Fun with Google Earth

Photographs

Overlays add high quality pictures.

I popped over to Paris this morning, the flight taking just a few seconds, courtesy of Google Earth.

After all, if you are sightseeing, why not start with the most beautiful city on earth?

The small track ball on my Apple Mighty Mouse functions as a zoom control – neat.

Click on one of the menus on the left and an overlay is added showing links to photographs:

Click on one of the little camera logos and you get the photograph – and yes, whoever put up that awful skyscraper really should be shot:

For art museums the links provide details on the art work selected. Plus you can upload your own photographs! Some of the linked photographs are great, some plain lousy. There’s web democracy for you.

A great way of looking at pictures.

I amused myself by zipping from the home where I grew up in London to my present location – too bad they didn’t take this one when the vines were in season.

You can download Google Earth here – it’s free. And remember, no looking at the Pentagon now or Big Brother will start watching you.

Update – March 10, 2008 – you thought I was kidding?

The Pentagon just announced that they will not let Google Earth film their locations.

You can imagine the conversation in Osama’s pad.

“Hey, Ahmed, this one’s blurred out. Must be military. Let’s bomb it.”

And we trust these people with our country’s defense? At least they read this blog – does that mean I should be scared? Honest, all I do is grow grapes at my place.

Lightroom defaults

Lightroom

Don’t forget to set these correctly.

One slightly frustrating thing about Lightroom’s menu structure is that preferred settings for how the application looks and behaves are all over the place. You would expect to see everything under Lightroom->Preferences, but that is far from the case. A last vestige of the truly frightful user interface enjoyed by Photoshop users for years.

I tend to prefer a really stripped down, minimalist look to the screen interface, opting for a minimum of distractions on the screen. Once you learn some of the most useful one-key short-cuts, then you will no longer need the top Apple menu or much of what clutters the side panels.

In the Develop module I right click on the left sidebar and choose to show only the Library and Folders. I have little use for Find, Collections, Keywords or Metadata Tags, so these are switched off. You cannot get rid of the Navigator selection at the top, but the very irritating flashing of the small picture preview as you go through pictures in the Grid view can be hidden by clicking on the small arrow to the left of the word ‘Navigator’. Because my photography is thematic, I do use Folders and sub-Folders named after the theme in question which, with my limited volume of pictures, works for me when trying to find something. Others will opt for keywording and dated folders. Here’s how my left panel looks in the Develop module:

The right panel is similarly stripped down – I have little use for Keywording or Metadata:

Like ‘switching’ can be accomplished in the other modules.

Much as I laud and respect the team which authored Lightroom, I do not need to be reminded of their names each time I boot the product, so I switch the display panel off by unchecking the first box under Lightroom->Preferences->General, like so:

In Lightroom->Preferences->Interface I get rid of the bizarre antique ‘Panel End Mark’ which Lightroom shows by default at the base of each panel, thus:

Now in File->Catalog Settings on the General tab, Lightroom comes with automatic file back-ups every thirty days switched on. First, 30 days makes no sense if you use the application more frequently. Your failing hard disk will not conveniently wait until your last back-up before blowing up. Second, if you are not making daily back-ups to a secure external drive, you are simply living dangerously. So I use SuperDuper! to make a daily bootable clone on an external Firewire disk and switch off this (now useless) choice, electing ‘Never’:

Still in the File->Catalog Settings menu choice in the Library (Grid) view, this time under the File Handling tab, Lightroom comes preset to discard 1:1 Previews after 30 days. Odd. It takes for ever to generate these when you import a lot of pictures and with the small increase in storage (my 40gB picture catalog creates a 6gB preview catalog) and given the vast increase in speed that 1:1 Previews add to the Develop process, you most certainly want to keep these. The third drop-down box is set to ‘Never’:

Next in File->Catalog Settings under the Metadata tab I leave the factory defaults for Metadata alone:

However, were I in the habit of frequent round trips to Photoshop and if I wanted my Lightroom edits to be automatically reflected in the Photoshop image, I would check the third box (‘Automatically write changes into XMP’) above. Otherwise, Photoshop will simply show the RAW unprocessed image in the database or the image as it was last saved. On those (rare) occasions where I do round trip to Photoshop I will do a file save (Command-S on a Mac) before round tripping, thus forcing Photoshop to show any Lightroom edits in its displayed image. If you check this box as a default, Lightroom will slow down as every change gets saved to disk. You don’t want that unless you are running on a Cray mainframe and work at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Meaning you have a super fast machine.

Finally, to get rid of the top white menu, I switch it off as explained here.

Now I have the lean and mean user interface I prefer.

A good try

Photography

But no cigar.

I have said it before.

Any self respecting photographer should have a subscription to Vanity Fair.

Sure, they confuse amateur hour politics with photography, but I don’t buy it for their perennial bashing of anything that is right of center. I can get that on the nine o’clock news, free.

No, the magazine is a great showcase for photography, never better than with their annual Hollywood Issue which comes out right before the Oscars.

This year the photo essay is an attempt to recreate the most famous scenes from Hitchcock’s movies – Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Marnie, Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, Vertigo, To Catch a Thief, Psycho, Lifeboat, The Birds and my favorite, North by Northwest. You know the scenes.

The sets are fabulous, the evidence of hard work and attention to detail abundant. Astonishing in many ways.

Yet the whole thing is a failure and the reason is that the actors posing in the picture are – well, it’s really what they are not.

What they are not is Cary Grant, James Stewart, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Eve Marie Saint and so on.

That’s some sort of commentary on the lost era of glamour that was Hollywood. Just take a look at the snap of the North by Northwest recreation where the hero is being chased by the crop dusting plane. VF says they even tracked down the tailor who made the suit worn in the movie and had him make a replica. The actor has a spare tire of some 20lbs excess weight around his stomach and looks like nothing so much as an ad for a Big Mac and fries. Cary Grant must be spinning in his grave.

Nonetheless, a brave try by some fine photographers. Get the magazine. Whether you look at the commissioned photos or the advertisements, you are in for a treat. Just avoid the editorials.

Lightroom Tutorials

Lightroom

Go to the source.

I came across some outstanding tutorials on Lightroom in video format, authored by George Jardine, a member of the Lightroom development team at Adobe.

Click here for an index.

If you do nothing else, download and watch the one titled The Lightroom Catalog – Part 1, or “Where Are My Pictures?” which is definitive on how Lightroom stores files. Without a proper understanding of this you risk loss of files which are stored in disparate Lightroom catalogs.

There are also a lot of useful Podcasts from the Adobe team in the iTunes store, all free. Many are in video format and feature interviews with famous photographers like Peter Turner, Eric Meola, Jay Maisel and Jerry Uelsmann.

While we are at it, I have found an even simpler way of switching off all the panels that Lightroom displays to allow uncluttered picture preview. Simply hit the Tab key on a Mac. Tab again to restore. Finally, to remove the menu bar at the top, go into this menu selection and, henceforth, the menu bar will only appear on a mouse-over:

There does not appear to be a way of doing this from the keyboard. (A reader has corrected me – refer to Comment #1 – the ‘F’ key does this – thank you, Alastair).

Here is the result:

A great picture of a great man

Photographs

The greatest engineer of the Victorian age.

Because so much of it is so very special, I have been reading up on railways and railway architecture.

Huh? Railway architecture?

Can you say Grand Central station in Manhattan – maybe the greatest interior in America? St. Pancras or King’s Cross in London? The gorgeous Ouse Valley viaduct in Sussex?

The supports for the Ouse Valley viaduct, 1841. Can you say ‘Perfection’?

One of the facts disclosed in my reading is that most of the world’s railways run on 4′ 8.5″ spaced rails. Known, to this day, as the Stephenson Standard, after the great Victorian railway engineer. How did he come up with that? His wife’s height? Some personal recollection? A dictate of mine engineering where he got his start? It seems to bear no resemblance to known measures, Imperial or Metric. (Please refer to Comment #2 for the solution – thank you, Alex!) I learned also that the giant amongst Victorian engineers, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (what a name!) refused to compromise with the limp-wristed Stepehnson Standard. Compromise was not a word in Brunel’s vocabulary. When he designed the Great Western Railway its was no less than a seven foot gauge. His tracks would run the largest locomotives and would be the most stable.

This refusal to compromise, his drive, determination, individuality and commitment, is what distinguished him in an already distinguished group of great engineers. Today you see that rarely – Steve Jobs is an obvious example.

Here’s the picture – you doubtless know it – maybe the greatest industrial portrait of a powerful man ever made. A man with no fear of getting his hands dirty. An engineer’s engineer.

The backdrop comprises the chains used to launch the Great Eastern iron ship
down the slipway. (Photographer by Robert Howlett, 1857.)

Today, everyone is a ‘team member’. The order taker at MacDonald’s. The Target sales clerk. The smug coffee maker behind the Starbucks counter. The workers at Nikon and Canon and Dell and Microsoft. All seeking to avoid accountability by hiding within the ‘team’.

Not so with I. K. Brunel. He took huge risks, had huge failures. And greater successes. What a man. What a photograph.

The ultimate book of railway photography while we are on the topic? None other than O. Winston Link’s.