This first shot taken from onboard one of easyJet’s finest.

Snow over Germany

As an Edinburgh resident, one of the first things to note about Munich is that they have a functioning tram system. Much jealousy!

Look Edinburgh! A moving tram!

Actually, for a major city, Munich seemed to have a functioning transportation system. Trams, light rail, buses and lots of cars (all on winter tyres). And it all just flowed. We crossed the River Isar at the Ludwigsbrücke, passing a municipal swimming pool

Volksbad swimming pool next to the Isar river in Munich

We first visited Zum Dürnbräu, where the glasses had lids that acted as signals to the bar staff. The bar menu had some interesting sounding delicacies on it…

Some interesting sounding snacks there…

On the way to the next bar, we passed the new town hall, which was all lit up:

Munich’s New Town Hall at night

At Augustiner Am Dom, where despite the fact that it was -1 deg C and snowing, we were seated outside under an awning, and were presented with these:

A few small beers

And then I started to crash. Not exclusively from the excessive beer consumption, but from general tiredness. Many people (not in our party) were audibly struggling to cope with their beer loads in the toilets, but I was starting to really want a reasonably sizeable nap. So, it was time to don jacket and gloves, and head out into the snow. In spite of being full of beer and in desperate need of sleep, and in spite of the aforementioned snow and cold, I was quite struck by this view, so I took a photo of it:

Viktualienmarkt, Marienplatz, at night in heavy snow.

I’m surprised at the quality of the shot, for all the aforementioned reasons! What looks like noise near the tower at the top of frame is in fact the snow falling.

The following day, after a good sleep and restorative breakfast in the hotel, it was back out for more sampling of local products. We headed here:

Hofbräuhaus, one of Munich’s famous beer halls

But because of a local Bundesliga match, the place was rammed, and not all of us got a seat. There’s no real art to this place, it’s industrial pubbery on a level of which J.D. Wetherspoon could only dream.

It being a 6 Nations Rugby day, we headed to local Killians Irish pub, only to find that it’s also Ned Kelly’s Australian Bar. Something of a culture clash one would think, but it’s essentially beer with sport on the telly. We watched Scotland beating Italy, and most of France contriving to lose to Wales. We bumped into another stag party there, and the stags had a quick chat:

The stags converse

This other party were on the same flight over to Munich as I was. They must have consumed at least their plane tickets’-worth of booze on the plane. Something in the region of six rounds of drinks at £50 per round.

Sunday morning dawned bright… for some members of the party. Others had been fairly well destroyed by the port and schnapps in the Wirtshaus in der Au restaurant on Saturday night. We had several hours to kill before our flight, so I went for a wander around town.

The New Town Hall during the day

The German Museum and the River Isar from Zenneckbrücke

That being said, I’m finding the press/Twitter/forum comments on Friday’s driver market news very interesting. If you’ve been living on Mars recently, you may not know that Lewis Hamilton is to leave McLaren at the end of 2012 and join Mercedes. Lewis’s McLaren seat will be filled by Sergio Perez, and Lewis is chucking Michael Schumacher out of his Mercedes.

Lewis Hamilton, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes, Silverstone 2012
Photo ©giles-guthrie.com

Going to Mercedes

If rumour is correct, Mercedes are paying Hamilton a lot of money. The deal is for three years, and it’s reputedly worth $100m (according to The Daily Telegraph). This would probably make Hamilton the most richly rewarded driver ever. (Footnote: It can be difficult to track this accurately, but I think that Schumacher, Alonso and Raikkonen have all been paid $26m per season by Ferrari. I’m not aware of any rivers getting more than this)

Because of this, the wide-scale perception is that Hamilton has gone to Mercedes to chase the dollar. If that’s true, it’s difficult to criticise. F1 drivers have a short career, and therefore limited opportunity to earn top-dollar that they must then live on for the remaining 60 years of their life. Also, in F1 circles, money equals value. And ranking the drivers by earnings is a sure-fire way to compare how each is valued against the other. The dollar is the ultimate leveller, the ultimate arbiter of that value.

But I’ve followed Formula 1 for a number of years now. And I’m seeing something that the cash-obsessed commentators seem to have forgotten. The simple fact of life is that Michael Schumacher won 7 F1 World Championships and Jenson Button 1, under Ross Brawn’s stewardship. That’s not even counting the sportscar success with TWR Jaguar. Nobody would ever say that a driver goes to Red Bull “for the money,” with that team, everyone would acknowledge the design team led by Adrian Newey. So why is Ross Brawn being dissed? People are blinded by money.

Furthermore, Mercedes has had the best engine in F1 for the entire duration of the 2.4 V8 regulations. In 2014, the regulations change again, and by aligning himself with the AMG Mercedes F1 team, Hamilton has guaranteed that he’ll get first dibs on any new trick engines coming out. He will probably have design input so that right from the very start the torque maps suit his driving style.

When signing deals, drivers need to work out not which team is best now, but which will be best when they’re at full-strength in the new deal. It’s crystal ball stuff.

Leaving McLaren

The big thing (for me, at least, as a McLaren fan) is the question of why Lewis would leave the Woking team that nurtured him from the gawky yet precocious teenager that marched up to Ron Dennis and asked for a drive.

Leaving aside McLaren’s image as a corporate drone machine, I think that it’s possible Lewis is looking for a different challenge. Maybe he’s seen the 8 world championships that Ross Brawn has architected, and decided he fancies some of that action. Maybe the fact that Mercedes engine boss Norbert Haug spends all his time with the AMG outfit is having an impact. But these are reasons to join Mercedes, not ones to leave McLaren.

There has been a definite cooling of the McLaren-Mercedes relationship in recent years. Some say it’s because of McLaren releasing their MP4-12c road car straight into the path of Mercedes’ SLS. I’m not so sure that it’s so petty. I think it’s that Mercedes wants its own F1 team carrying its own name to be successful. But the upshot is that McLaren is no longer the favoured Mercedes partner. In 2012, it has started paying for the Mercedes V8s, and that’s a cash hole that even the massive McLaren would notice.

And for how long will McLaren remain “Vodafone McLaren Mercedes”? I’m not sure I believe that the Woking outfit is working on its own power plants, but I’m fairly certain that Vodafone is on its way out. If not of F1 as a whole, then almost certainly out of McLaren. Vodafone has terminated extraordinarily successful sponsorship arrangements with the Triple Eight V8 Supercar team, and with the Australian national cricket team. And it has been absent from the rear wings of the McLaren F1 cars for a while now. It all points to a staged pull-out from McLaren that will leave them hunting a new title sponsor.

That’s not where a driver wants to be. Title sponsors and manufacturer engine partners are talismans in F1. A team without one or the other is wounded. And a team without both is in for a spell in the doldrums. Could that be McLaren in 2014? Just as Mercedes starts bringing its new-spec engines online? To its Brackley in-house team first?

Michael Schumacher, AMG Mercedes Petronas, Silverstone 2012
Photo ©giles-guthrie.com

Bye Bye Michael (reprise)

It’s been fun but the time has come
To bring down the final curtain move along
Time to face what you know in your heart
That the world keeps on turning, you’ve lost your part
It is never ending
Take a look if you’re not sure at the millions gone before

It’s been hard when the going is rough
Or you’re many thousand miles away from home
To believe that it’s all worthwhile
That it makes the slightest difference in the end
And it gets harder

Will you stay until you’re pushed
Or will the day dawn when you’re on your own?
You look around
There’s only empty rows of chairs
Where once your fair weather friends
Hung on every word that you said
TONY BANKS – THE FINAL CURTAIN LYRICS

Michael Schumacher’s F1 career has had something of everything in it. Records have been smashed, and world championships won with different teams. It was Schumacher who finally wrested Scuderia Ferrari F1 from its autophagic political nightmare. Even the mighty Jean Todt required the services of the German for that, and Ferrari was required to put aside its innate Italian-ness in order to reattain the success of the past. Of course, Schumacher then rewarded the Scuderia with five world championships. They subsequently won a sixth with Raikkonen, and look set fair to take a seventh with Alonso in 2012.

But — while the circumstances of Schumacher’s departure from the Scuderia were not respectful — Schumacher’s second bite of the F1 cherry has ultimately failed to deliver much of the spark for which he was known in his first time around. Some spirited driving in the Mercedes has been evident, but being reunited with Brawn in a German works team has not enabled Schumacher to reach his former greatness once more. Neither, to be fair, has he been demolished by Nico Rosberg, but it does seem like Rosberg is usually better-placed to take advantage of opportunities. It is Rosberg who has delivered AMG Mercedes’s only Grand Prix win of the current era. Meanwhile, Schumacher’s error rate is too high. It says something of the respect that the F1 world still has for him that while similarly crashy Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado are being hung out to dry, Schumacher is being gently ignored, like an elderly relative who’s developed late-onset Tourette’s. And while the Italian press lines up to castigate the off-the-pace Felipe Massa, still the Germans hope for a late resurgence by their ageing hero.

It’s time for Michael to go. But has he once again been denied the opportunity to retire of his own volition? A sad end to his career.

A Matter of Opinion on “Too Young”

One of the Sauber-Ferrari drivers has made a real impression this year. Not just for car speed, but for maturity of driving. Sergio “Checo” Perez came to Sauber riding the crest of a wave of Telmex cash. And he has come close to winning two Grands Prix this year. In each case he’s done it by being able to overtake cars on track, and being able to work leftfield strategies to his advantage. In fact, it appears that his car speed is a little lacking, certainly over one lap, as he is often in the teens in qualifying. The fact that he’s beaten the “works” Ferraris on a number of occasions (including at the Italian Grand Prix) is remarkable.

Sergio “Checo” Perez, Sauber Ferrari, Silverstone 2012
Photo ©giles-guthrie.com

Not quite as remarkable as Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo saying he was “too young” for graduation to the Scuderia. Massa is in desperate need of being put out to pasture, and Perez looks very much the up-and-comer. But Ferrari passed, and McLaren didn’t. It does rather look like McLaren has made the better choice here. Perez has something to offer, and contemporary McLaren will be able to shape and nurture him to bring him on. Formula 1 is all about seizing the opportunities when they’re presented, and that is true for teams just as much as it is for personnel. I suspect Ferrari could rue the day they let him slip. Presumably just as BMW/Sauber did when they let a young Sebastien Vettel go test a Red Bull.

The One Left Out in the Cold

Someone in all of this has got to be feeling pretty sore. Paul di Resta has been in Sahara Force India, and doing a great job. He’s seen off the talented Nico Hulkenburg, and has delivered a number of very mature performances in Mercedes’ junior team, frequently transcending the car or working around its failures. He must have felt he was a shoo-in for whichever Mercedes seat was vacated by the Hamilton/Schumacher switcheroo, but that’s not happened. No seat appeared at Mercedes, and McLaren snapped up Perez, leaving di Resta out in the wilderness. Paul’s managers should be on the phone to Maranello right about now…

Paul di Resta, Sahara Force India, Silverstone 2012
Photo ©giles-guthrie.com

And so…

There comes a time in every F1 season where the anticipation of next season is at least as strong as the excitement at the remainder of the current. I think we’re at that point now. There’s a liberal smattering of great drivers across the top four teams, and the stage is set fair for some epic contests. Friday’s changes are, in my opinion, most definitely for the better.

A popular insult…

Can you see what it is yet?

Felipe Massa has been the #2 Ferrari F1 driver for a very long time now. In fact, since the team dropped Rubens Barrichello at the end of 2005, the second car has been piloted by Massa. Now it looks as if the Scuderia has lost patience with the Brazilian, and is ready to cast him aside at the end of the 2012 season, perhaps sooner.

When he entered the sport in 2002 with Sauber, it seemed as if he was a preordained Ferrari driver, farmed out to the customer team to get some experience. When I watched him at Silverstone that year, he didn’t exactly seem at ease with the car, alternately prodding it then chasing it through each turn.

Felipe Massa, Sauber, Silverstone 2002
image ©giles-guthrie.com

Age and experience have definitely mellowed that style, and he has been able to rack up 11 Formula 1 wins in his six years at the team. I would normally at this point make some bitchy comment about the number of Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championships the team has amassed in this time, but the fact of the matter is that Massa has never had anything other than a superstar driving the other car in the team.  The only time this could be argued was in 2008, where Kimi Räikkönen was in the slough of demotivation. Massa capitalised, scoring 6 of his 11 wins in just this one year, on the way to losing the championship ten seconds after it looked in the bag.

But in Michael Schumacher, Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso, Felipe has found himself pitted against the best. He’s defaulted to the role of “competent number two”, which can be a nice safe secure place for an F1 driver in a top team. Most of the money and adulation, hardly any of the real pressure. Let’s not kid ourselves though: Felipe has never really looked like threatening the greats on the other side of the garage.

Looking back, Felipe’s career has had a number of shocks that would cause even the most mentally-stable of drivers some difficulty. It seems as if Felipe has not recovered from them fully.

It seems fairly certain that Massa was meant to play #2 to Michael Schumacher, and to learn from him.  But at the end of 2006, when Michel “retired”, instead of promoting Felipe to the #1 status he probably felt owed, the Scuderia offered asylum to McLaren refugee Kimi Räikkönen. Räikkönen was feeling unusually motivated as he’d been dropped by the Woking outfit, and as Alonso and Lewis Hamilton engaged in their Kramer vs Kramer scrap to lose the World Championship, Kimi quietly put in a string of car-defying performances to snatch the cup from the squabbling duo. Felipe was left behind in his dust.

In 2008, with point proven, Kimi went back to cruise-and-collect mode, and it was Felipe who picked up the baton. With McLaren bruised by the previous year’s fight, Felipe was able to capitalise on their lack of solidity, and took the championship fight to the last corner of the last lap of the last race. Finishing first, with Hamilton out of position, there was a heart-breaking number of seconds where Felipe celebrated while Hamilton’s wet-shod McLaren blew by a series of slick-shod cars in torrential rain. 30 seconds later Felipe’s championship had been ripped from him by the Briton.

The next year saw all teams struggling to play catch-up to Brawn. Massa’s struggle became particularly personal after a piece of suspension, jettisoned from Barrichello’s Brawn BGP001, impacted his helmet at somewhere north of 150mph. The season was over, and many pundits reckoned that was it for Felipe.

But it wasn’t. He came back for the 2010 championship, now with Fernando Alonso in the other car. Alonso must be soul-destroying to have as a team-mate. So fast and so dogged is he that no result within his grasp is allowed to slip away. For someone as inconsistent as Felipe it must have been a nightmare come true.

And then, to Hockenheim 2010. Massa leading, Alonso second. “Felipe, Fernando is faster than you,” came the message. Felipe was being asked to sacrifice the win. The win that would have come a year to the day since he nearly died in one of the red cars. How can you overcome such certain knowledge that the team does not want you to win races in its cars? I normally believe that the one who completes the race distance in the shortest time is the one who deserves to win, but in this case, Ferrari should have held station. It would have been the honourable thing to do.

Ten years later…
Felipe Massa, Ferrari, Silverstone 2012
image ©giles-guthrie.com

Now, mid-way through 2012, Massa is nowhere. Alonso has gathered the team up, with its terrible car, and personally driven them to the top of the driver’s championship. Felipe is struggling to get into the third part of qualifying. It really looks like it’s time for a change.

But today, an interview has been published by the Radio Times, in which Damon Hill, ex-F1 World Champion, is quoted as saying that driving at 80mph “makes him shudder”, and that most people are such bad drivers, they should not be allowed to do more than 55mph on motorways. He then claims that people don’t concentrate on motorways.

This couldn’t be any more wrong. And frankly, I’d expect Damon Hill to know better.

The reasons driving on the motorway can be stressful are:

• People not paying attention to what’s around them.
• People failing to judge relative speeds.

That’s pretty much it. Well, there’s the old chestnut of trucks overtaking each other with the relative speed difference equal to the margin of error of their speed limiters, but that’s a chat for another day.

Overall, I would say that the standard of driving in the UK is pretty damn bad. Drivers are no longer taught to respect the rule of the road. And the rule of the road was written so long ago as to be all but meaningless. But the real issue with motorway driving is that drivers don’t respect each other. There’s no formal motorway tuition, and it is in fact illegal to take an unqualified driver on the motorway. So your new driver learns to drive in town in a diesel Mini and is then let loose on a motorway network where average speeds are roughly around the limit. Anyone else see a problem here?

It’s endemic. People are not taught how to drive any more. They’re taught the bare minimum required to get through the driving examination. And then they’re left to fend for themselves. You can see it in all the people who bimble down a slip road at 40mph and then shit themselves when they get to the 70mph traffic stream at the bottom. In the people who are so busy focussing on the speed that the Armco is going by, they don’t notice that the relative speed to the car in front isn’t that great.

How about, instead of limiting, restricting, monitoring and fining people, we actually teach them how to fucking drive their four wheeled death machines?

As for Mr Hill, he should really know better

I find the Apple missing manual phenomenon frustrating because I can sometimes own a product for two years and not know that it does something really funky. This post is about one such thing.

In the iOS Camera app, on devices with autofocus cameras (iPhone 4, 4S, iPad 3, perhaps some of the Touches) you can tap on the viewfinder screen to create an autofocus point. The camera refocuses the image on that point which is dead useful when the device seems unwilling/unable to get a focus lock on the image.

My discovery is this: The tap-to-autofocus also causes the camera to re-meter the scene, using a point-weighted average.

Take this shot for example. Yes, it’s presented as a grainy black & white, but it’s actually a composite of  two images. (see bigger here)

The reason for this is that the human eye is actually a pretty trick bit of kit. The difference between what we can differentiate in shadows and what we can differentiate in extreme lighting (our dynamic range) is massively greater than that of any camera. Film or digital, multi-thousand-pound-pro SLR or wretched phone camera.

For photographers, this is a bit of a nightmare. We set the camera up to show detail in the ground, and it just goes & gives up on the blue sky with its beautiful fluffy clouds, showing the whole lot as a white sheet. Or we set it to show the sky, and the ground features disappear in a shadowy murk.

The way to get around this is with compositing. Either in-camera with a graduated filter, or in Photoshop (other editors are available) with multiple shots blended together. Take one shot where the sky is great (murky ground) and one shot where the ground is great (white sky). Then put them together in Photoshop.

The shot above required such a technique. The only way to get the white of the snow, the malevolence of the clouds, and the ground detail (all of which the eye can perceive) into one shot was to composite it. But who knew an iPhone had the right software built in to give you the control you need to make such a shot? Note: using “HDR mode” will not achieve this.

Compositing is hard though. The most common method to get the phone to change the exposure is to recompose the image. It runs what photography manuals call a “centre-weighted average” metering mode. It looks at the whole scene, and pays particular attention to the centre of the image. If you want it to change the brightness of the image, just recompose the image to move the centre point.

But this will cause you all kinds of problems in post-production, because you’ll have a much harder job matching your multiple exposures up to create a coherent scene. Changing the angle of the shot alters the perspective, so you won’t necessarily be able to match sky and ground consistently. This’ll show itself up in weirdness around the horizon, with some trees or buildings ghosting in the composite.

What you need is the ability to make the same shot over and over again at different exposure levels. And you can actually do this in the iPhone with what I’ve come to refer to as “tap to meter”.

Look at the following sequence of photos. In each, the shot is unedited, save for being resized. I’ve placed a red box in the zone I tapped to meter the scene.

In each case, the overall brightness of the image is radically different, as the phone takes my tap instruction and tries to weight the overall image brightness to make my tap point the mid-level of the image. But the composition of the image itself is unchanged.

This makes compositing easy. If you can hold the phone relatively still while you tap to re-meter and then reshoot, your matching exercise (precisely overlaying each image) should be simplicity itself. Then you can pick the brightnesses you need to make the image level correspond with what you saw, compensating for your camera’s ineptitude.

If you want some more information on how to actually do the compositing, leave me a note in the comments.

Orion, Jupiter and Venus

In this first shot, Orion is left-of-frame, with Jupiter and Venus in close attendance with each other on the right.

In this second shot, the streak under Orion is the International Space Station, crossing completely under the massive constellation in a mere forty seconds.

ISS Underscores Orion

Orion’s Stars

Surrounding Orion’s belt are four other stars, held to be Orion’s shoulders and feet. His highest shoulder (right, facing the observer) is the red supergiant Betelgeuse, some 640 light years from Earth. It is the eight-brightest star in the night sky. The blue giant Bellatrix is Orion’s left shoulder, and is maybe the 22^nd brightest star in the sky (accounts vary).  It is a blue-white because it burns considerably hotter than the sun, and is only 250 light years from Earth. Orion’s left foot, Rigel, is the brightest star of the constellation, considered to be around 860 light years from Earth. Rigel is actually a binary system, with the Rigel B star’s brightness dwarfed by the A star. Saiph (Kappa Orionis) is reckoned to be around 650 light years from Earth, and is 22x larger than our Sun. Saiph is the sixth-brightest star in Orion, although the majority of Sapih’s brightness is in the ultraviolet spectrum, and thus not visible to the human eye.

Orion’s Belt

Orion’s Belt consists of Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka (left to right). Altitak is 100,000 times brighter than the sun. It is approximately 800 light years from Earth. Alnilam is much further away – estimated to be 1,340 light years from Earth. It emits most of its light in the ultraviolet spectrum, totalling 375,000x more brightness than the Sun. Mintaka is 915 light years away and is in fact a binary system, with its two stars orbiting each other every 5.73 days.

In this third shot, Orion’s Belt is the three stars in a line pointing towards the top-right of frame.

Orion's Belt and Orion's Sword

The camera has resolved a number of stars not visible with the naked eye, and although this shot is taken at a relatively low zoom range of just 260mm, the top and middle stars of Orion’s Sword are already clearly distinguishably multiple stars.

Orion’s Sword and the M42 Nebula

I set out on this post to take photos of Orion’s sword. This appears to hang down below his belt, and appears as three stars. However, it’s much more complex than that, and with the naked eye, the middle “star” can be understood to be something else entirely. Indeed it is, the M42 nebula, held to be the most photographed nebula of all.

Orion's Sword at 520mm

At a 35mm focal length of 520mm, the lowest star is a singleton, the middle is a clear pair with a cloud surrounding it, and the upper star is a slightly more distant pair. The camera resolves a number of other stars not visible to the naked eye – at least not in a city with its light pollution.

Orion's Sword and the M42 Nebula

Zooming in further (1,040mm) we can clearly see the gas/dust clouds of the Orion nebula (lower-right-middle of frame) surrounding the brightest star, Zeta Orionis. Clearly I have more to research regarding the many other stars that the camera has resolved. However, I’m quite pleased to have clearly captured my first ever nebula. That’s enough for tonight!

Camera geekery…

All shot with a Canon EOS 1d MkIII on a Manfrotto 190 ProB tripod with a 390RC2 head and a Canon TC-80N3 remote.

1. Lens: Canon EF16-35 F/2.8L II. 16mm. Exposure: 1.3s @ F/3.5 ISO 1600
2. Lens: Canon EF24-105 F/4L IS. 24mm. Exposure: 5 frames at 8s @ F/6.3 ISO 800
3. Lens: Canon EF100-400 F/4-5.6L IS plus EF2x MkII teleconverter. 200mm. 3.2s @ F/11 ISO 3200
4. Lens: Canon EF400 F/5.6L. 400mm. 4s @ F/11 ISO 3200
5. Lens: Canon EF400 F/5.6L plus EF2x MkII teleconverter. 800mm. 1.6s @ F/11 ISO 3200

Note that the text refers to zoom lengths including the 1.3x crop factor of the 1d MkIII camera body.

This is a box of Frubes. Within are six little sachets of fruit-flavoured yoghurt. It’s entirely possible to envisage the tubes all standing to attention inside the box.

This is the general thrust of their television advertisement. It features a “General” Frube, who suggests that the Frubes are yoghurt soldiers, but that you are to “rip their heads off and suck their guts out”.

A Frube. This is the part where you rip its head off, as shown on the arrows (click to enlarge)

Which is exactly what you do to eat them. It’s a fun advert, gets over the key messages of yoghurt, fruit, and eating instructions. You rip off the tab at the top, and suck out the yoghurt from within the pouch. In the words of the inestimable Homer J Simpson, “it’s funny because it’s true.”

But not any longer. Now, the slogan has been changed to “pull their tops off and eat them all up.”

Seriously?

Someone’s complained about this advertisement? Somebody thinks it’s not funny?

This is what’s wrong with Society today. Everyone’s so damned keen to take offence at absolutely fucking everything that nothing can be simple fun any more. It’s so depressing.

This is my first tar trail that I’m reasonably happy to publish. Taken in the back garden, it’s stacked from 265 shots.

The two key changes made between this and the fail shot were that “Long Exposure Noise Reduction” was switched off, and that I used a timer remote cable, rather than the EOS Utility on my laptop. This seems to start the “next” shot immediately after the shutter has closed on the previous shot.

Now, to go and shoot somewhere a bit more interesting!

If you’re anything like me, you’re a really keen picture-taker, a fairly keen editor, and a grudging filer. Somehow publishing can get lost, but it’s publishing that allows people to actually see your work. Without publishing it, it’s like it’s never happened.

But, once you’ve shot, imported, keyworded, filed, chosen and edited your shots, it’s too easy to simply do nothing at all with them. Or too easy to feel that there’s one last edit that will transform the shot from OK to awesome.

These are excuses. Get publishing!

And I’m not addressing you exclusively, dear reader. I’m as guilty of it myself. For example, after my star trail fail, I’ve actually taken a star trail I’m really happy with, but have I shared it here?

Quite.

Fortunately, Lightroom has features which can help. In this article, I’m going to illustrate with Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent jf Flickr export tool, but others are available, and LR’s built in Facebook publishing service is probably one of interest to most people.

A note on Publishing Services in Lightroom.

This was explained to me really well in a blog post that I’ve since forgotten the whereabouts of. Basically, if you want to export a photo to – for example – email to someone, then you use LR’s excellent built in Export tools. However, that’s quite a fire-and-forget mechanism. It’s Export and be done. If you want an ongoing relationship with the files you’ve exported, you should use the Publish Services, which you’ll find down on the bottom-left in the Library module.

These allow you to set publishing destinations. You can then drag the photos you want to publish, and the next time you tell Lightroom to Publish them, the collections are updated in the destination. This is useful if – for example – you wish to use Lightroom to unpublish a shot. Remove it from the Publish destination in LR, and at the next publish, the shot is removed from the destination.

Next, think of these services in terms of Lightroom’s Collections functionality. It works the same way, you just specify an external relationship for the collection, rather than it beginning and ending with a virtual grouping in your LR catalogue.

Smartening your Collections

OK, so where the power lies in this is that you can create Smart Publishing Collections. In the screenshot above, the collections with the cog (Food & Drink and Edinburgh Christmas Market) are smart collections, whereas the ones with arrows are standard collections constituent of images you manually place therein.

LR auto-populates smart collections based on logic that you set.  So as you go about your normal business of importing, categorising, assessing and generally mucking about with your photos, Lightroom silently goes about sticking them in publishing collections for you. Once you’re happy with what you’ve done, a single button click takes care of it for you.

In this example, I am publishing Food & Drink shots into a Flickr set. Any image with the keyword “Food & Drink”, and which I rate as four star or above is automatically published to the set. I establish these rules in advance, one time, and LR goes on and on, publishing on my behalf. I don’t have to remember which collections, which sets, which rules. The trick here is obviously configuring the Smart Collection rules to your established behaviours.

You are Keywording, right?

LR’s power as a cataloguing tool comes from the right hand panel of the Library module, not the left. If you’ve got a massive folder structure and not much in the way of a Keywords structure, you’re really not making as much of LR as you should be. If you build a keywording structure (read “The DAM Book” by Peter Krogh for more on this, even though he slags off LR as not being good enough for the task), you can build real searchability into your catalogue. After all, a successful workflow isn’t about putting images into your catalogue, it’s about getting them out.

So, the general thrust of this post is this:

• Keyword your images and add meaningful star ratings to them.
• Configure Smart Publishing Collections for specific image types that you want to publish automatically.
• Sit back while Lightroom looks after things for you.