Social Media for Photographers

The inside of a cafe, looking out the window at an old market square.  A person walking a dog is passing by.

At first we all used to have our own websites, then places like Facebook and Instagram came along, and drew us in.

Now with the algorithm dictating the terms, most sites promoting short form video in the hope of caching in on the TikTok trend, many promoting ideas that half of the population do not agree with; now many photographers are moving off these site that no longer seem to work for photographers. The question is where to go?

I have moved over to the Mastodon from Twitter a few years ago and recently started to post pictures to Pixelfed as well as Instagram. I have deleted my Facebook account, and am looking at getting rid of Instagram. As a photo sharing site it’s now pretty poor but I still find it useful to keep in contact with models.

Surprisingly one site from the past seems to be making a come back is Flickr I have recently started to post there again.

Doom strolling is certainly bad for us and being more selective with our social media can be nothing but good.

Adobe Lightroom Preset

a screen print showing Lightroom presets, it shows a list for:
None
Default2024
Default2025

There are some settings I apply to every photo, one of these is copyright information. So beginning of each year I create some new default presets, This one Default2025 is for copyright information, I then have one for the main cameras so an M10 preset and a Z preset for example.

A bit of work at the start of each year, a new 2025 folder. structure and we are set for another year.

Do you buy music or stream?

Like most people today, I tend to stream music rather than play physical media, but streaming services pay artists very little money.

So I occasionally buy physical media. So far this year I have bought eight new CD’s and a few second hand vinyl albums.

I rip my CD’s to Flac and import them into Roon to manage, thus I can stream them when out on my phone and around the house to any Roon end point.

So every few months I run a report in Roon on my listening, and any artist that comes up high on the list I go out and buy their CD. I have a physical copy and they get paid better.

Recently we had workmen digging up the road and they cut through the main fibre optic cable delivering broadband to the village.

We have very poor mobile phone signal in the village so suddenly no streaming services. With the several hundred CD’s I own ripped to my own media server I could still stream to devices around the house.

I also buy DVD’s still. These are also ripped to file and held on my media server, so we could still stream movies from our own library.

Reselling cameras

After my recent post on the Fuji X100 and also GAS. I had a look at second hand prices for Fuji X100. There keeping there value very well. Not quite as well as my Leica M4 which seems to have doubled in price since I bought it; but the original X100 is still going for about £500 on many sites.

With the release of the X100 VI prices on eBay have gone ridiculous with the new model hitting £5000! Many would argue that the retail price is too much for a fixed prime lens compact, but name another fixed lens compact on the market. We have the Fuji X100, Ricoh GR and the Leica Q, all targeting different markets.

Not much competition.

Lightroom and Broken Sync Part 2

I was creating a new gallery for my more formal website when I noticed that once again Adobe Lightroom Classic Cloud Sync has stopped working.

As you can see above, I have blogged about this before and normally just going into to here, then relaunching Lightroom Classic is enough to fix it, but not today.

Luckily there is a hidden button to fix this.

If your on a Mac while in preferences and Lightroom Sync, hold down the Option Key (Alt on Windows) and a Rebuild Sync Data button appears, click on this and your Lightroom will restart and sync will be back working again.

Can you trust what you see?

Since before digital, in the dark room, photographers have been producing composite images, from multiple negatives, a landscape image with a sky from a different negative.

In my wedding images I shoot multiple shots of groups, and occasionally have to combine them to get a single image of everyone looking good at camera.

Model images, a tweak here and there to soften skin, remove a pimple.

Leica M10

But now with modern AI, we can create what ever kind of image we want. So how can we trust what we see?

Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) and the C2PA standard hopes to address this. Big players in the software world have signed up, like Microsoft and Adobe. Nikon and Leica are the first camera manufactures to sign up, but its Leica, working with their partners, the German government and Adobe that are the first to release a camera that supports this with a built in image authentication chip.

If you’re interested in Leica’s new M11-P I would suggest heading over to https://www.slack.co.uk/articles/the-leica-m11-p.html where Jonathan Slack will soon have a good overview of the camera.

https://contentauthenticity.org

Importing files to Adobe Lightroom Classic

Lightroom import dialogue box can be confusing, there are two options, simple and advance. I have on occasion gotten my import wrong myself, generally importing files to the wrong location but its an easy fix.bad credit loans uk direct lenders

I can think of a couple of other ways of importing photographs but rarely use them. Recently on YouTube I saw this and thought it was a easy way to import if you struggle with the other methods.

The video shows you how but basically create a folder in Lightroom where you want the files to go and then when highlighting that folder select import to this folder.

Simple and easy.

I still use the normal import methods, I have presents that apply things like basic develop settings and metadata which is the advantage of the normal import methods. Creating import, development and location presets to get a lot of the leg work done in advance can really speed up your work flow.

DPReview to close

DPReview has been one of the top photography review sites and forum hosting for photographers for over twenty years.

This week we were all shocked to discover its closing down. I never knew that the site was owned by Amazon, and in the current cutbacks that Amazon are making the site is one of the loses.

There’s a lot of knowledge that is going to be lost. Hopefully Amazon can be persuaded to at least keep the site available for people to read even if there is no new updates, but so far to looks like the site will be deleted.

Profoto Desktop App

If you’re a registered Profoto user, you may have received an email today about their new desktop app. You have been able to control your Profoto flashes from your phone for a while and update the firmware. Now with the desktop app you can also control your flash heads.

I have only done a quick test with my A10 but despite being beta it seems to work well. For when your working tethered in the studio it could prove very useful.

Lightroom and Broken Cloud Sync

I was updating my portfolio site https://rbphotographic.co.uk and was unable to pull some photographs from an online Adobe Album.

Looking at my Lightroom classic I realised the sync arrows were all missing. My new album could not be selected to sync.

I restarted a few times, but the trick to get them back was to go into settings, Lightroom sync. Going in here restarted it.