Tag Archives: slow

Lightroom Issues Update

In quite a few previous posts, I have mentioned the troubles I have had with Lightroom recently. This was all triggered by an update a while back and subsequent updates have not solved any issues. The problems just continued and I was unable to get anything to address the sluggish behavior. The program would respond better when I was working in the Develop module but it was very difficult in Library and when importing.

I recently had a bit more success. I contacted someone who, while not working for Adobe, does have a business based around Lightroom and has good connections with the company. I was able to send this individual a copy of my catalog. They had a play with it and had similar issues with memory overuse so it wasn’t a hardware issue. They were able to pass on the catalog to an Adobe engineer to investigate further. I feared there was some corruption in the catalog and hoped they would find a solution.

It transpires that there is not any corruption. Instead, it is in the nature of the catalogs that I have created that the problem lies. A long time ago I posted about my approach to processing a shoot. I would use a Collection Set for each shoot in which I would use smart collections to take shots with the right combination of keywords and dates. They would split out rejects from non-rejects and put HDR, panorama shots and videos in separate smart collections. This made processing the shoot more efficient.

As a result of this approach, I have, over the years, accumulated a large number of these collection sets with smart collections in them. This is what is causing the trouble. The program is getting bogged down with all of them. This leaves two ways forward. In the short term, I am going to go through these smart collections and turn them into simple collections. Hopefully this will reduce the processing burden. I don’t need the smart functionality any longer so I can just take the selected images and make simple collections out of them.

The longer term action is that Adobe is now aware of this issue. Hopefully they can investigate a way to address this in a future update so that it isn’t constrained in the same way. It happened suddenly so there was something in the coding that changed to cause the issue so maybe it can be similarly quickly fixed. In the early days of Lightroom, it was limited in the number of images it could have before things got sluggish and that was resolved so hopefully this can be too. We shall see. If it is, you’re welcome!

Practice Panning to Make it Different at BFI

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I was killing some time at Boeing Field and the light was dropping fast. There was a variety of traffic inbound but nothing that counted as terribly unusual and not, therefore, something I desperately cared about getting a good shot with. As a result, I decided to play around with low shutter speeds to see how it changed the look of the shots at a familiar location, to see how the sharpness varied across the airframe and to see just how badly may panning skills have degraded. Needless to say, the results were pretty mixed. The worst of the lot will clearly never see the light of day but here you can see some of the shots that I was okay with. The conclusion from the output is that I should go a bit lower in shutter speed to increase the sense of speed.

Blur That Prop!

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Ask any aviation photographer about camera settings and they will quickly turn to shutter speed for prop aircraft. The goal is a nicely blurred prop and no frozen blades. This requires a slow shutter speed and this can have downsides. If you are using a long lens, getting a sharp shot of a moving target with a low shutter speed can be tricky. A bit of spray and pray with the shutter button can be required. Interestingly, if you are closer to the aircraft and using a shorter focal length, things are not necessarily better. When you are close in, the different parts of the airframe are actually moving at different speeds and angular rates to you so one part might be sharp when another isn’t. Sometimes this looks okay but often it just looks crap.

I have become less focused on gaining the great blur for ground shots. Air to air it is something a lot more worthwhile since the other plane is not moving relative to you – well, hopefully not that much. Therefore, you can experiment going slower with hopefully some good results. Similarly, when I am shooting helicopters close in and hovering, I will give it a go too.

Recently, I was at the Waukegan show and I decided that, since what I was shooting was not something that I had to get (either I would have other chances or I wasn’t so bothered anyway), I would play with some really low speeds. I ended up shooting at 1/80^th of a second which, on a 500mm lens is a stretch. Needless to say, you are not going to see the failures. When I have played like this before, I have had times when not one of the shots was of any use. However, this time I did get a few lucky results – yes, they were luck. You can have great panning technique (which is not always true for me) but the math is not in your favor when doing this. Therefore, I shall be happy with the results this time around. I won’t be doing this all of the time but playing around is an important thing to do when you have the chance. Just don’t do it when you really want to have a shot you can keep.

Night flight

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A recent flight home meant an arrival into Midway a while after the sun had set. I had been taking some pictures out of the window as we headed back across the country and decided to try my luck after dark. I had thought about trying out some auto ISO shots as I described in a previous post. However, since I was shooting night scenes, the camera does its best to try and make things look properly exposed and this is not what you need. Instead, I had to manually set the ISO to a higher number and then drop the exposure compensation to between -2 and -3.

The shots came out okay but they weren’t terribly interesting. However, as we got lower, I decided to go for something a bit more interesting and slowed the shutter speed down dramatically. I braced the camera against the window frame and decided to see what sort of light trails I could get. The exposures were a couple of seconds or more so this is rather tricky. While the background is blurred deliberately, I had the top of the engine and the winglet in for reference. Avoiding blurring them was more hit and miss.

I tried a bunch of shots and was pleased with the number that came out well. However, the effect only seems to work in a couple of situations. One is a turn. This puts more ground lights in the frame and turns everything into a nice curve. The other is when you are very low at which point everything is moving past you close and fast. I might try this again before too long but will have to ponder what might improve things. One technique issue I was pleased with was remembering to turn off image stabilization. With long exposures, it causes the image to wander so, when bracing, it actually makes things worse. Unlike me to remember that first time out but sometimes I do get lucky!