all of them are well-deserved.

So anyway, here is the image.

The Lighthouse Sanctuary, by Tom Kaszuba. New London, Connecticut.

Taking a few minutes to look through Tom’s Flickr page invigorated me and inspired me to photograph the very river and scenery surrounding me here in New London. He has captured the coast of the Thames and the city of New London in a unique and flattering way. My hat is off to you, Tom; keep up the great work!

Edit: One of my favorite blogs, Lifehacker, just posted a short article with a similar message, Take a Cheap Vacation in Your Own City. Therein, they suggest grabbing a guidebook for your area (you can usually find them at visitor’s centers, on your city or town’s website, at the city or town hall, or in a local library) and doing some of the suggested activities or visiting the suggested locations. This could be another great way to revitalize your photography without spending a lot or going too far.

Although I believe the ranger overstepped his bounds and acted with undue suspicion under the circumstances, my colleague and I reacted—in my opinion—in a completely appropriate way. We were very polite and understanding of the issues at hand and we recognized that Tennessee might do things a little bit differently than Connecticut. For example, in Tennessee, photographers get frisked under suspicion of poaching.

Anyway, it’s a good idea to hold up your end of the bargain if you do get approached by an officer of the law, and to act in a way that reflects positively on yourself and on all of us as photographers. Especially if there is a video camera in the officer’s car…

Yesterday, I ran across this article, 5 Things Photographers Should Do When Confronted By Police. It contains some helpful tips and might be useful to you in your travels.

It’s also a good idea to know your rights in these situations, and to help you I will once again point you toward Andrew Kantor’s Legal Rights of Photographers (pdf)¹ guide, a somewhat abridged yet very straightforward and understandable overview of your rights as a photographer (at least in the United States).

For a slightly more technical view, you may wish to read The Photographer’s Right by Bert P. Krages II (attorney at law). Although no advice given by an attorney from outside of your state could be said to be formal, anyone out there from Oregon just struck gold. For those of us who aren’t from the pacific wonderland, at least you can say that this advice was cobbled together by someone with actual legal training.

If you want to dive in yet further, please do visit the forums at PhotoPermit.org where you can read all about your rights, current events, and first-hand accounts of being hassled or confronted by authority figures both various and sundry. [Edit: Apparently photopermit.org has now been replaced by a spam site. Condolences.]

1. Linked with permission. If that copy is down, get it from me