When using Adobe Lightroom one of the many things you will learn to do is culling or weeding through your pictures from an event you just shot. This process of culling or refining your list of pictures down to just the best pictures can be an extremely time consuming and tedious task.

From every photo shoot you have there will be fewer keepers than the one you delete.  So anything that can help speed up this process is worth looking into, or at least considering adding it to your workflow.  The time saving feature I am talking about is the “Auto Advance” feature of Adobe Lightroom.  What this simple but useful feature will do for you is automatically advance you to the next picture in the list after you have given it a “Pick” or a star rating in Lightroom.  This sounds really simple but it will save you one step during culling and prevent you from having to hit the right arrow key to advance to the next photo.  

Enabling Auto Advance

As with many things in all Adobe software there is more than one way to enable the Auto Advance feature in Lightroom.  

1.  On the menu bar go to the “Photo” menu and towards the bottom you will be able to click the “Auto Advance” menu item.  This will turn on “Auto Advance”

2.  Or you can simply go to your keyboard and turn on caps lock.

Now with this feature turned on as you are going through the photos from your latest photo shoot Lightroom will Auto Advance to the next photo every time you rate a photo with a pick or star rating.

Currently at the Caesar Creek State Park Visitor Center there are two of my pictures hanging in their gallery. Caesar Creek visitor center recently had a 2109 nature photography exhibition and two of my nature photos were chosen by the judges to be displayed in their exhibition.  I was very lucky to be chosen out of all the entries to have my work put on display, as not all photos submitted make it through the selection process. Each photographer was allowed to submit 3 photos for this exhibit.  There are some very beautiful photos on display.  And the Caesar Creek State Park Visitor is a great place to visit, if you have time I highly recommend you check out the visitor center and the state park.  

The Exhibition will take place between: August 31st, 2019 – December 31th, 2019, at the Caesar Creek Lake Visitor Center, located at 4020 N. Clarkesville Road, Waynesville, Ohio 45068.  

Judges Meritt Award

Explaining the pano technique

Winter Bliss

Sunset At Garland

The Fairborn Art Association “FAA”, recently held a 2019 landscape juried art exhibition. The subject of the competition was the newly created Garland Wetland Reserve located in Fairborn, Ohio.  The art exhibition is a collaboration between B-W Greenway Community Land Trust and the Fairborn Art Association.  This yearly art exhibition was established to heighten the public awareness of our local green spaces and the need to preserve them.  For me this was an exciting opportunity to showcase my photography and enter into my first juried exhibition.  

The opening reception was held on July 14 from 2-4pm, where the announcement of the winners would take place and the gallery would be open to the public, to see all the art work on display.  The Landscape Exhibition was not just for photography but for any art work 2D or 3D as long as it was not larger than 30x40 inches.  I had been preparing for several months for this art exhibition as it was my first.  I visited the Garland wetland reserver several times at different times of the day to try and get a feel for what I wanted to submit for the exhibition.  I finally decided on doing panoramic shots of the wetland.  I submitted 2 black and white pano shots of the wetland one in wide format 12x36 inches and the other in tall format 16x24 inches.  The pano stitch technique is one that I like doing because I think it preserves the look of an environment and gives you a sense of scale almost like if you are actually there.  For both of my photographs I wanted to do something different so one is a winter time shot with snow on the trees.  The other is an early spring shot of Garland wetland just as the sun is about to set.  Both photos I am very proud of as I spent several hours editing them.  I would edit then re-edit, edit and re-edit them both until I was finally satisfied they were perfect and ready for print.  

Once July 14 came I was very surprised by the number of paintings that were submitted to the art exhibition.    There were over 100 different pieces submitted from different artists in the area.  Some of them were photographs but a lot were paintings all judged in the same competition without separate categories for paintings and photographs.  When the winners were announced I was pleasantly surprised to have received a green ribbon for “Judges Merit Award”.  Needless to say it was a very fun and exciting day.  I really enjoyed the art exhibition and getting to talk to people about my photography and how it was done.  I am looking forward to future competitions.