Feeling the Need for Speed

I’ve purchased a couple photography related items this week that will hopefully speed up my workflow and help me spend less time in front of a computer.  The first is Lightroom 4.  I learned how to edit in Photoshop back when I started taking pictures.  At this juncture, it’s hard to imagine life without it.  I use it for every single photo I share (whether personal or professional). After using it for so long, it’s become second nature and I never bothered *really* learning how to edit in Lightroom…that is until now. In Lightroom, you can work in batches, so let’s say I take a series of pictures with the same camera settings in the location, I can edit one and then select the others for syncing and my exact same edits will be applied to the others in a matter of seconds, instead of repeating the same steps for each like you’d have to do in Photoshop. I know once I get the hang of it, I’ll finally start giving my personal photos the TLC they deserve, like the ones below from Florida that were edited in Lightroom by yours truly…woo hoo! 

Another purchase (actually upgrade!) that I’m really excited about is BlogStomp. I purchased Version 1 of the application ages ago and never really paid attention to it.  (Side note:  It’s amazing the amounts of money I’ve spent over the years on photography items that never get used, but that’s its very own blog post!) BlogStomp lets you resize for web, watermark, sharpen your photos and make collages! I had no idea about this last piece until a photographer friend mentioned it to me this week and since I often use diptychs in my posts, this will be an especially useful tool. The collage above was created with the application in a matter of seconds.  This would have easily taken me 10-15 minutes to recreate in Photoshop. If that’s not wonderful enough, the new version of BlogStomp (hence the upgrade) allows you to post your images directly to your blog, Facebook or Twitter account, eliminating yet another step in my workflow. I’ll spend less time on the computer and more time doing what I love best: shooting!