Let Adobe Tell You What To Do

Well, let's be honest with ourselves - they've been doing that since their first Photoshop program. And we've grumbled about it as we learned what their odd words and commands meant. But this time Adobe can give us good advice. A lot of people use Lightroom to process their images - even if they do not fiddle with them later in any of the other Adobe programs. They get up a library of whatever the latest shoot is, throw out the duds, and clean up the rest. Then they sort and send the resultant images to other areas for storage, printing, or delivery. The lucky people who have discovered Loupedeck + do this with great ease and can power through large jobs a lot faster than the mouse jockeys. Ask me, I know. The best day I had in the last decade was the one when I saw the Loupedeck+ at a PhotoLive event. I watched a friend buy one and when I knew it wasn't dangerous, I followed suit. CE sell 'em...just saying. Plug done, it's back to Adobe Lightroom. For years now I've looked at the Library, wrangled the images in the Develop section, and exported the goods to my storage. But I've not really paid attention to the shooting data - and to what it tells me. In truth, it tells me more about what I do than I know - and one of the things I could well pay attention to is the record it makes of the shooting data. Several cases in point have come up one weekend as I took committee stills for a dance school: a. The shutter speed I used was 1/30 of a second. The images have just that tiny hint of movement, but not enough to cancel their charm. I guess years of rifle and pistol shooting have paid off - I can hand-hold at 1/30 of a second. Probably come in handy for train robbing as well... b. The aperture was f:5. Just barely down from the maximum of the zoom lens used, but down far enough to get the eyes and most of the headdresses in focus. c. The ISO was way up the wazoo - the noise and luminescence recovery section was definitely needed, but the old X-Pro1 sensor held up very well. d. The focal length of the zoom lens used was recorded for each shot. And this is where the Adobe gold is to be found. It tells me the exact number, and if I enter these against the entire shoot I can see which are the most common settings used. I'll bet there is some geek's button you can press to do this automatically, but in my case I just totted things up and compared them and I ended up with the most used range. This is a mere fraction of the capability of the lens on the camera - which suggests to me that I need to change lenses. I need a Fujifilm or other lens ( and who knows...) that will shoot from about 23mm up to 35mm. If it can do so with a big maximum aperture...that I can stop down to f:3.5 or 4 and get crisp resolution...I'll have the perfect optic. For me. You do your own research - everyone of us is an individual shooter who can fine-tune their outfit to meet their needs and suit their own vision.