If you regularly browse my online gallery you will know that I’m constantly adding new images, and (occasionally) removing others. In fact, over the last month or two I have added rather a lot, and I thought it was time to shine the spotlight on one or two of them …just in case you missed them!

From now on, at random times (i.e. whenever I feel like it) I plan to single out an image and tell you something about it, why I like it and how I made it.

Here’s one to start with: it’s an image I recently added to my “shadow” series:

Mobile (click to view in gallery)

What is it actually of, and why is it called “Mobile”?

Well, this was taken this spring outside the LA Museum of Modern Art. The subject is a work by Alexander Calder, who is best known for inventing a type of kinetic sculpture made of many carefully balanced pieces which can move relative to each other (in the breeze), creating a constantly changing form – he dubbed this a “Mobile“. This particular piece sits in a pond outside the gallery and is kept in motion by the random interplay of water fountains and wind.

As you might guess by the large number of images involving shadows and reflections, I am fascinated by indirect observation. What can we tell – or not tell – about something by its shadow? Here you see the seemingly solid shapes of the sculpture’s shadow contrasted with the ethereal, although directly viewed, water spray. The shadows seem to pop out as if they are suspended above the water (as the real sculpture is), while the water creates a shimmering background texture. The dark shapes seem simple, flat and two dimensional, but what do they really tell us about the things casting them? Nothing in the picture gives us a clue to the direction of the light, so we can’t tell their real shape or size, nor where the objects casting the shadows are are relative to the frame. This isolation enhances the abstract quality of the image and forces the eye to appreciate the spacial composition, and contrast of textures. The underlying tile grid gives the image a mathematical feel – like an equation plotted on graph paper, which echoes the precision of the perfectly calculated equilibrium in Calder’s piece.

I took this shot from a walkway above the pond so I could look down and isolate the elements I wanted (no distracting people, trees or buildings). The sculpture (and its shadow) was moving rapidly and I needed to freeze its motion, but since it was a sunny day I just set exposure compensation at -2/3 stop to tame the reflections and let the camera do its thing, leaving me to concentrate on the composition, which was constantly changing as the wind and water spun the parts of the sculpture around.

Of all the shots I took this one best captured what I was after. It required very little work to create the finished image.

If you found that interesting let me know – if there’s a picture in the gallery you are curious about, drop me a note – maybe I’ll pick it next time!

In this day and age we are used to software that is more-or-less self explanatory. Manufacturers are becoming more and more stingy with documentation. Paper manuals have all but disappeared, replaced by pdf files on a CD. I have no doubt that most of these will soon be “download only”.

Usually this is not a problem. Other than “quick set up”, I can think of few occasions when I have actually cracked open a manual anyway – I prefer to learn by doing. Even with something complex and deep like Photoshop, I was able to get started and figure out the basics without much trouble. Sure, understanding the myriad of features and techniques available takes time and experimentation (not to mention textbooks and the internet), but at least I could get started and look for answers when I got stuck.

The same rules don’t hold for Adobe Lightroom, however.

Lightroom is promoted as a tool designed specifically for photographers (unlike Photoshop, which is the Swiss Army knife of image processing). Many professional photographers and serious amateurs sing its praises and claim that they rarely touch Photoshop any more. So when, a year or so ago, the time came to upgrade to Photoshop CS3 I jumped at the offer of a package bundled with Lightroom version 1 for just a few dollars more.

Unfortunately Adobe failed to adequately explain what Lightroom actually WAS, and for people like me, who had established a way of working (or “workflow”) based around Photoshop, this new product made no sense. I couldn’t figure out how to duplicate what I had learned to do in Photoshop. I didn’t understand what the program was doing, or why it needed information I wasn’t used to worrying about. After a short period of experimentation, I decided that it was easier to just keep doing things the way I was, and I gave up.

The praise for Lightroom continued, however, and this year version 2.0 was announced with much fanfare. I decided to give it another shot.

I tried to “get it” – I really did – but when faced with a real life task, it was quicker and easier to fall back to the old tried and trusted Photoshop.

Then I learned that fellow photographer and Fotonova19 participant, Godfrey DiGiorgi, would be running a class at Mountain View’s Media Center entitled “Lightroom: Starting in the Middle“, expressly for folks like me who were entrenched in an existing way of working and who wanted to transition.

For me at least, the class did its job and finally helped me to understand what this darned thing is all about, and why its advocates are so excited about it. The key is that Lightroom represents a complete change of approach to managing and processing photographs – not just another tool. It is absolutely critical to understand this before you even start the program for the first time, and requires quite a bit of thought and preparation before you can start using it in earnest. It is not a program that you can learn by trial and error.

Once I understood what was going on “under the hood”, the pieces started to fall into place and the benefits became clear. The class did not have time to get into much functional detail, but it got me to the point where I can start experimenting and leveraging some of the abundant resources available online.

It’s going to take me a while to make the transition, but I can now understand not only how, but more importantly why, I will move my workflow to Lightroom.

Thanks Godfrey!

I spent a few hours this past Saturday helping some volunteers paint a school in one of the less well off communities near here. I slipped away from my duties for a few minutes to take some pictures of the kids who were helping repaint some maps on the school playground. I’ve put those photos up on Shutterfly to share with the School and other volunteers. You can see them here:

Protecting Mexico

As you can see, the kids were great, really getting into it. At one point, as I was taking pictures, there was a brief shower and the kids rushed to protect their work…