Monthly Archives: February 2023

EXIF tailoring in Lightroom

Lightroom

Another fine plugin from Jeffrey Friedl.

One of the small frustrations in Lightroom is the inability to tailor the display of EXIF data in the Library module. What follows is relevant to the ‘purchase-once’ versions of Lightroom, before Adobe went to a ‘purchase many times’ subscription model. Whether the plugin works with the latter versions I do not know.

Lightroom displays EXIF data in several preset formats but you can bet that the one you want – meaning no blank or redundant fields of information – is not available. The Friedl plugin ….


The plugin viewed in the Lightroom Plugin Manager.

…. allows you to pick and choose which fields are displayed and the display order. Once your changes are saved restart LR to view the effect.

Very handy. Subscription is on the honor system after a 6 week free trial. The full range of Friedl’s plugins can be found here.

Be sure to put the plugin in one of these locations on a Mac:



Where to put the Friedl plugin file.

The Nikon D800

Hardware, Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses

No more Cold Turkey.

‘Cold Turkey’ refers to the process whereby and addict gives up addictive substances in one fell swoop. No weaning, no cutting back, no phasing out. Bang. All at once. The most compelling version of the process can be seen in French Connection II where poor old Gene Hackman is made an addict of heroin by his captors. It’s a disturbing movie and a good one.

And when the iPhone 11 Pro came along I went Cold Turkey with regard to my DSLR, MFT and 35mm film hardware. The Nikon D3x, the D700, the two film bodies – FE2 and F100 – and two Panny GX7 bodies along with a plethora of lenses were all sold, right down to the last lens cap and card reader. In the four years since I have been chugging along (almost) happily with that iPhone and its successor, the iPhone 12 Pro Max. Almost? Well, in a word the ergonomics are indistinguishable from the function of a bilge pump. Both suck. And the reach at the long end is extremely limited.

So the other day finding that I might want a ‘serious’ camera on occasion I reneged on the ‘iPhone only’ commitment and bought a DSLR and lens.


The Nikon D800, introduced in 2012. Mine came with two Nikon batteries
and the ghastly factory strap, quickly replaced with an Upstrap which I found in a drawer.

My D800 body came with a mint 85/1.8 AF-D Nikkor which I immediately resold. Never sell a body with a lens – you will lose money on both, as did my seller.

What is the thinking behind buying a camera discontinued almost a decade ago, along with a 28-300mm VR Nikkor discontinued in 2021? There is a host of good reasons.

Quality: As an upper end Nikon body, the D800 succeeded the fine D700, upping the sensor megapixel count from 12 to 36. Who needs 36 megapixels? See below. The body is robust and the shutter long lived with subsequent iterations (D810, D850) adding little.

Economics: At introduction the D800 retailed for $3,000. The latest Nikon mirrorless digital bodies sell for $2,000 to $5,500 (Z6/II, Z9) and you need the latest Z series lenses to take full advantage of what these offer. By contrast the used D800 I just acquired ran me $525 with a very low shutter count of under 16,000.


Open a snap in Preview for a shutter actuation count.

You can buy beaters with hundreds of thousands of actuations (probably ex realtors, wedding snappers and war types) for just a little less, which seems pretty dumb to me (KEH on the web, Roberts Camera and many others on eBay), especially given the abundant availability of lightly used bodies. I got a mint body and, for another $450, a mint 28-300mm ‘lens for all seasons’ VR Nikon AF-S lens. And I had to splash out another $13 on an SD/CF card reader (the D800 can use one of each) as mine had been sold at the start of the Cold Turkey interlude.

Negligible depreciation: With the D800 having lost over 80% (!) of its original cost in the decade since it was discontinued it’s not going to go much lower very fast. So if I get disillusioned with my purchase it’s out of here for negligible net cost. Same reason I only buy used cars …. every 20 years!

The Nikon F mount: It’s probably fair to say that more lenses were made with the Nikon F mount than with any other. The new mirrorless Z cameras dictate the use of a kludgy adapter with these and you do not get the full functionality of the latest Z optics. But with the Nikon F mount you do get access to some of the finest SLR optics made at ridiculously low cost. My own journey through that cornucopia of choice is best seen here. And all those manual focus Nikkors work with the confirmation light in the viewfinder of the D800, taking the guesswork out of critical focus.The D800 will happily use old screw drive AF-D lenses as well as the latest AF-S optics, not to mention the old and vast range of manual focus lenses.

Weight: The D700 weighed 40ozs, the D3x 50ozs, with the Z6/II and Z9 coming in at 25 and 47ozs (!), respectively. The D800 weighs 35ozs, just 10ozs more than the Z6/II. Not bad.

Cropping: While sensors of 45 megapixels are now common on the high end, the 36 megapixels introduced with the D800 was a revelation. If your lenses are of decent quality then you can extend the long end with cropping rather than carrying extra glass. Here’s a case in point:


D800, 28-300VR at 300mm. ISO 800.


Crop of the above image.

The cropped image is one quarter of the full frame, meaning the focal length equivalent is no less than 1200mm. Handheld. VR is the icing on the cake of the D800’s big sensor. The crop is unprocessed – the minor color fringing and sharpness drop off are easily fixed in Lightroom.

Lightroom: I refuse to ‘upgrade’ to Adobe’s subscription version of Lightroom. I prefer to keep control over my images. My purchased version (6.4) has not been materially improved and natively supports import of D800 RAW files with no special tricks required. All I have to do is plug in my $13 USB3 card reader into the 2010 Mac Pro (still barely improved on by Apple, and adequately powerful to deal with the D800’s large files), with USB3 being a nice way of speedily handling those 70 megapixel uncompressed RAW files. Nice.

In conclusion, if you want a state-of-the-art camera and lens combination, have no issues with buying used, do not wish to spend over $1,000 and lose very little should things not pan out, the D800 with a modern polycarbonate-encased Nikkor AF-S lens is the way to go. And the ergonomics are the best on the market – button placement, feel in the hands, use with gloves, the menu system, and so on.

Geotagging revisited

Lightroom

Works with any digital camera.

‘Geotagging’ refers to the addition of GPS location data to your digital images. While images taken on a cellphone are automatically geotagged, most digital cameras do not provide this facility. Even most of the latest digital cameras are deficient in not providing built-in geotagging in the interest of saving on battery drain, and saving on cost, as no GPS receiver is required. Some manufacturers, like Nikon, will sell you a separate GPS unit conceptually similar to the one linked immediately below.

I last addressed geotagging in 2012 when I attached a GPS receiver to my Nikon D700 and recorded GPS data on a separate data logger, a small storage device carried in the pocket.

I continue to regard geotagging as an important tool when it comes to retrieving old images, a tremendous aid to putting them in a specific time and place.

But there’s an easier and more reliable approach than using a costly hardware dongle, one which does not display the frequent connection loss suffered by the hardware approach described over a decade ago and which will work with any digital image with a time stamp.

While what follows is Apple-centric this approach will work equally well with Android/Windows, when you are not busy rebooting your Windows computer, that is.

Two components are required to geotag your digital images:

  • An iPhone in your pocket – I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro Max
  • A GPS tracking app on that iPhone – I use GPS Tracks, an app that is actively supported

My digital image management software is Lightroom and what follows is Lightroom specific, Mac or Windows. I’m using the last version of non-subscription LR, 6.4. When Adobe changed to a monthly subscription model they dishonestly and purposefully broke the ‘Maps’ module in non-subscription versions of LR so that you can no longer view your picture location in the LR app. They claimed it was changes at Google which irretrievably broke Maps. This was a lie. The real reason they did this was to force owners of the non-subscription version to sign up for a subscription with its monthly toll. A couple of lines of code would have fixed the issue. And yes, it will be a cold day in hell before I change to the subscription model with this dishonest business and lose control over my images.

But we do not need Maps in LR for what follows to work. What you do need is a superb plugin from Jeffrey Friedl, suitably and nerdily named Geoencoding support which comes with a 6 week free use period whereafter an honor system contribution is called for. When you unzip the download file make sure that the file named ‘gps-jfriedl.lrplugin’ is placed in one of these two directories on your Mac. The first is user specific, the second will make the plug-in available to all users of the Mac:



Where to put the Friedl plugin file.

Next, download GPS Tracks to your iPhone and start the app before your photo journey, after first making sure that the time indicated on your digital camera is more or less the same as the time reported by your iPhone. While you do not have to be dead on, the time stamp on your digital image is the one that is used to look up the data generated by GPS Track to determine the GPS coordinates at the time indicated on your digital image.

At the conclusion of your photo journey stop the GPS Tracks application and email yourself the GPX file it has generated. This records GPS coordinates by time. Drag and drop that GPX file from the email onto your Mac’s desktop. GPS Tracks provides a short trial period for data export to work after which the annual subscription cost is $10. Well worth it if you want all your digital images geotagged.

Next, go into LR and go to File->Plug-in Manager, and enable the plugin, thus:



The Friedl plugin enabled.
You can vary what is disclosed in LR from this pane.

Reboot LR for the changes to take effect.

Now download your photos from your digital camera to LR, highlight the ones you want to geotag, and go to File->Plug-in Extras->Geoencode, pointing to the GPS Tracks GPX file on your desktop thus:



The Friedl plugin after geotagging 8 images.

Your images are now geotagged and you can display them in Google Earth using Lightroom, just like you used to be able to do before Adobe broke the Maps module in LR, as follows:



How to display your journey in Google Earth



The GPS track displayed in Google Earth.
The yellow pushpins show where I took photos.

If all of this seems labor-intensive, be assured that it is not. The GPS data logging happens automatically in your iPhone and exporting that file to your desktop and importing it into Lightroom is a matter of seconds.

Advantages: The GPS location system in your iPhone is way superior to the one in that little Nikon DSLR plug in hardware dongle linked at the top of this piece and will work with any digital image with a time stamp.

Disadvantages: Additional battery drain on your iPhone. My 40 minute walk, above, incrementally drained some 6% of the iPhone Pro Max’s battery – call it 9% for every hour of use. Not a lot and if you have an iPhone Pro or Pro Max with the larger battery you are set for a day’s photography with GPS Tracks running all the time. If you need a recharge on the go consider one of those inexpensive pocketable car starter batteries.