Doing What You Know ~ My Adventures Through the Blogosphere

A lot of photographers who give out advice talk about doing what you know. This is definitely good advice and something I know very well is blogging.

I am no stranger to blogging. I was one of the first to jump on the online journal bandwagon and have had a slew of blogs over the years. I started out with a free Blogspot Blog which I kept for over four years. I then graduated to a free WordPress Blog. That one didn’t last very long, under a year.

Thomas and I traveled Europe in the summer of 2005. We backpacked around six different countries and had a great time. To keep our families and friends at home updated, we kept a travel blog. It included accounts of our travels as well as photos. It’s actually quite a funny read if you have some time to kill – we had some adventures there for sure. One day I will put it all into a book for us, all these words about our trip.

In 2008, I made the leap from personal blogging, to dog blogging and launched the Ottawa Dog Blog. It was right after we had just had to put our dog, Paddington, through knee surgery for a genetic defect that lead me to realize that she came from a puppy mill. This shocking truth created a deep need to give back and start a place where people could go to learn about other places to find dogs other than puppy mills. I was (and still am) also quite obsessed with everything dog related and Thomas was getting sick of me telling him all these dog facts so it also became an outlet to connect with like-minded dog lovers. The blog has been going strong for two years now and I have been very lucky and blessed to have met so many people through it.

2009 marked the launch of this very blog; a photo blog to share my images and my passion for this industry. Simply put, I love taking photographs and I touched on that a while back. It is not only a place to come to see my latest work, but I want it to be a place where you can get to know me a little bit better too.

I do love writing, as much as I thought I didn’t. I don’t like writing what other people tell me to (as in Essays in my school days – ugh) but I love writing what’s on my mind. And I’ll tell you, there usually is quite a bit on my mind. In fact, right now I have three blog posts on the go and several more floating around in my head. I could never meditate, ever. I can’t clear my mind – the notion even scares me a little. And while I try my best to do yoga and be “zen”, I’ll never make it and do as well as some friends of mine. But that’s just who I am: a bit of a spaz with a lot on my mind, and a camera in my hand!

Have a wonderful day,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

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The photos on this website are protected under the Creative Commons Canada License. You may share the photos on this blog with friends and family but you may not print, edit, crop or alter the photos in any way, the logos must stay intact and elizabeth&jane photography must be credited.

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Aperture vs. Lightroom ~ Why I chose what I did

When I first started out in photography I wanted a program that could be dedicated to archiving and handling my files in an easy and comprehensive way. The options for me on a Mac were either iPhoto or Apple’s higher end photo editing suite, Aperture. I looked into Aperture’s features and decided to go with it. At that point, Aperture’s now biggest competitor, Lightroom, didn’t event exist yet.

Fast forward to today and I am still using Aperture. This isn’t because I haven’t tried Lightroom, I definitely have, but I chose to stick with Aperture for some key reasons.

One of the first reasons why I considered switching to Lightroom has nothing to do with the program itself, and everything to do with a company I have a ton of faith in. They produce fantastic products and when I heard they were releasing presets for Lightroom, I started to think that maybe I should consider switching. At that point, Lightroom had many features, such as the presets, that Aperture did not. The company that made me waiver my commitment to Aperture is Get Totally Rad.

Many photographers will already be familiar with the Totally Rad Actions for Photoshop. I personally cannot live without them. I use at least one of their actions on every photo I publish. They are stellar, extremely well made and worth every single penny in my opinion. And it was because of this awesome track record with the Totally Rad Action Sets 1 and 2, that when I found out they were releasing Lightroom presets, I actually gave Lightroom a try.

I read tons of literature and watched way too many tutorial videos about Lightroom and got pretty excited to try it out. It sounded awesome so I downloaded Adobe’s Free Trial to see what I thought. At first I played around with the presets and thought they were pretty cool, until I realized that I really wanted them to behave like Photoshop layers. I found it a bit difficult to navigate around and kept trying to make it look more like Aperture, in the way it displays how the files are organized.

Aperture stores its files in a very different way than Lightroom. Apple has created a self contained “packaging system” that essentially puts all of your photos into one single file. That may sound confusing, but it’s within Aperture that you are able to organize your photos into a very easy file structure. This simple packaging also aids in the backup process. Aperture allows you to back up with one single click to however many “vaults” as you’d like. I am sure there is a way to do this in Lightroom, but I wanted it to be the way Aperture is so the obvious decision was to stick with Aperture.

And that was it. I realized that I wanted Lightroom to be like Aperture as well as wanting it to be like Photoshop so I went back to my first loves.

I was rewarded and reaffirmed a few days after I made my decision with the release of Aperture 3 which brought features such as the presets that I had wanted from Lightroom. I was thrilled!

The only downside now is that Get Totally Rad has put out a statement that they will not be doing TRA Aperture presets, which really sucks but I will still hope that at some point in the future, they might revisit the idea. For now, I am so happy with using Aperture 2 coupled with Photoshop and I am quite confident in my decision.

Photographers: what do you use? Lightroom? Aperture? Adobe Bridge? Photoshop? Something completely different? Please share and tell me why you chose your selected product(s)?

In a few weeks I will be upgrading to Aperture 3 and I can’t wait!!

Have a wonderful day,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

elizabeth&jane photography elizabeth&jane photography blog Destination Wedding Photography

The photos on this website are protected under the Creative Commons Canada License. You may share the photos on this blog with friends and family but you may not print, edit, crop or alter the photos in any way, the logos must stay intact and elizabeth&jane photography must be credited.

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The No Flash Challenge

I’d like to touch on my feelings about Flash on websites, which are actually quite negative. I studied web development in university, so I feel I have a justified reasons for my strong feelings against Flash. I would almost go so far as to say I loathe it. It slows down my experience, I am impatient and I hate having to sit there while a site loads, and people use it incorrectly. There are certain minimal uses for Flash but even then I am not sold. It angers me when an entire website is created in Flash that has absolutely no reason why it had to be done using that platform instead of in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Having said that, I do have Flash on my website – and I want to get rid of it.

With the recent announcement of Apple’s newest creation, the iPad (stupid name, but I definitely want one), I got to thinking about how a visitor experiences my website on mobile devices. Hand held devices such as smartphones, the iPod Touch, and the new to be released iPad don’t have the ability to display Flash elements and I don’t see this as a bad thing. Currently, there is a Flash viewer on my main home page, as well as my gallery page. For a while now I have wanted to combine the two into one viewing experience that resides solely on the home page. It is simpler and I wanted to do it without Flash, but still have the same dynamic sliding photos and automatic playing.

Enter my awesome code-man husband. Thomas, is a web developer and has his own company. I challenged him to prove to the photography community that a dynamic website without Flash can be done. Everything that everyone seems to love about Flash, cool transitions and movement, could be done without Flash. One major benefit of this is the fact that the site will work and function the way it does on a computer, on a mobile device, as well as having better SEO and will load a heck of a lot faster.

And he did it! The demo site uses my photos (yay!) and looks great! We will be implementing a gallery similar to this on the home page of my website soon and I am so excited about it! View the demo here.

Thomas also wrote a really informative article about the process and made a few great points. One in particular he touched on was music. I do not like music on websites, at all. When I am browsing, I am usually listening to my own music and don’t feel it necessary for the website I am looking at to be playing it as well. I find it almost obnoxious, especially when there is no way to turn it off. In cases like that, I leave the website almost immediately.

To quote from his article:

“If you are using music, make sure you have permission to use the music on your web site. You, as a photographer, worry about people stealing your photos, so why would you steal someone’s music?”

This point is bang on. Almost every photographer’s website that includes music, is playing a popular song by a well known musician. I doubt they have permission from them to have their song playing. As photographers we worry about our photographs being stolen and I am sure it’s happened many times – I know it has to me. So if you are using a musician’s song without consent, isn’t that the same thing?

A lot of people disagree with me on the music front, but studies have shown that on a whole, music is more detrimental to keeping people on your website than if you didn’t have music.

I’d love to see photographer’s rise to the challenge of creating a website that is viewable in all platforms, including mobile devices. A photographer’s website is crucial to their brand and if you would like to have yours be rid of Flash, contact Thomas – he’d love to work with you to achieve that goal!

Have a wonderful day,

Liz – Contact Me, I would love to speak with you!

elizabeth&jane photography elizabeth&jane photography blog Destination Wedding Photography

The photos on this website are protected under the Creative Commons Canada License. You may share the photos on this blog with friends and family but you may not print, edit, crop or alter the photos in any way, the logos must stay intact and elizabeth&jane photography must be credited.

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