From Clicking to Creating – Week 5 of 2018 

This was a pretty fun week. First the Dogwood 52 challenge is Photographers choice in the Wildcard category. In looking at the list, this is popping up a few times throughout the year. It’s always fun to create something without specific boundaries.

Wild Card: Consider this a Show-and-Tell for grown-ups. You have freedom do shoot what and how you wish. Let us know if you’re trying a new technique, composition, style, subject, working on a specific project, or just exercising your freedom. Have fun!

Since I’m all obsessed with the hummingbirds right now, that had to be my shot for this week.

I love how he was looking at me in this shot, and the sun was perfect on his colorful head. I added two different texture layers to this image, to bring a little more color to the background.

The 2 Lil Owls this week is Red. I knew right away what I wanted to do. I have seen images like this, but have never tried to do my own. So with the help of my able bodied assistant, otherwise known as the hubby, I made this image of red wine being poured into a glass.

This photo needed some editing because we have one glass wine glass, everything else is plastic…RV life. The glass came from the show Al did in Wyoming last fall and had their logo on it. Obviously, that wasn’t going to work.

I used the clone tool in photoshop, and removed all the letters. Much better looking.

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2 weeks ago I talked a little bit about how you can use the organizing power of lightroom. These are some other things I use, to help me classify, and organize all my images. (And FYI, I fixed the enlargement of these photos so if you click on them, they will show up bigger. I went back and fixed the others too.)

Collections are a great way to organize your photos the way you want them to be. You can make as many collections as you want, simply click on the plus sign in the collections tab on the left side. Once your collection is made, you can easily add photos to it. Right click on the collection name, and a menu will pop up. One option, is “Set as target collection” click this and the little plus sign will be next to that collection. To add photos, click on the circle in the upper right of the photo you want in the collection. This will put the photo in, or take the photo out of the collection that is specified.

Giving the photo a rating, or stars as I call it, is another way to be able to search. Clicking on the stars at the bottom of the photo will give your image 1 to 5 stars. You can then search with the top search bar under “attributes” for say, 5 star photos.

You can also color code your photos. Right click the image, and a menu will pop up. There are lot of options in this menu, including “set color rating.” Pick a color, and that image is now color coded. Then in the top bar you can search by color, and those images will show up.

Now the best part is you can combine all these ideas, plus the keywords we talked about before to narrow your search right down. Say I am in my Print collection, and I want to find horse images, with a five star rating. While I am in that collection, I put that search criteria in the top bar, and voila, exactly what I was looking for. Of course you can search all your photos in the same way.

The more you make photos, the larger your lightroom folder is going to be. I can search by keywords such as year, or subject matter, rating or stars, and in a particular collection. This makes finding what I’m looking for so much easier, since I tend to have anywhere from 7000-9000 photos in lightroom at any one time. Just a quick note on keeping lightroom manageable. I import the photos I like the most after a shoot. I do not keep every image, that would be way too much. All the photos live in a Lightroom folder on my computer, and I back that folder up to an external hard drive pretty frequently. Since I shoot RAW, this file is big. To keep storage on my computer at a minimum I will go through lightroom periodically and delete photos that I have backed up to my external, but don’t really need to live on my computer anymore. That way I still have the photos and can put them back into lightroom if I decide I want to. This keeps everything running smooth because I’m not clogging the memory on my computer.

If at anytime my instructions make no sense to you, please leave a comment with your question and I will answer it as best I can.

Ok, lets see what you guys created this week.