Single-Serving Photo

If you’ve been using Adobe Lightroom since Beta 1, as I have, and if you’re using a Mac, there is a very good chance that you’ve run into the awful “change modules” error. This error usually strikes when your catalog is being updated during a version upgrade, when other Adobe software on your computer changes, or for any number of other unrelated reasons (as I discovered).

What happens is roughly this: you open the program and the splash screen remains indefinitely. If you click it, it disappears, but Lightroom’s main window does not open. You receive a very minimal menu bar including “Lightroom,” “File,” “Edit,” and perhaps “Window.” The File menu is shortened and only allows you to open a catalog. I presume that this is what Lightroom would look like if you could put it into a state where it has no catalog open. During normal operation, you basically always have a catalog open.

Once there, you can try to open your catalog, but as soon as you do, you will receive the error: “An error occurred when attempting to change modules.” Feel free to click OK on that message, it will simply drop you into a weird, incomplete Lightroom interface that has no side panels and no film strip.

Having battled this error two different times now, I am confident I can offer some advice. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my contribution to Blog Action Day, I posted a story about being confronted by a park ranger while photographing using flashlights in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Although I believe the ranger overstepped his bounds and acted with undue suspicion under the circumstances, my colleague and I reacted—in my opinion—in a completely appropriate way. We were very polite and understanding of the issues at hand and we recognized that Tennessee might do things a little bit differently than Connecticut. For example, in Tennessee, photographers get frisked under suspicion of poaching.

Anyway, it’s a good idea to hold up your end of the bargain if you do get approached by an officer of the law, and to act in a way that reflects positively on yourself and on all of us as photographers. Especially if there is a video camera in the officer’s car…

Yesterday, I ran across this article, 5 Things Photographers Should Do When Confronted By Police. It contains some helpful tips and might be useful to you in your travels.

It’s also a good idea to know your rights in these situations, and to help you I will once again point you toward Andrew Kantor’s Legal Rights of Photographers (pdf)¹ guide, a somewhat abridged yet very straightforward and understandable overview of your rights as a photographer (at least in the United States).

For a slightly more technical view, you may wish to read The Photographer’s Right by Bert P. Krages II (attorney at law). Although no advice given by an attorney from outside of your state could be said to be formal, anyone out there from Oregon just struck gold. For those of us who aren’t from the pacific wonderland, at least you can say that this advice was cobbled together by someone with actual legal training.

If you want to dive in yet further, please do visit the forums at PhotoPermit.ORG where you can read all about your rights, current events, and first-hand accounts of being hassled or confronted by authority figures both various and sundry.

1. Linked with permission. If that copy is down, get it from me [back]

Here in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, surrounded on three sides by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Armed with only our Great Smoky Mountains National Park Illustrated Trail Map from National Geographic, a basic idea of sunrise and sunset times, and our wits, we set out to capture the majesty of the southern wilderness.

This is officially my first post from the field, though I’ve tried before and failed. My impression so far? Positive!

Photos after the break! Read the rest of this entry »

There are three major ways to grow as an artist; to strengthen your aesthetic senses and the quality of your work:

1. Emulate the work of artists you admire,
2. Experiment on your own, exploring the subject matter that interests you, and
3. Participate in critique

Emulation is very common, especially when getting started in art, and exploring subject matter of interest to you essentially describes doing art, so I’m sure you do that already. Critique, however, is where many artists are weakest. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not so much that flash photography is actually complex, but more that the available information tends to skip the fundamentals. In short, I love Strobist very much (and I’m not alone), but I felt left in the dark (pun intended) about a couple of small items after reading a recent post and I felt I should share the answers I came up with. Read the rest of this entry »