With the release of Lightroom 6 / CC, there has been a lot of hype about the performance speedups in image rendering. Being curious, I ran a few tests to see how much LR6/CC may have improved for my own workflow. Summary Processing and exporting from raw files is significantly faster in LR 6/CC (about 30%). The GPU did not make a difference. No difference in generating previews between LR 5 and 6. Small panoramas take roughly equivalent time in PS and Lightroom. But my test with a large panorama ...
Making a Mobile Friendly Photography Website
Back in February, Google announced that they were going to use mobile friendliness as a ranking factor for websites: Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Basically this means that if your site is not mobile friendly you are going to lose traffic. By mobile friendly Google just means that your content is optimized so that it ...
Why Images Appear Blurry on Retina and Hi-DPI Screens
When I moved my main machine to a retina Macbook Pro, I was surprised to notice that the screen made my website images appear blurry. I had thought image sharpness would stay the same (or improve) since the physical resolution of the screen was much higher. I also thought that any resampling by the browser wouldn't affect sharpness since there was an integer scaling factor: i.e. each image pixel should get mapped directly to a 2x2 square of retina pixels. My assumptions were clearly wrong though as my ...
File Naming Systems for Managing Your Image Collection
Once you have more than a handful of images it's going to be very important to use a systematic naming scheme. Having an organized system for numbering your files will allow you and your clients to identify images precisely. Instead of a client asking for a picture of that "prison cell in Alcatraz" (I have about 160 images of Alcatraz and most contain prison cells), the client can just look at my website and say I want to license image #22140. Given the ID number, I can quickly find the file in my Lightroom ...
Numbers behind a stock photo and print business
In the spirit of Harper's Index here are some random facts about my photo business: Largest number of prints in a single order: 11 Largest number of images licensed in a single transaction: 12 Biggest reproduction made from my work: 8'x25' (400 sq. feet) Biggest license: $5,840 Biggest license for a single image: $1,400 Smallest sale by a distributor: $27 Largest sale by a distributor: $350 Number of images on my website: 6,890 Number of images in my library: 32,097 Lines of Perl code to ...
Creating Photo Books in iBooks Author
Last fall I visited the city of Prague in the Czech Republic and spent a week photographing historical and cultural sites. With several thousand pictures’ worth of raw material, my wife and I decided to co-author a coffee table-type book that showcased the city through photographs. I previously authored a photographic book of Los Angeles with a traditional print publisher, so I was familiar with the complexity of a book project. I considered taking this route again by searching for a publisher, but ...
Shooting Handheld Panoramas
I love to take panoramic images and when I've planned a specific shot I will carry all of the gear: a heavy tripod, leveling base, panorama head with nodal slide, etc. However, many times, especially when traveling in foreign countries, bringing all of this equipment is infeasible because it weighs too much or takes up too much space (or you left it at your place of lodging). If you are caught without your panning gear, it's still possible to create high quality panoramas if the conditions are good. For ...
Digital Photo Storage While Traveling
If you shoot digitally in RAW format, the amount of memory taken by your pictures can quickly add up with today's high resolution cameras. The RAW files on my full-frame Canon 5D II (21MP) take up about 30 megabytes of memory each which means that a normal day's worth of shooting for me (a few hundred pictures) will require perhaps 5-10 GB of storage. Sports, wildlife and action photographers can easily take several thousand pictures in a day. On long trips, especially in the wilderness or in developing ...
Stitching with Tilt Shift Lenses to Create High Resolution Images
With digital SLRs it has become very easy to combine or stitch multiple pictures together to create high resolution images. For example, the picture below shows a composite image of the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco stitched together from three source images. The three individual source files were taken with my Canon 5D mk II and are roughly 21 megapixels in size (5616 x 3744). However, they can be combined in software to create a 40 megapixel stitched image (7229 x 5623). Right now, ...
My Photography and Computer Equipment
Cameras Currently I'm using Canon 5D Mark II bodies. The 5D is a full-frame digital camera with 21MP sensor. It's a great travel camera as it has fantastic image quality but a relatively small body (at least compared to the professional 1D bodies). The only drawback I see is the relatively poor autofocus performance. Lenses I use a wide variety of lenses and pick and choose depending on my subject. For example, if I am shooting travel pictures I would take a three lens kit composed of the 24-105, ...