Best of 2010
I’ve taken lots of pictures this year and have had a lot of fun doing it. I could probably figure out how many I’ve taken and let you all know, but that would be a minor waste of time. Thanks to all of you who have read my blog and commented on the posts. I truly appreciate it. Onto the subject of this post…
Flickr recently opened up a new group called “Best Shot of 2010,” to which I would like to submit the BEST picture that I took this year. It’s a hard choice for me to make – so that’s why I’m turning to you, blog readers. Below is a collage of the 12 pictures from which I would like you to choose. Follow this link – Best of 2010 – and vote using the Like button. I think you should all have access, even if we aren’t friends; I made it a public Facebook album. These 12 images were taken throughout the year; some taken in Chicago, some in the suburbs, some in other states, all taken with Nikon, and all taken by me. I’d appreciate your feedback, and hopefully look forward to bringing you many more enjoyable photographs in the future. If you’d like to see all the pictures I’ve posted on Flickr this year, you can do that by visiting this link – Fourth Photography 2010.
The Day of Thanks
The Wilson family Thanksgiving is always enjoyable – especially this year with two new members of the family! Katie, my beautiful (new) fiancee, and Coleman, my aunt and uncle’s newly adopted baby, were both in attendance. What a great way to introduce them to everyone – football, turkey, delicious sides, desserts, and lots of love. The aforementioned items are some of my favorite things about Thanksgiving. But there’s nothing like a good old game of Madden ’97 on N64 to bring me back. Hopefully you enjoy these pictures half as much as I enjoy each and every Thanksgiving.
New Software!
Thanks to a new friend from church, I just got Lightroom 3! I had been using Adobe Lightroom 2 to produce most of the fine images you’ve seen on this blog over the last couple months, but I’m excited to have version 3. There are several updates that you can see here and if you’re completely unfamiliar with the capabilities of Lightroom in general, check out this link – Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3.
Some of you may be shocked. “What?! He doesn’t use Photoshop?”
Well… If you clicked on the links above, you’ll realize that Lightroom and Photoshop are two very different programs for editing digital photographs. Lightroom is designed to handle large batches of photographs, which it organizes into “catalogs.” Multiple photos can be imported and then edited quickly, due to the photo strip interface along the bottom of the program, and the same effects easily applied to multiple images (which you can do in Photoshop as well, but not as quickly/painlessly). This is great when you’re trying to organize/edit/produce approximately 1500 photos from a wedding.
One of my favorite features of Lightroom are the presets – some of which come preloaded; others can be found online for free downloading. I’ll post some before and after pictures at some point. If you have specific pictures that you’d like to see the before and after, please LET ME KNOW! Just to let YOU know, I still use Photoshop. But mainly for additional touch-ups once I’ve done editing in Lightroom or for other things like adding text or crazy effects. I’m by NO means a Photoshop expert, but I get by.
“Oh man, should I try using Lightroom?” Definitely try it out – especially if you take a lot of photos and want software to simply keep the photos organized. Adobe offers a free trial on their website (see above links).