OK, doing a little more apres-ski photography this afternoon and this odd scene came up.

The real accomplishment of the weekend, though, was a thorough revamping of my website using the LRB Portfolio plugin for Lightroom. It has a few limitations — I wouldn’t want to do a huge site on it, and there’s a surprise and poorly documented gotcha about saving your work — but for the price (10 euro) it’s excellent. Once I’m sure I’ve got the content under control, I’ll devote a little more time to appearance; I want to spend some time with Adobe’s kuler.

At this point, in all honesty, color tweaking the site is probably a time-waster. What I need to do next is start marketing my work, with a vengeance. One of those things I know how to do — and don’t much look forward to doing.

photo: Face in the Window, 2009

Since a painful arm injury three months ago, I’ve discovered the joys of Windows Speech Recognition—a built in program in Microsoft’s Vista operating system.  My arm still hasn’t healed—the hazards of a lifetime of keyboard work—but even when it does I will probably continue to dictate to the computer.  It’s wonderful to run the computer without touching it.  Kind of mystical, almost like talking to Hal on “2001.”

What you do is, talk into a headset microphone in a pretty normal and rapid tone of voice.  It almost seems like the faster, the better, as the computer does a better job following along when you don’t stop.

So, in fact, I’m sitting back in my chair at this moment dictating this blog post.

What’s this got to do with photography?  Not clear—but somehow I can imagine controlling the camera someday in the future by voice.

Scenic mode:

“Take a picture of that sunset!”

Portrait mode:

“Shallow depth of field. Low ISO. Focal length 80. Snap.”

After writing a story for the newspaper about using speech recognition software, I got an e-mail from a woman—a quadriplegic—who uses WSR to run a computer in the nursing home where she lives.  Just think: she could be a voice photographer, documenting her rather different life.  I’m going to see her on Friday.

photo: Winter cabbage, 2009

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at a panoramic photograph for a while, but was under the impression — mistaken, it seems — that the process is complicated. It’s not, at least in my ancient copy of Photoshop Elements 2.0.

The shot above was stitched together in about 17 seconds from three handheld photos from the orchard. I exported them at screen resolution from Lightroom, so there wasn’t too much processing involved.

Next step: a print.

photo: The back porch, 2009

Working with Lightroom for the last couple of days has been quite an inspiration.  Unlike the ungainly Photoshop, Lightroom is actually designed with photographers in mind and is practically as easy to use as Google Picasa.

The great thing is that Lightroom offers localized adjustments without going through all of the pain of creating layer masks.  That means you can do traditional darkroom style burning and dodging, but you can also do much more along the same lines: amping up saturation on that tree, for example, or brightening that face.  It’s that kind of work that is the difference between snapshots and real photographs.  Almost every photo straight out of the camera, whether shot on film or digitally, can use this kind of tweaking to enhance its structure — even if “perfectly” exposed.

Lightroom just makes it easier.

This photograph, taken today in our pasture, was dull and flat straight out of the camera, even with extra saturation.  Besides increasing the saturation even more, I created an exposure gradient in order to darken the sky.  I brightened a couple of the trees in the background and heightened the value on the younger green trees in the middle ground.

In some ways I think it all may be too much—but I like it, anyway.

photo: Forest and pasture, 2009

After a couple days of hard thinking, I’ve decided to keep the Pentax K20D and the 16-50/2.8 zoom. The autofocus, after some practice, actually isn’t as bad as I first thought (though it’s a lot slower than Canon). But overall I love the camera, for its handling, quality feel, and great images.

I also spent some time today shooting with my old SMC-M 135/3.5 lens, which was fun. It’s a sharp piece of glass and very light in weight.

And the other news is on the software front: I’ve been playing with Adobe Lightroom on free trial. Very impressive. May have to buy it.

photo: Sunrise over the forest, 2009