JFK 05/01 (Image Heavy)

[gonzalu]

I know it's two days later but I was really busy the past few days... jetBlue paraded four of their specials almost back to back. Weather was great in the morning but got cloudy in the afternoon. Eric was shooting horses and Mark was on his way to Orlando so I was on my own until Mark H showed up later in the day with this "other guy" :tongue:

http://manny.smugmug.com/Airplanes/Spotting/JFK-05012011/i-44X5gsj/0/L/vt-jwf-L.jpg

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[gonzalu]

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[Roush6NY]

Great shots as always man, LOVE the Cathay shot! Sorry I couldn't join ya :frown:

[steve1840]

Manny! Great shots!! Those are some killer angles man. Wish I coulda been there for that!

[Spunker]

Excellent set Manny!

[gonzalu]

Thanks Gene, Steve.

Kaz. I swore I wouldn't mention your name any more since you did not make it, but I guess I have to forgive you. ROTFL... just busting your B****... I actually sealed it with the wife. She has now threatened to divorce me if I go out again on the weekend, even if for an hour. So if you see me out there, you know I am DEEP DEEP undercover LOL.

[mattdueck]

So Manny just a quick question. First great set of shots. Second how long does it take you per shot to edit (a rough estimate)? You had tonnes of pictures so it must take hours to edit....

Thanks
Matt

[gonzalu]

Hey Matt,

First of all, thank you :-) Now for the good stuff... here is a quick workflow for me.

--Insert Card(s) into reader
--Fire up Lightroom and hit the File | Import menu.
--Select the card reader and allow LR to find all the images
--In the presets drop downs, I select the DEVELOP preset of choice (I have one for every situation and camera) and a METADATA preset for the particular shoot (In this case, ThrustImages 2011 and all the pertinent info is preleaded)
--In the Keywords text input box I add generic stuff like "JFK, Airport, Aviation, Cloudy, Sunny, RWY 31R, The Mounds, Spotting," etc. etc. Whatever I feel is generic enough
--Select folder and title for where I want the new pics to go.
--Hit the IMPORT button

This can take anywhere from 5 seconds to two hours depending on the CF card and capacity. Your Card Reader, Connection and CF Card Speed and Capacity all conspire against speedy imports.

After LR is done ingesting, it goes and creates whatever previews you wish for it to do... 1:1, Half Sized, Originals, whatever. I always use 1:1 as they help preview speed later. If I want to go to my pics quickly, I may stop the process immediately and re-engage it overnight. EITHER way, LR is fully available to you all the time. It is very multi-threaded and can do pretty much anything in parallel ...

I then go though in the LIBRARY module and quickly scan in GRID view for stuff like a TREE or LIGHTPOLE blocking the plane, obviously OOF shots etc and flag for deletion (X or SHIFT-X to flag and move to the next shot in one swoop)

If my goal is to post to the forums quickly, I may forgo the whole thing and just use Bridge in PSCS5 to quickly identify images I want to post and just select and run them through my default script that generates a 800px wide image with my watermark/logo on it. If I want to do more editing, I typically do that in LR after all the above steps are done.

My FULL edit session can take hours, days, months even. It involves the following after the last step of rendering previews.

--I go in LIBRARY | EDIT mode where the image is FULL SCREEN but using the generated previews. I use dual monitors so one screen is THUMBNAILS and the other FULL SCREEN 1:1 views. These views are generated BY LR from my preset.
--Going over each and every picture, I simply want to DELETE all the bad images... so this is quick, looking only for obvious trash like explained above. I keep my fingers on the SHIFT key and then hover over the X and RIGHT ARROWS moving very quickly.
--After all the major issues are flagged, I hit CTRL+BACKSPACE which deletes all deleted-flagged images.
--Now I go through my images, and select all images of a particular aircraft and while in the GRID, add a Title and a Caption. The Title is Aircraft Manufacturer, Model and Tail Number. Caption is Airliner/Owner, Manufacturer, Model, Tail Number, Approach/Departure, Airport, RWY, and anything special like the Strobe being on, missing panel, wrong engine cover, Special Name if the plane has one (Jet Blue, Iberia, Virgin, KLM, Lufthansa, etc. all have names for their planes)
--After that's finished, I go back for specific editing and further narrowing of a set of final images I keep forever.
--Once all that is complete, I may export to my website, select some for the databases such as A.net or JP.net and then ARCHIVE the whole shoot. A copy goes to Mom's house and another stays on a RAID1 mirror set on-line or off-line, external.

That can take forever. I have hundreds of folders waiting to be properly tagged, culled, edited etc. But the most important thing is to add some "key" keywords (pun intended) to the IMPORT and a proper folder name/structure to later find them when you need to get to an image BEFORE you have had the chance to properly tag each image. For example, say on Sunday the 1st I shot a lot of different planes, but I added to the keywords, "jetBlue, Blues Brothers, Building Blocks, I Love New York, Blue York, Cargolux, Lufthansa A380, RWY 13L" and a few others. I have not yet tagged each image individually so a full DB search will not yield results from THIS import but I can search for a more generic entry and it will show up saving me looking for it too deep. It will get me close enough. Once I meta tag everything, I can find a regi, at a particular day, time, weather and even RWY and dep or arr. :-)

Hope that gives you some insight. For this particular set you see above, from INGESTION of all three CF cards to the resulting images being linked here after posting to the web; it took about 2 hours. 1.5 of it was spent on just ingesting and quick scan.

[RomNYC]

--After that's finished, I go back for specific editing and further narrowing of a set of final images I keep forever.

I meant to ask for a while, what is the size of these pictures that you keep "forever" (ie. before resizing for online DBs)?

[gonzalu]

I keep RAWs so they are originals. I really don't care about storage. I do IT for a living and a Petabyte to me is like fine wine LOL. Consider your RAW originals the same as you would a slide. Would you print a CibaChrome of your slides and then toss the slides?

[billv]

Manny, fantastic images...they pop right off my screen. Good contrast and sharp. I know you are a fellow Nikon shooter, but what lens are you using? Is it the 200-400?

Good explanation of your LR workflow too. Great program. And thanks for all your contributions here, I've read them all.

I need to make it down to JFK one of these days, but geesh...I can't even find time to shoot BOS and I'm 30 minutes away, lol.

Regards,

[Zee71]

Great stuff Mr. Manny!!!! Nice catch on the Corsair departing. Didn't get a chance to shoot anything here in Orlando. I'm hoping maybe to get some shots when I return back this Friday.

[[email protected]]

Awesome set Manny, I like those heavy's....
Too bad with the heat shimmer on Air China Touch Down.. But the angle is perfect! :smile:

I really hope to catch a bunch of them, when we arrive in JFK in a few weeks.

[NWA DC9]

Nice I got pictures of the Atlas Air 747 that day to.

[gonzalu]

Manny, fantastic images...they pop right off my screen. Good contrast and sharp. I know you are a fellow Nikon shooter, but what lens are you using? Is it the 200-400?

Good explanation of your LR workflow too. Great program. And thanks for all your contributions here, I've read them all.

I need to make it down to JFK one of these days, but geesh...I can't even find time to shoot BOS and I'm 30 minutes away, lol.

Regards,

Thanks Bill... The light was never perfect as there was a slight veil of clouds ever-present and then it got very overcast to the end of the day. I'll take that over today's weather any day, but my goal is always for Blue Skies LOL.

My main long tele [is] the 200-400mm f/4 VR-I but this time all the shots were either with the D3+70-200mm f/2.8 or 24-70mm f/2.8 .. only a couple of them were with the 200-400mm f/4 mounted on the D2Xs. I am considering going back to the 80-400mm for a while as I save up for the 200-400mm f/4 VRII or hopefully Nikon will follow suit and copy the built-in 1.4x TC as Canon did ;-) Or perhaps the excellent (if a bit inflexible) 300mm f/4 + TC14

I want to go to BOS for spotting! so let's swap LOL. I've been after the AFR 747 but she is inconsistent at JFK...


Great stuff Mr. Manny!!!! Nice catch on the Corsair departing. Didn't get a chance to shoot anything here in Orlando. I'm hoping maybe to get some shots when I return back this Friday.

Thanks Mark... too bad she was not that well lit and that range is not good for my current setup anyway. But, it is nice to have it in the bag sort of.


Awesome set Manny, I like those heavy's....
Too bad with the heat shimmer on Air China Touch Down.. But the angle is perfect! :smile:

Thank you. I really hope to catch a bunch of them, when we arrive in JFK in a few weeks.

Yeah, the Air China was just in a bad location... the heat was bad Sunday and add to it its own engine exhaust and well, you see the results. But I love the dynamics of that angle, I never get tired of it :-)


Nice I got pictures of the Atlas Air 747 that day to.

At JFK or elsewhere? :-)

[gonzalu]

BTW, if you;re ever interested in the tech details, I usually leave the EXIF data (and IPTC) intact :-)

[RomNYC]

BTW, if you;re ever interested in the tech details, I usually leave the EXIF data (and IPTC) intact :-)

I never really understood why people would take it off. Any explanations?

[gonzalu]

File size mainly... it can save a few K. Sometimes in order to make it in the queue at A.net or JP.net, I remove the EXIF if the file is a bit over 1024K in size... I believe others also remove EXIF to hide the technical data of how their images were acquired.

In my mind, removing EXIF is fine but IPTC is not something that should ever be removed. It is a great way for people to know who you are as a photographer and that the work belongs to you. If ever you consider Stock Photos, IPTC is the way you either eat or go hungry. A good CAPTION is what sells a photo vs. not. Editors seldom just look at pictures. They first find them by searching the metadata. Then they look at content!

Oh and Airliners.net REMOVES ALL metadata from images upon upload, INCLUDING any embedded color profiles so ALWAYS remember to CONVERT TO profile before saving as JPG.

JetPhotos.net honors all metadata in your images which is good. They also have a handy EXIF viewer on their site if your images have any.

[RomNYC]

Thanks Manny, I do enjoy checking out the EXIF data from other photogs as part of my learning process.

Btw, great read on levels and curves that was posted today on the website. :cool: