News from Rod Barbee Photography

October 2013

Rod Barbee Photography Newsletter

Greetings

So wow. Autumn is here. How did that happen? I guess this surprise (I was surprised by the arrival of summer too) is a side effect of getting older. Or wine. Or older wine.
No matter. It's here and it happens to be my favorite time of the year. The days are cooler, the bugs are deader, and the colors are prettier. Plus there's the added benefit of not needing to mow the lawn as often.

And the autumn also ushers in the the time when I look forward to checking off items on my winter to-do list. The very same list I've been working on for the last 10 years or so.
To review, my winter to-do list includes (and has included for the last ten years or so) going through my two four-drawer filing cabinets full of slides and throwing most of those slides away. Maybe it'll actually happen this winter.

This autumn is also turning out to be a good one for chanterelle mushrooms in the woods near our home. Bailey and I picked about four or five pounds of them the other day and there are lots more back there in the woods.
Also, I'm glad I have my little Garmin etrex 30 gps.

Adobe's Photoshop Photography Program

You've probably all heard about Adobe's Creative Cloud and how Photoshop is now sold only on a subscription basis. The normal price (for just Photoshop) is $19.95/mo. That's pretty steep considering I've been used to upgrading every other year for $200 at a time. Now they want me to pay $240 each year? No thanks. So instead I was able to find the Photoshop CS6 upgrade and bought that instead, considering that it was the last time I'd be able to do that.
And now Adobe, having heard the howls and teeth gnashing from the photographic community, is running a "limited time" offer for those upgrading from Photoshop CS3 or newer. Right now, through their Photoshop Photography Program, you can get Photoshop CC and Lightroom 5 together for just $9.99/mo.
If I hadn't just spent $200 on the CS6 upgrade I would seriously consider taking them up on this offer, even though I already have Lightroom 5. As it is, I'm just sitting hear howling and gnashing my teeth.

note: since I first wrote this (just yesterday) the standard price for Photoshop CC seems to have been changed to $9.99/mo. Not bad, actually.

Olympic 2014

Just a heads up on next year's Olympic National Park workshop I'm leading with Don Mammoser. As of right now, nearly half the spaces are spoken for. Now I'm not one who normally exclaims "Act fast before this chance gets away from you!"
Just saying: it's nearly half full already.

Search and Replace file renaming in Lightroom

Ever need to rename files in Lightroom? Sure you do. Lightroom's renaming utility is pretty powerful, but there are things it can't do, like search and replace. Do you need to change one character or string of characters into something else? Let's say you use meaningful words in your filenames. Perhaps you were photographing in my favorite national park, Olympic, and you wanted to include "olympic" in your file name. Only you accidently spelled olympic as olympia, a common mistake. But you've just name 526 files with "olympia". What to do? What. To. Do?

You could rename them one at a time. Not likely. You could use one of the many file naming utilities available for Windows or Mac. But that's renaming outside of Lightroom and that's a no-no if you want to keep track of your pictures. What you need to do is to change the names inside of Lightroom but without resorting to the mind numbing tediousness of changing them one at a time.
Fortunately, there's a Lightroom plug-in that will come to your rescue: Rob Cole's File Renamer. The File Renamer can perform search and replace fine name changes, so all you'll need to do is enter "olympia" in the search field and "olympic" in the replace field.