If you’re sick and tired of first having to output the JPEGs at the right size etc. from Lightroom, and then using whatever random tool is out there to upload to flickr, smugmug, zenfolio, etc., then there is hope for you thanks to Jeffrey Friedl:

http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies

There you will find numerous very well crafted plugins to Lightroom to upload from Lightroom’s “export” function.

Not only do these plugins take care of uploads, but they can also plug in things like “keywords”, “groups”, and other useful meta-data. They’re also remarkably bug free for a 1 person endeavor.

Highly recommended. Now if he just made a “photo.net” uploader!

I’m not a pro, though I’ve shot more weddings than I’ve ever wanted as favors for friends. Some things I’ve learned are:

1. Figure out in advance when you’re going to take the posed shots and make sure that time is solidly allocated and your subjects aren’t going to be agitated because they want/need to run to something else.
2. Ask the client up front what shots they want to make sure you don’t miss something they specifically want. Plan out in your head what’s coming next – the kiss, the cake cut, etc. so that you’re not fumbling with battery or media changes during a critical moment. Fire like crazy when those shots come up because it increases your chance of a good hit.
3. Put a wide lens on one camera and a long one on the other. You need to be ready for any situation. That also allows you to swap the lenses if needed.
4. Check with both the pastor/priest/etc. and the client before the wedding to find out what you’re allowed to do during the ceremony. Nothing rots worse than to find out that you’re not allowed to use flash or have them annoyed because you got too close to the pulpit. Find out and be prepared (incidentally exactly both of these have happened to me).
5. Check out the lighting situation before the wedding to make sure you know how you’ll handle the light or lack thereof.
6. Be prepared to be treated like “the help”. You may be the bride/groom’s friend, but most people probably won’t know that. Usually someone thinks you’re getting paid and treats you accordingly.
7. MAKE SURE YOUR CAMERA CLOCKS ARE SYNCHRONIZED! If not, it can be a lot of work to fix and totally breaks the image sorting later.
8. Be prepared for a lot of post-processing fun to try to match up a images if you’re shooting with two different makes of cameras. The sensor output (“look”) can be significantly different between models/makes and placing them in the same album can be problematic.
9. Batteries, batteries, batteries! I suggest using rechargeable because they recycle much faster, but regardless, make sure you have enough of them and if rechargeable, a plan on how to recharge them.
10. Memory – it goes fast. Make sure you have enough. Consider getting a portable backup hard drive unit. Personally I back up to two separate ones to make sure that if one chooses to die, I have a second copy.
11. Figure out where you’re going to station you equipment. You’re going to potentially have a lot of expensive stuff and it can either be in the way, not convenient, or causing you to be distracted because you’re worrying about theft. Figuring it out on the fly can be a major distraction.
12. As soon as you’ve downloaded the images, back them up securely to additional media. Nothing can cause a group of people to hate you more than to screw this up. Remember, this is someone’s wedding, you get it wrong and your name is “Mud” (and/or will be known as the person who “ruined” their wedding).
13. Make sure you have good flashes. You’re going to need the output.
14. Don’t practice high ISO shots for the first time during a wedding. Make sure you understand the pluses and minuses and what works and doesn’t work. High ISO can be a savior, but particularly in high contrast shots, it can look ugly as all get out. It also is difficult sometimes to match to other shots in any album.
15. Take many multiples of group shots, frankly any posed shots. The LCD preview is a good start, but too small to catch all the possible ways your subjects can screw up an image. Those eyes may look open, but they still look ugly and off.
16. Constantly check that you haven’t bumped or accidentally changed your settings. Nothing sucks more than to realize you’ve been set at maximum aperture with no depth of field because you didn’t realize you knocked the command dial. ALWAYS keep reminding yourself to set back any custom changes like exposure adjustments or ISO changes. It bites to realize you’ve been a half stop down on every picture 200 shots later. This leads to…
17. Shoot RAW. You have a lot more options and hope if things are off or you screw up. JPEGs do not have a lot of latitude. Of course if you shoot RAW, plan a weekend worth of adjustments and processing!
18. Test all your equipment well before and the day of. It really sucks to find you’re one flash down 20 minutes before the wedding. A stupid little forgotten cable can throw a huge wrench in your plans (or mounting plate, as was my case).
19. Figure out where you’re going to take the posed shots and what poses you want. You look like an amateur if you’re doing this on the fly.
20. Act confident and your subjects will believe you actually know what you’re doing. Don’t act confident, and things can get out of hand.
21. Make sure your deodorant is up to snuff, you’re going to sweat running around in a suit.
22. Figure out as early as possible who’s with the bride, who’s with the groom, who’s the mother, the father, the best man, etc. etc. You’re going to need this information to properly case the shots. Doing this on the fly risks error and even possibly insulting someone and can certainly make you look like an amateur.
23. Make sure you don’t favor one family or another in your shots. At the reception take advantage of the seating to make sure you get just about everyone. That way they won’t complain that precious old Uncle Arnold got missed or have one of the families complaining that they were ignored.
24. Have a sense of humor. You’re going to need it. It also helps lighten the mood and get people to smile, which of course is half the battle.

I learned many of these the hard way, which is why you couldn’t pay me to do weddings!

Unfortunately people don’t, but I do them anyway…

This is some of the best (mostly) natural light wedding photography I’ve ever seen:

http://meninenuotrauka.lt/

Somewhere in Lithuania I believe. Very impressive.

So you’ve upgraded your Fuji S5 firmware to the latest and greatest, yet you aren’t totally satisfied. How do you get the old version?

Go to:

http://download.fujifilm.co.jp/pub/tools/s5pro/v<VERSION>/FPUPDATE.DAT

where “<VERSION>” is replaced by the version youi want minus the dots. So, for version 1.09 it’d be:

http://download.fujifilm.co.jp/pub/tools/s5pro/v109/FPUPDATE.DAT

(don’t forget the “v” in front  of the version number).

Incidentally, rather than using their software to copy the update, the easiest way is to copy the downloaded “FPUPDATE.DAT” to the top level of your compact flash card, and then upgrade following Fuji’s normal instructions (make sure you have a charged battery and power on with the “BACK” button pushed down).

Despite claims from Fuji otherwise, you can also downgrade by copying an old “FPUPDATE.DAT” on the card and using the same “update” directions.

Many thanks to “acrystalball” for publishing this on the DPReview Fuji SLR Forum.

LIFE and Google have teamed together to create an archive of millions of LIFE images stretching from the 1750s to modern times:

http://images.google.com/hosted/life

The images are stored at remarkably high resolution and most were never published.

It really is a pretty astounding archive.

On the other hand, it looks like LIFE will be creating some sort of archive of their own here:

http://www.life.com/Life

Perhaps the two will be merged someday…

Many have noted that Fuji S5’s NP-150 battery is externally the same as the Nikon EN-EL3e. This of course makes sense since the Fuji S5 is a customized Nikon D200 body. However, the two batteries are not compatible as they output different voltages and have a different chip on board. If you try to place the Fuji in the Nikon camera or vice-versa, the cameras won’t work.

The chargers on the other hand look identical, and have the exact same output specifications, so some have said the two are compatible. That is, you can use a Nikon MH-18a charger with the Fuji NP-150 battery and/or the Fuji BC-150 charger with the Nikon EN-EL3e battery.  If you insert the other manufacturer’s battery in the opposing unit, they do in fact appear to charge.

So, the question is, is this a good idea?

After a conversation with Steve, a very friendly and helpful rep at at Fuji Pro Repair who verified this for me, the answer is no, you should not interchangeably use the two chargers. Apparently because of the difference in chipping of the two, you will damage either the battery or the charger.

Some claim to have successfully interchanged the two chargers, however this is discouraged by Fuji and they specifically say could damage your equipment

UPDATE:

“puddleduck” (aka Andy) at DPReview indicates that he has never actually used the Fuji charger in all the years he’s had the S5. In fact he’s never opened the package and only used a Nikon charger and it has always functioned correctly. Anecdotally speaking, it sounds like the people at Fuji are just being cautious.

I guess each will have to make their own decision here.

One of the advantages of digital photography is you can shoot and print your own passport photos. However it’s not always clear what the rules are. Fortunately the State Department has a useful site on this:

http://travel.state.gov/passport/guide/guide_2081.html

In particular you need to know how to place the “face” in the image, which is outlined here:

http://travel.state.gov/passport/guide/composition/composition_874.html

This is also useful because the same format is used for things like International Licenses.

If you live in the Upper Valley, or even if you don’t since they do mail order, a great company still handling slide/E-6 processing is “Slide Specialists”:

http://www.slidespecialists.com

They also handle C-41 (negative) processing, artwork photography, drum scanning, large format fine-art giclee printing, and other digital printing.

Most of all they are an extremely friendly bunch and a great source of photographic knowledge. I’m not sure exactly how long they’ve been in business, but they’ve been a great source as long as I’ve been shooting (20+ years now). Highly recommended.

One of the great features of Firefox 3 is that it now natively supports color management. However, for some reason by default it is disabled (well, it actually makes sense – see caveat below).

To enable it:

• Enter the url “about:config“
• If prompted that you are risking Armageddon, say “Ok” anyway.
• Find the key “gfx.color_management.enabled”.
• Click on it until it changes to “true” (note the line should turn “bold” when enabled).

Note this caveat from the mozillaZine entry on the subject:

Without a properly calibrated monitor and a correct color profile, color management may actually make colors look worse.

For those of us with calibrated monitors, it’s pretty handy though. The only problem is you’re definitely not going to see what uncalibrated users are going to see if you’re posting photos et al!

As an additional note, you may want to investigate the variable “gfx.color_management.display_profile” as well. According to the mozillaZine entry by default the color profile used is the system default, or if not set sRGB. If you’re doing something funky (ie: not setting the system default) you may need to muck with this.

You will need to restart Firefox after you make the change(s).

UPDATE:

There’s actually an easier tool (plugin) to work with here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/policy/0/6891/30686

to change these settings without going into “about:config”. The only problem is because it’s beta, Mozilla.org requires you to register first. Also, it’s not totally intuative how you actually use it. Once installed (I’m going to assume you know how to install Firefox plugins) you actually have to:

1. Select “Tools / Add-ons”, which brings  up “Add-ons” window listing all your Firefox plugins.
2. Find the “Color Management” tool (should be on top since you just installed it).
3. Select “Options”, which will bring up “Color Management Preferences”.
4. Select (check) “Enabled” and if necessary, fill in “Set Color Profile”. Usually you don’t need to set the later since your default color profile should already be set when you ran your profiling/calibration software.

I would also note that turning on color management has its minuses. Any image that doesn’t have a color profile embedded (which is most GIFs for instance) will be converted into your default monitor color space. That may create a ugly color shift you’re not expecting. For things with profiles embedded, you’ll see what the author intended, but otherwise, you may not!

If you’re a Fuji DSLR shooter like myself, particularly a Fuji S5 shooter, you’ve probably discovered that if you shoot RAW, space on your hard drives disappears rather quickly. Unless you’ve got a mighty speedy workflow and can get your RAFs off the disk in a hurry, a space crunch is practically inevitable.

Without actually moving them to another media, there are basically three sane tacks:

1. Compress the drive or directory the RAW files live on.
2. Convert the files to DNG format.
3. Use Fuji’s HS-V3 to convert to the files to compressed RAF.

#1 doesn’t yield a huge amount of compression as it’s geared to linear data rather than photos. #2 works great, but leaves your images limited to what RAW converters can handle them. In particular Fuji’s HS-V3 (HyperUtility Software version 3) can’t currently handle the DNGs, which is important to me since arguably HS-V3 does the best conversion job (even if it’s too painful in my opinion for regular use).

So, that leaves option #3. The problem with option #3 is you have to use HS-V3 to do the conversion. Not only is HS-V3 klunky in this regards, it can be extremely slow because the “RAW FILE COMPRESSOR” continually communicates with HS-V3’s management interface to redraw the RAFs as they are compressed. This makes the compressing take even longer and consumes more cycles on the PC, making it difficult to multi-task.

The answer is actually fairly simple. It turns out the “RAW FILE COMPRESSOR” is a standalone application. You can easily add it to your desktop or “Start” menu by creating a shortcut (note of course, this is Windows – if you’re Mac, well, I’m sorry you’ll have to figure this out yourself).

Creating a “Start” menu shortcut is a bit beyond the scope of this document, however creating a desktop shortcut is simple and if you do want a “Start” menu shortcut, you can always drag the desktop shortcut to your “Start” menu.

So here’s what you do:

• Right click the desktop.
• Choose “New / Shortcut”
• When the “Shortcut” dialog pops up select “Browse”.
• Navigate in the “Browse For Folder” to “My Computer / Local Disk (C:) / HyperUtility / HELPERS” and select “RAFCOMP.EXE”. Then click “OK” at the bottom. Note “Local Disk (C:)” may vary depending on how you installed Windows (it is also of course possible you didn’t put HyperUtility in the default directory).
• You will drop back to the “Create Shortcut” dialog and it will have the “RAFCOMP.EXE” path inserted into the “location of the item”. Click “Next” on the bottom to continue.
• In “Type a name for this shortcut” replace “RAFCOMP.EXE” with a reasonable name. I put “Fuji RAW File Compressor” as my value.
• Select “Finish” at the bottom of the dialog.

Ok, so this creates a shortcut for the RAW File Compressor on your desktop (graphic is a vise), now what do you do?

Well, you run it. Double click to start it up. You’ll see that it brings up the same dialog as the compressor would if you ran it out of HS-V3. The thing is, what Fuji doesn’t tell you is you can drag and drop to this tool. So, open an “Windows Explorer” and find the RAF files you want to compress. Select them (using some combination of <CTRL> or <SHIFT> keys) and drag and drop them onto the compressor. They automatically get added to the compress list.

You can drag and drop as many as you want from various directories, even putting different directories into the same batch. Once you click “Convert” the compressor smartly handles these correctly and creates a “COMPRESS_1” subdirectory under each directory where the RAF files were stored. This “COMPRESS_1” directory contains the compressed RAF files. Usually I just drag the completed files right over the originals, letting it overwrite. Compression is roughly 50%.

By the way, you can even add files while it’s compressing, and it will handle those files correctly as well. Unlike running it out of HS-V3 it doesn’t endlessly try to redraw screens, it’s just a utility compressor in this state, just as it should be (well, at least in my opinion).

It actually turns out that it’s fairly easy to add to your “Send To” menu as well, but that seems to be limited to about 35 items per “Send To”, so I didn’t find it worth the effort.

One last note, just as many converters don’t handle Fuji DNGs, many also don’t handle compressed RAF, so there’s a bit of a trade off here. Capture One doesn’t, nor does DxO. My two favorite converters for Fuji do – Lightroom and HS-V3. Lightroom can also convert the “compressed RAF” to a DNG, which may give you a few more options (in my tests the conversion of a “compressed RAF” to DNG was the exact equivalent of a vanilla RAF to DNG – the compression is redone in DNG’s format). Capture One says they’ll handle Fuji DNGs some day, but it hasn’t shown up in a few revs already.

UPDATE:

As “dlbogdan” pointed out on DPReview, you can get similar compression levels out of WinZip or 7-Zip. Here’s some result testing with 27 RAF files with both S&R pixels (ie: 24mb RAFs):

• 638 mb total for the originals (uncompressed)
• 329 mb total for the Fuji Compressed RAF format
• 421 mb when zipped into a ZIP archive using WinZip in default WinZip 2.0 compatibility mode
• 323 mb when zipped into a “7z” archive using 7-Zip
• 324 mb when zipped into a ZIP archive using WinZip with compression set to “Optimize for best compression”

The issue for me is that neither Lightroom nor HS-V3 can see into any of these other archive formats (ie: “.ZIP” or “.7z”). That means you have to unpack and re-pack to work with them. Supposedly HS-V2 could actually browse the WinZip 2.0 compatible archives, but unfortunately HS-V2 can’t handle Fuji S5 RAW files (HS-V2 only handles Fuji S2 RAF files plus a few older Fuji bridge cameras).

However, given that you preserve the original uncompressed RAF format in these archives formats, it may be worth the trade off. Using WinZip with say “Optimize for best compression” means that the RAW files will be usable by all converters that understand Fuji S5 format for the forseeable future.

UPDATE 2:

One question that also came up on DPReview from “acrystalball” (aka Crystal) is, “Is the Fuji RAW compression ‘destructive’?” The answer is, I don’t know – the HS-V3 help files don’t indicate one way or another. My personal guess is “no”. Certainly I have seen no degredation and given that there is in fact only 12 megapixels of RAW data, I would expect a much smaller RAW file by default than the 24 mb the S5 outputs. Thus, I think there is plenty of room to non-destructively compress.

UPDATE 3:

It also looks like SilkyPix handles compressed RAFs, which apparently a “free” version also exist:

http://www.isl.co.jp/SILKYPIX/english/download

However it’s pretty severely limited over the for-pay version.

UPDATE 4:

“itt” (as in “Cousin”) at DPReview made some other notes based on this post:

• Files can be dragged from Lightroom and Adobe Bridge directly into the Fuji compressor.
• BreezeBrowser does show thumbnails and can export the embedded JPEG from compressed RAFs (to note, from what I can tell any app that can handle uncompressed RAFs can actually see the thumbnail and embedded JPEG in compressed RAFs, though they may not be able to actually open the RAF and/or process it).
• It’s much easier to create a shortcut by dragging the “RAFCOMP.EXE” binary while holding the right mouse button to the desktop. This automatically creates a shortcut. Note make sure that you’re holding the right mouse button otherwise you will drag the actual binary to your desktop, removing it from the location it would normally run out of (and potentially breaking things!)!
• Earlier he also pointed out that “s7raw“, a free Fuji converter, also handles compressed RAFs.