Using the right photography keywords in Lightroom is the smart way to organize your photos.

Visit the show notes at:  https://williambeem.com/episode121

Using Keywords in Lightroom is the smart way to organize your photos. While most Lightroom trainers emphasize using Collections, I find that searches with Keywords are far more effective and easier to use.

Keywords in Lightroom are Better than Collections

Someone needed to say it.

If you aren't familiar with either Keyword or Collections, let me explain the concepts in very simple terms.

Collections Are Like Buckets

Think of a Lightroom Collection like a bucket. It only has what you put in it – manually. There's no intelligence involved. You give the bucket a name and it just sits there and waits for you to put stuff in it.

You can drag photos into Collections and they sit there like leaves in a bucket. Every once in a while, you can look at the photos in your buckets.

The most clever part about Collections is that you can put the same photo in more than a single bucket.

Let's say that you take a photo of someone in your family. That could go into two Collections. One for Family and one for Portraits.

The problem with these buckets is that you start getting too many of them. What happens if you take a photo of someone in your family while traveling? Well, then it may go into Family, Portraits, Travel and perhaps a bucket for photos you took in your destination.

Worse, imagine it was a holiday!

Now you need a bucket for photos you took on New Year's Eve!

You can see how this could get out of hand. You end up with buckets all over the place. You want to find a photo in Lightroom, but first you have to traverse a long list of Collections.

You can then create Collection Sets, which hold other Collections. Now you have buckets filled with more buckets!

It gets worse. Have you ever looked for something that you just knew was in a particular storage place, but it turns out you never put it in that spot in the first place?

That's what Collections do for you. It's a place for your stuff, but it's up to you to manage the place and make sure you put your stuff in the right place. That's even if you created a new bucket later which may be related t your photo, but you never went back to put it in the new bucket.

Keywords Are How You Use Search Engines

When you want to find information in the modern age, you use a search engine like Google. Even other programs and web sites have search engines.

You type in the words that relate to the information you want to find, and then the search engine gives you possibilities that it thinks could be the results you want.

For the most part, this works very well. The majority of people who visit this web site do so because they found an article in a search engine.

They never thought of looking in buckets to get their results.

Here's the thing.

It's up to you to put Keywords in Lightroom when you import your photos. It's not that hard, and Lightroom actually makes it very easy for you.

Let's say I took a trip to West Virginia. I may use Keywords like “West Virginia” and “Mountains” to describe what I see in those photos. As luck would have it, you can add even more information.

If this was a holiday trip, I may use “Christmas” or “Holidays” as Keywords. Maybe both.

Now I can go to Lightroom and search for “Holidays” and see all of my photos taken on a holiday, whether it was Christmas or Independence Day.

After a while, Lightroom makes it easy because it sees relationships in the way you add Keywords. When you enter a Keyword, it will start recommending more Keywords to use, based upon Keywords you've used together before.

So it gets to the point that you don't have to type all of the keywords for a photo. You enter one, and then you start clicking to add related Keywords.

If a bunch of those photos ought to have the same Keywords,

Learning how to find your inner motivation for photography can be a tricky thing. In fact, most people never really think about it.

Visit the show notes at:  https://williambeem.com/episode120

Learning how to find your inner motivation for photography can be a tricky thing. In fact, most people never really think about it. Honesty, I think it's one of the most important things you can understand to help guide and improve your photography.

Here's why.

Different Photographers Have Different Types of Motivation

If you listened to the podcast (of course you did), you'll understand that Lee and I are quite opposite in our approach to photography. She's an extrovert and I'm an introvert.

Yet she likes to work alone in her photography. It's something private for her and she gets her best reward when she has her own space to think without anyone else getting in the way.

I'm an introvert. Oddly enough, I really enjoy photography for collaboration and social engagement. Perhaps that's why I'm drawn to photography. I've learned that I can't create the images in my head without collaborating with others. That means reaching out, developing relationships and finding people who can help me develop the crazy ideas in my head.

More often than not, I discover that we can all work to create something better than any of us would do on our own. That gives me a great deal of satisfaction.

Why Do You Need to Find Your Inner Motivation?

If you think about it, there are really only two kinds of motivation – positive and negative. Put another way, pain or pleasure.

I'm of the opinion that photography should't be a pain, though sometimes it frustrates me. When that happens, I start to question why I'm even bothering with photography at all.

Photography shouldn't be a pain in the neck.

So what makes the difference between knowing when photography is fun or when photography is painful? In my experience, photography becomes painful when:

* We don't know what we're doing

* We don't know how to do what we want

* We don't know what we want

Take a good look at that list. Perhaps you have more to add to the list, but there's something in common with each of those pain points.

Ignorance.

That's because ignorance is painful. Knowing that ignorance causes my frustration, I try to eliminate anything unknown in my photography projects.

Why Are You a Photographer?

Let's start at a very basic level. Ask yourself why are you a photographer? What is it about you that makes photography something enjoyable or interesting?

Lee mentioned on the podcast that she's always been one to express herself visually. She's an artist and started drawing at a young age. Over time, she learned how to visualize her compositions and create it. Photography became an extension of that inner motivation to create something visual.

She started getting interested in photography to capture memories, as many of us do. However, her desire to improve her photography changed her initial concepts from portraits to other types of photography.

That wasn't without some angst along the way. One day Lee was taking some travel photos and Tové made a heartbreaking comment.

You used to take photos of me.

Lee felt horrible when she heard that, and she never saw it coming. She used to take photos of Tové all the time. As a young girl, Tové used to photo-bomb other people's pictures because she just thought anyone with a camera was trying to take a photo of her.

Meanwhile, Lee's photography evolved as she realized there was potential for art in addition to capturing family memories.

Inspiration is Not Motivation

There are a lot of photographers who claim that they want to inspire you. Trust me, that's impossible. It's a nice sentiment, but nobody can inspire you.

Inspiration is an internal process based upon a trigger. You and I may view the same photo. Whether we're both inspired or not has nothing to do with the photo, but rather with our own motivations. The trigger may cause us to feel something or act creat...

All photography needs some post processing help. Whether you need Adobe Photoshop or not may depend upon which genre of photography you enjoy.

Visit the show notes at:  https://williambeem.com/episode119

Does every photographer need to use Photoshop? Whether you need it or not may depend upon which genre of photography you enjoy. We discuss some alternatives and reasons why Photoshop may be right for your needs.

Let's get into it.

Does Every Photographer Need to Use Photoshop?

I'll be honest, I use Photoshop and truly enjoy it. However, I don't always feel the need to use Photoshop to process every image. In some cases, and often most cases, I don't need it. Using Adobe Lightroom and perhaps some 3rd party tools (mentioned below) does a great job to help me finish my photos.

Why Use Post Processing Tools?

Photoshop is an extremely powerful tool for manipulating photos, graphics and text. By the name, you'd think it was designed for photographers, but it's really a tool to help graphic designers. Photographers can definitely benefit from using Photoshop to enhance and finish our photos.

As much as some folks like to brag about their shots coming “straight out of the camera”, the truth is that all photos need some processing. JPEGS coming out of a camera get processed in-camera according to your profile.

Ever shot something on Vivid mode? That's one of the settings on some cameras that process your photos after the shot to give it a particular look.

RAW photos don't get this processing, and that's a good thing. Instead, you get a rather flat looking image to use as a basis to start your post processing.

We have plenty of choices for RAW processors these days:

* Adobe Lightroom

* Adobe Camera RAW

* Luminar 2018

* ON1 Photo RAW

There are too many to mention, and most do the same thing as far as basic RAW processing. They're all very good. These RAW processing engines allow you to create your own personal style for each photo. Many will let you save those styles as presets to use on other photos, or you can even buy presets developed by other photographers.

The Photoshop Difference

Adobe Camera RAW is part of Adobe Photoshop, but things change once you get inside Photoshop.

Now you have a lot of power and control to manipulate images. Not just by changing color profiles, but by actually warping the pixels to change their shape, remove elements you don't want and add text & graphics.

If you look closely at cover photos of models on magazines, you're looking at an image that went through Photoshop. It's amazing how much gets processed.

* Skin smoothing and blemish removal

* Eyes enhanced, whitened, sharpened and even enlarged

* Hair plumped up

* Thighs and arms slimmed down

* Hips and breasts plumped up

* Lips reshaped

* Eyelashes and eyebrows added

* Colors changed from boring to exciting

The list can go on, but you get the idea. Photoshop lets you do almost anything you can imagine to a photograph. It enables your creativity.

The Problem with Photoshop

With all of that power comes a rather steep learning curve. Once you learn the basics, you may find that it's still rather time consuming to do things in Photoshop that are faster, easier, and sometimes less expensive in other tools.

Canva makes it easy to create graphics for social media and products. 3rd party plugins for Photoshop are now morphing into stand-alone tools that can do a great job of enhancing photos, and they do it very quickly.

I think Photoshop is an essential tool for portrait retouching, compositing and some very fine detail work. However, it may be overkill for many photographers.

We discussed a number of alternatives on this episode, and you can find links to those products and some trial or demo versions to use for a period of time.

Does every photographer need to use Photoshop?

Honestly, I don't think so. There are many genres that I think can do excellent work with Lightroom, Luminar and other products.

Big Photography News: Does This Mean We Can Ditch Facebook Groups and Go Back to Flickr Communities?

Visit the show notes at:  https://williambeem.com/episode118

Last week we got the news – SmugMug buys Flickr. OK, now what?

SmugMug vs. Flickr

Before I get started, I want to disclose that I am an affiliate for SmugMug. I have no knowledge of the inner workings of SmugMug, but I do get paid if you decide to purchase an account with SmugMug based upon my recommendation (and you also save 15%). Since I'm disclosing all of that, here's my SmugMug discount URL:

https://williambeem.com/smugmug

With that out of the way, let's talk about this purchase.

Flickr and SmugMug are both online photo sharing sites, but they serve different markets and needs. Flickr is a social media site where you upload your photos to share, either on the service with other photographers or using links to post your photos elsewhere on the Internet.

SmugMug is a portfolio site and also a point of sale for photographers. This is where you create galleries of photos that you can share, either publicly or to a limited audience, and allow them to purchase your photos through the site. SmugMug integrates with Bay Photo for prints or allows you to sell digital downloads.

Flickr has a free version of the service supported by ads, but you can pay for an annual membership that provides more features and removes the ads for a relatively small fee.

SmugMug isn't free, but it does offer a 14 free trial. Other than that, you pay to use the service. SmugMug also takes a 15% cut of your online photo sales.

Flickr Used to Be the Place for Photographers

That headline may upset some people who are still diehard fans of Flickr, but it's safe to say that Flickr's community diminished over the past few years. Different social media and photo sharing sites rose up to steal much of Flickr's thunder, and Flickr did little to nothing to remain competitive.

Facebook is a horrible place to post your photos due to the aggressive compression applied to your images, but people post there anyway.

Why?

Because that's where everyone else is these days. Not everyone has a Flickr account because it primarily appeals to photographers. However, nearly everyone has a Facebook account. So you put up with horrible compression in order to potentially reach a wider audience.

Another group of people embraced Instagram (which Facebook bought) for mostly the same reasons. With the rise of mobile phone photography, it was an easy and frictionless what to share photos in the moment.

Photographers who want to share their carefully composed and post-processed photos jump through hoops to get them on Instagram for much the same reason we post them on Facebook.

That's where the people are.

The Social Media Backlash Created a New Awareness

Mark Zuckerberg's two days of testimony before Congress opened a lot of eyes about the price we pay for using Facebook and Instagram as a “free” service.

These free social media sites are full of opportunities for us to reveal information about ourselves that Facebook and developers can mine to either sell us things or attempt to manipulate our opinions.

That sort of thing never happened on Flickr or SmugMug.

The problem is that we didn't truly have an alternative that came to mind.

That all changed with the headline – SmugMug buys Flickr.

That's because Flickr didn't come to mind under the ownership of Yahoo or Verizon. Why?

Because both of those organizations are essentially advertising companies. They're the other side of the same coin when compared to Facebook or Google services. They're mining your data to exploit.

We cover the pros and cons of five different methods to learn Lightroom, from getting started to more advanced usage.

Visit the show notes at:  https://williambeem.com/episode117

If you want to learn how to use Lightroom Classic CC, there are plenty of options at your disposal. We cover the pros and cons of five different methods to learn Lightroom, from getting started to more advanced usage.

Five Ways to Learn How to Use Lightroom Classic CC

Learning how to use Lightroom Classic CC seems like a never-ending task. I think most of us choose a method to get started, and then mostly stick with what we know.

There are two problems, though:

* Most of us learn Lightroom in different ways

* Most teachers seem to only teach Lightroom the same way

As you listen to the podcast, you'll see that Lee has a very unusual way of working with Lightroom. While it wouldn't work for me, her method reminds me that one size of training isn't right for everyone.

That's why we wanted to discuss some of the different ways to learn how to use Lightroom Classic CC, and give our thoughts on the pros and cons of each method.

Learning by Doing

At some point, we all learn by doing. I think it works best after you had an introduction to go over the basics, but some people like to just dive right in and start pressing buttons, moving sliders, and finding out what happens when you do something.

To be honest, that's not my style. I remember when I was a kid and my father wanted me to do something. If I replied, “I don't know how”, he'd belt out a loud voice with one word: “Learn!”

Now I loved my Dad (he's gone), but these were never my favorite moments.

How do you even know where to start? Mind you, it's much safer to start playing with Lightroom if you don't have any guidance than it was to learn how to work the lawn mower. It can still feel intimidating.

Lee's method of learning how to use the tools in the Lightroom Develop module is something I thought was pretty clever.

She got a number of Lightroom Presets to apply to her photos, and then started analyzing what changes they made. Some were just sliders that globally adjusted the photo, but she also looked for the tell-tale dots that indicated a Gradiant or other masking tool that had a Local adjustment.

The key to learning by doing isn't just to see what happens when you move a slider or use a masking tool. You want to uncover the reason why you would choose that tool to do your photo development.

As with most things in photography, it's important to find your answer to “why?”

Learning by Reading

Learning by reading used to only refer to books or magazines, but clearly a lot of people reach for a search engine result before shelling out money to buy a book for simple problems.

I bet someone find this post before they buy a Lightroom book.

That said, I still like to purchase and learn from Lightroom books. I have a growing collection of book reviews on my site from authors like Scott Kelby and Joe McNally.

So how do you know when to use a search for an article or if it's time to go buy a book?

If I have a one-off problem, I typically start with a Google search. That's because I already know how to use Lightroom for my basic needs. However, there are features that I don't use frequently. If I wanted to create a photo book in Lightroom, I'd probably start with a search engine to supplement what I already know about Lightroom.

Books are better for those who want to get started with Lightroom, or perhaps use as a reference for a new version of Lightroom. There are some features that I just don't use often, but it's nice to know where to find the answer. Google searches are nice,