Behind the Images

You may have noticed that I've been very quiet on this blog for a very long time. The reason is that I've been spending a lot of time pursuing my other main interest: photography. I have found the time I invest in that to be very rewarding, so it occupies all of my available free time. The purpose of this very short post is to point you to where you can find me when I'm quiet here.

Recover Stolen Camera Gear with Lenstag

Have you ever been the victim of camera theft? Thankfully I haven't, but ever since a colleague of mine recounted his months-long journey to recover his DSLR and lenses, I've been giving the topic a lot of thought. His story involved many calls to the the police, and hours spent scouring the Internet to find his camera's serial number embedded in EXIF data on Flickr. He then painstakingly followed the activities of the thieves on social media until he had enough evidence for the police to approach them. Luckily for the rest of us, there's a potentially useful (and free) service that aims to make the processes of locating stolen camera gear a little easier: Lenstag.com

PSA: Level Up Images with Lightroom

This is going to be one of the shortest posts I've ever written. I'd like to take this opportunity to make a public service announcement. If you have any interest whatsoever in photography, please do yourself (plus the world) a favor and take the time to learn Adobe Lightroom. It isn't even a quarter as difficult as Photoshop to learn, yet it will do wonders for your photographs.

It wasn't all that long ago that I used to think the auto enhance features of programs like Picasa were sufficient to improve my images. If I could invent a time machine, the first thing I would do would be to go back in time and yell at myself to start using Lightroom (okay well maybe after I tell myself to buy Apple and Adobe stock, along with some Bitcoins).

I learned through a combination of friends with similar interests, blog posts, and tutorials. Here's a good compilation of links to get you started. If you don't believe me, check out the before and after examples below (may not work correctly on a mobile browser). All edits were done with basic Lightroom tools and didn't require any complex masking, layering, etc. Some edits are subtle, but often that is all it takes to make an average picture great.