Hocking Hills in March and Lightroom

We all felt very cooped up during the year of the covid. It often felt too dangerous to be out in public, even in a park or in the woods. Nancy celebrated a big birthday this past March – one of those ending in a zero. We wanted to do something special and decided to risk our lives and get into the great outdoors. We rented a cabin for a weekend from a company we have used in the past and that we trusted were doing a good job of keeping their clients safe. Nancy and I had received both of our vaccinations and we were past the 14 days before good immunity. So off we went to the Hocking Hills.

I’ve noted in past blogs that the Hocking Hills can be difficult to shoot. There is so much incredible nature on the different trails in the park that it is worth the effort to do some serious hiking with a camera. Winter in Hocking Hills can be magical. Early spring in Hocking Hills can be really underwhelming. I had no idea what we were going to see in mid-March. Most of the snow had melted and spring had not yet sprung. What I didn’t expect was all the beautiful ice. As so much of the Hocking Hills involves trails through sandstone caves and canyons, direct sunlight doesn’t reach down to many parts of the trails. And even when there is direct sunlight, it doesn’t last for very long in any one place. The temperatures ‘below ground’ are also much cooler than they are on top of the trails and caves. The icicles were beautiful.

Much of the trails were also covered with ice. It was treacherous. Many parts of the trails are very narrow, and it can be difficult to find patches of ground to make it safe to continue on a path. Thus, there is a lot of ‘ice skating’ over trails. The hike we took over so much ice cured my interest in spending time in the Hocking Hills in the winter. The rock paths and stairs can be dangerously slippery when they are just wet. A covering of ice makes some areas almost impassable. In some areas, there are steep drops from stairs or cliffs to the bottom of the caves and canyons. There are people who die from falls there every year. There are signs everywhere warning people to stay on the trails.

We had excellent weather for the weekend. We weren’t the only people wanting to take advantage of an early spring in central Ohio. The place was packed. So many of the trails are narrow and it is impossible to either pass people who are walking slower or avoid people. We were in crowds most of the time, and people were moving through the trails single file. It was insane. It was early enough in the vaccination experience that there wasn’t great information available about just how effective these were going to work in the real world. As it turns out, these vaccines appear to be very effective and safe. Please get vaccinated!

The Hocking Hills might be one of the most visited places in Ohio. It is well known by photographers and there are some iconic shots that you see on social media sites. This bridge and waterfall on the Old Man’s Cave trail is one of them. Every time I make the trip, I take this shot. Note to self, resist taking this shot. You have it in every season and in almost all lighting and atmospheric conditions. You have it with the water running hard and when the falls are just a trickle. There’s nothing new here. Move on.

This is another image I create every time I am on this trail. I’ve shot this tree from below, from above and at eye level. There is a very long and steep stairway adjacent to the wall where this tree is growing. Trees grow out of the ground here and also out of rock. I’ve shot this tree without leaves, covered in leaves, or shimmering in the sun. The contrasts with the rock wall suck me in and I shoot it like an automaton. Note to self. Please leave this tree alone. You’ve shot the crap out of it.

These are photographs from the Old Man’s Cave trail. Please look for the arrow on the side of the first image – these indicate it is a slide show.

These are photographs I took in Hocking Hills near our cabin.

Another favorite trail is Ash Cave. It is one of the paved trails in Hocking Hills, so I was able to get Pauline to the falls in her wheelchair. Pauline loved waterfalls, so this was a great place to visit. I’ve also shot the crap out of these falls, but never with ice. It was a great day for capturing the beauty of this place.

Hard to pass on an abstract. The sand rock formations create beautiful shapes, textures and colors.

Happy birthday, Nancy!

I am going to describe and explain why it is that I use Adobe Lightroom to organize and work my images. I am not going to describe how I use Lightroom for organizing and developing my raw images. I don’t think that discussion is all that useful and I will explain why I believe so.

When I started my amateur and student journey in photography, I organized my images using Microsoft’s File Explorer. I use a PC with Windows. I am always using the most updated version of Windows 10 because I download and install each version every week it is pushed. I started working my photographs in Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw. I imported my images using Bridge and I worked my photographs in Camera Raw. I then began using Photoshop to work my images with the Raw Filter. I’ve noted previously that I use the NIK program in some of my work. NIK is a third-party program that installs into both Lightroom and Photoshop and is very easy to use.

My college program offers classes in both Photoshop and Lightroom. I’d taken several Photoshop classes and decided I should learn Lightroom so I signed up for the class. It is an excellent course and teaches the full functionality of the program. Like all the Adobe programs, it is a highly technical and complicated piece of software. At first, I was leery of taking the course, because I was concerned that it was going to force me to reorganize all my images. As I’ll explain shortly, that is not at all how this program works. It was a great course, I’m glad I took it, and I have become an avid user of the program.

I should add that there are other programs available for organizing and working photographs. Adobe is not the only game in town. For artists and photographers, Adobe programs are the most popular. As such, these are the programs taught in my college’s photography program. I appreciate these programs, I’m glad that I’ve devoted the time and energy to learn them, and I do enjoy using them. They make it easier to do my work, and I do believe that these programs enhance my photography.

If you shoot film, what I am going to describe about Lightroom is probably not relevant. You develop your film in a dark room and you probably have some method for organizing and storing your negatives or slides and your prints. Lightroom is a tool for digital photographers.

Regarding the organization of digital photographs, both amateurs and professional photographers create a strategy for storing files such that they can find an image out of the thousands of them that are taken. Digital photography has made it very easy to shoot many images. In fact, it is so easy that the technology encourages you to push the shutter button multiple times without giving it much thought. You don’t have to take any film to a developer or deal with film in a darkroom. All you have are bits and bytes that take up space on a disc. Disc storage becomes larger and larger and the cost keeps coming down. Thus, there is little downside to shooting more and more. There is no cost for printing what you shoot in order to view and appreciate every image. The cost of shooting one image is the same as shooting 1,000 images. A great exercise to try when going out on a shoot is to limit yourself to 36 shots as you would have from a roll of film. You become much more deliberate about what and how you shoot. I can see this process from reviewing my images from the days I was shooting film. It is not at all unusual for me to take hundreds of photographs on a long hike. I will often shoot multiple images of the same subject to ensure that I capture it in sharp focus. I will also move around the same subject to test different backgrounds or light or perspective. In my days with film, I was discouraged from doing this type of insurance and experimenting by the cost involved. Being able to review and appreciate images digitally also means that I can view and share these images at no or relatively small cost, depending on the program or forum for doing so. I can share my images with family and friends on a web site and on my Flickr or Instagram accounts. Compared to creating prints, the cost is negligible.

Whether you are shooting with an expensive camera or a phone, you are likely taking lots and lots of pictures. If you don’t have a way to organize them, you probably develop a headache every time you look for a specific image. If you would like some ideas for how to organize photographs, I would be more than happy to share what I’m doing with mine. Otherwise, I am going to assume that you have a methodology for organizing. I’ve listened to discussions about this process in my photography classes, in textbooks and on instructional videos. Every photographer who takes their work seriously and creates lots of images has a strategy for organizing and backing up their work. I have never listened to any of these presentations that gave me a reason to change what I came up with for myself. What I do makes sense for me and I can easily find any of my images. That is the purpose of organizing. As I have almost 100,000 images on my computer, that is no small task. Everyone has a method that works for them. These organizational strategies usually involve subject matter, geographic locations, and dates. My organization works for me. I’m sure if you are serious about your work, you have a method that works for you.

I have the same perspective on developing images. Through taking classes in photography and Photoshop and Lightroom, reading lots of books, articles and blogs, watching instructional videos and following photographers on social media, I have listened and learned about all manner of workflow for developing images. I am going to assume that if you have been doing this work for a while, you have your own approach which includes the order you use to work your images, the development of your aesthetic and creativity and the extent to which you are philosophically comfortable to alter your images. Through education and experimentation, I have developed my own approach. If you are interested, please get in touch and I would be happy to share my workflow for developing images. For the most part, my approach is evolving.

Lightroom is divided into Modules: Library, Develop, Web, Print and Books. The Library and Develop Modules are the reasons I use Lightroom. Thus, this article will focus on those modules. The book module integrates Blurb into Lightroom. Blub is an excellent program for creating and publishing books. Doing so within Lightroom is convenient and highly effective. The print and web modules are also easy to use and include some great templates to facilitate your work.

I am going to start with the Library Module. The beauty of Lightroom when it comes to organizing is that the program will adopt or mirror precisely how you have your images organized. Using File Explorer in Windows, I had all my images in folders and subfolders. All I had to do in Lightroom was to point the program in the direction of these folders, and the program incorporated this structure into a Catalog. I capitalized the word because it is a thing in Lightroom – a Catalog is the highest or most inclusive level in the Lightroom hierarchy. My system is simple. I have all my images on one drive in my computer and each folder belongs to this one Catalog. I’ve named it Sandy’s Image Vault. There are debates among photographers about the advantages and disadvantages of having one or multiple Catalogs. It involves how quickly and efficiently Lightroom manages Catalogs that contain thousands of large image files. I have all my images in one Catalog and I’ve never had an issue. Photographers engage in many debates about everything. I stay out of these discussions. I save my debate energy for issues, such as preserving our democracy, trying to keep the entire species from killing itself from stupidity and saving the planet. When I set up my Catalog in Lightroom, it adopted the structure that existed in File Explorer. It didn’t change anything. Lightroom didn’t move any of my files. It learned the structure I had already developed and it wrote code or instructions to document my organization in the program. All the folders and subfolders I created will now appeared in my Catalog in Lightroom. I have Lightroom set up so that whenever I close the program, my Catalog is backed up. What this means is that all of the instructions or code involving, not only the structure of my organization but also the instructions from the develop module and any work I did in the other modules will be backed up. I periodically backup this backup to an external drive. In the event my Catalog becomes corrupted because all things digital have ways of going south, I will have a backup both on my computer and on an external drive. This calamity has only happened once to me in all the years I’ve used Lightroom.

It took me a while to get the hang of the way Lightroom works. For most photographers who have organized their images before they began using Lightroom, they’re going to do what I did. They will establish a Catalog or Catalogs in the program and will merely have Lightroom populate the structure you have already created. Moving forward, you can grow your organizational structure from within Lightroom. Creating folders and subfolders and moving files is intuitive, if you have experience working in File Explorer or whatever you do in Mac world.

There are times when I am more comfortable working in File Explorer. This is the case when I am moving my raw files off my computer and creating multiple backups of those images. I open multiple windows on my computer to move the images and create the backups. I also operate outside of Lightroom when I am downloading images from iCloud (taken with my iPhone) onto my computer. When I work outside of Lightroom, the program has no idea what I’ve done to those files and folders. For Lightroom to reflect the changes I’ve made, I have to go into the program and identify what I’ve done. All I do is select the folder and synchronize it. Once synchronized, the organizational structure appears within Lightroom and the images that have been moved are either no longer shown in Lightroom or their new location is established within the program. I could do all of this work within Lightroom, but I do what is comfortable for me, using an approach I trust.

Lightroom allows you to customize the way it behaves when you import images from a memory card. This is also done from within the Library Module. Automating this process facilitates maintaining the organizational structure. The Library Module also makes it possible to review images once they have been imported. Lightroom offers multiple ways to look through your images. The program also provides multiple and easy ways to flag or rank images. It makes it easy to go through the process of deciding the best images from a shoot and the images that can be deleted.

Lightroom also allows you to tag all your photographs and they make it easy to do so. I don’t tag my images because I’m too lazy and I’m counting on the program to incorporate artificial intelligence in the near future. Lightroom already uses artificial intelligence to identify faces. If you turn on this feature, Lightroom will identify the photographs of people based on facial recognition.

One of the most effective ways for me to explain the power of Lightroom is to describe Collections and the way I use them within the Library Module. Collections are used to organize your images. For instance, if I wanted to create a book using my best images of mud and sand abstracts, I can create a collection in the Library Module for that purpose. I would then go through all the folders in Lightroom that contain those images and add my favorites to this collection. If I was conducting this review in File Explorer, I would be making a copy of the image and then adding it to a folder. I wouldn’t want to move the file because that would alter my organization and I wouldn’t be able to find it in the existing folder. By copying it, I would be adding another image on my hard drive. Given the size of these files, this kind of activity could easily fill up a hard drive. Lightroom doesn’t create a new file in a collection; it creates a virtual file. I can see the image in my collection, I can even manipulate the image, but it doesn’t create the real file with bits and bytes. I’ve been able to create multiple collections with hundreds of images without adding a single file on my hard drive. Once I have selected my images in a collection, creating a book in the Book module is simple and easy. Collections are a great way to organize images for books, social media and for a web site without adding files to your disc drives.

This same power of Lightroom can be seen in the Develop Module. After I import all my images from the memory card, I sort through them in the Library Module. I delete the files that I deem not worth the time to develop because they are out of focus or the composition sucks. The beauty and the bane of digital. When I’ve completed this process, I open the images in the develop module.

I’m not going to review my workflow for developing my images, because as with organization, photographers, amateur and professional, have spent hours and hours honing their skills and finding the most effective ways to work their photographs. Whatever you do with a raw image, it is pretty much possible to do in Lightroom. The tools are incredibly powerful and easy to use. Lightroom has incorporated instruction directly into the program, so if you are uncertain about what a tool is supposed to do or how to use it, getting guidance is easy. There is also an incredible amount of information, both in articles and videos on the internet. So many photographers are also teachers and you can find their instructional videos on YouTube and on their web sites.

I do most of my work on raw images in Lightroom. I also use NIK. My primary uses of NIK are for converting images to black and white using Silver Efex Pro and for experimenting with filters in Color Efex Pro. Both are great programs. In the past, I’ve also used the NIK HDR function. Over the years, Lightroom has added more of these filters and I’ve been able to accomplish more of my work exclusively in this program. NIK is a great program with some very powerful features, and I plan to use it more often in the future. One of those features is an effective way to work on specific areas of an image without making selections or using masks in Photoshop. All this work in NIK can be accomplished right from within Lightroom.

Philosophically speaking, it all comes down to how much time you are interested in devoting to working a single image. There are many photographers who focus their energy on how they take the picture. Using a tripod to ensure that there is no camera shake and that the image is in focus. Using the proper settings in the camera to get the right exposure. Using depth of field and framing to achieve their creative goals. These folks likely spend minimal time working their images in these programs. There are others who make minimal edits to their images. And still others spend hours and hours making changes to their images. My work probably sits somewhere in the middle. There’s more I could do with my images if I had the patience to do so. Perhaps someday.

Back to Lightroom. All the tools are available to make global adjustments to images and there are tools, such as the brushes and gradients, to make local edits. It is a powerful program. It is also complicated, but experimentation and practice will increase your comfort with both how the tools work and how they impact your image. One of the most powerful aspects of Lightroom is that the changes are nondestructive. All the edits you make in Lightroom to your raw images are recorded as instructions in code that do not change a single pixel in the raw file. You can make many changes to an image; decide you don’t like the direction you are going and start back from scratch. You don’t create a new image with your changes until you export the image. Another great feature of Lightroom is that you can create multiple versions of an image and be able to compare them to decide which you prefer. Each of the versions is a virtual copy and does not create a new file on your disc drive. Thus, you can create various black and white images of the same photograph or use different color filters or combinations of filters without adding all these files to your disc drive. The real file with bits and bytes isn’t created until you export the image.

I do almost all of my developing of raw images inside of Lightroom. When it comes to retouching images, however, I use Photoshop. Lightroom does have a way to remove small objects from an image, but it is nowhere near as powerful as those tools are in Photoshop. If they were, I would almost never use Photoshop (except for projects where I am combining text and images or doing something above my paygrade using layers – I took an entire course on using layers in Photoshop). If it is a very small blemish or a small object that I need to remove, I start with Lightroom. If it is a larger object that needs to be moved or removed, I go directly to Photoshop. The retouching tools in Photoshop are amazing, effective, and powerful.

Lightroom and Photoshop work well together, so going back and forth can be fairly seamless. This is one of the instances where you are going to create a new physical image. When you exit Photoshop, after making your edits, the image will appear in Lightroom as a new file. You can automate this process and determine the file format you want these images converted to when they return to Lightroom. I have it set up so that these images are uncompressed TIFF files and appear next to the original raw image. The file name is changed so that the original name also now has the appendix, edit.

When I’ve completed developing the images I have in a folder, I select my best images for exporting.

As with importing, you can set up the way exporting is going to behave in preferences. This allows you to automate this process. You determine what format you want your images exported in and where they go on export – what folder or folders they will appear in, including external drives for backup. Again, when exporting an image, you create a new physical file. The edited raw file will remain in raw format and it also remains nondestructive; at any time, you can open that image, remove all the edits and return to the original raw file.

I have my export set up to create the highest resolution jpeg images. While I ordinarily avoid compressing my images, this is the format that is almost exclusively used to upload and show work on my web site or in my Flickr or Instagram accounts.

I’ve avoided getting into the whole discussion about the Adobe subscription program, because I save my debate energy for issues, such as preserving our democracy, trying to keep the entire species from killing itself from stupidity and saving the planet. Adobe isn’t the only company that has figured out a better way to create a revenue stream. Welcome to America. I never consider trying other programs. If you are seeking advice or help from a fellow photographer, the likelihood that they’re using Lightroom and/or Photoshop is pretty good. If you are going to be taking photography courses from the college I attend, it is the only game in town. I am rarely disappointed with Lightroom. When they seek feedback, I give them the same information every time. Please talk to the people on the other side of the cubicle wall who are developing Photoshop and ask them if you could please install all of their retouching tools and functionality into Lightroom.