studio day

Original plan was to shoot outside but rainy weather once again changed plans. Long but good day at studio with three totally different styles, including the one with white furry hat. Photos & video can be found here.

Lightroom 4

Got the Lightroom 4 upgrade. I have edited first set of photos with it and changes in develop module takes some time to get used to. New 2012 develop module feels to be giving better end results than old fill light/recovery sliders that created noticeable halos in extreme values.

I have heard & read mixed comments about the performance. Some say LR 4 is faster, while others complains it to be slower than previous version. With small catalog and fast machine, where I first tested it, software was really fast & responsive to use. Interesting to see how it will handle my bigger catalog with 50k+ photos.

Too bad about the catalog import bug that loses some of the custom point curve values when moving LR 3 catalog to LR 4. I think I will be waiting 4.1 update before importing my main catalogs for LR 4.

Update 30.3.2012 :  LR 4.1 update is coming to fix the point curve bug. Yei!

Lens statistics

It was interesting to check Lightroom lens metadata statistics from the main catalog. By looking just the numbers, 24-70mm/f2.8 is my most used lens with over 11000 photos in the catalog. 50mm/f1.8 comes really close by having only 1000+ shots less taken with it. For me, surprising parts were the big amount of photos taken with super wide angle lens (Sigma 10-20mm) and that I have taken almost as many photos with 35mm/f2 than with 50mm/f1.8.

Photos in 0mm category are from MF lenses or corrupted images where camera lens info was lost from file. Yes, that can happen when memory card gets corrupted.

While I think lenses are not that critical for making the images, I like to test them. Especially when there is opportunity to test some special gear like MC ARAX 35mm/f2 or long telephoto lenses. I own only few of the lenses in the list and by looking statistics I could make most of my images just with 24-70mm zoom and one longer prime.