How to consistently white balance photos in Lightroom

I have no professional training in graphic design or color management, but here is a Lightroom trick I use when I have a bunch of photos I want to consistently white balance.

1. Get your photos into grid mode (whether this is by selecting a collection/folder or filtering a collection/folder).
   
2. Pick one photo as your reference.
   
3. White balance that photo the best you can. Sometimes I like to open up the photo in Photoshop and use Adjustments -> Variations to help me with the white balancing.
4. After you are done, go back to grid mode, select the reference photo.
   
5. Right-click on the photo and select "Lock to second window."
   
6. Select the first photo in your grid, open it in the Develop module (press "D"), and press "Y" to open the photo in split view. You want the split view where there are two variations of the same photo side-by-side, not the one where you have one photo split down the middle. If you're in the wrong split view, press "SHIFT-Y" to change views.
   
7. Open up the second window by clicking on the rectangle with "2" in it, at the bottom lefthand corner of the screen or pressing F11.
   
8. This is your reference photo. Move the second window to cover up the photo on the left.
   
9. Now you can white balance the current photo against reference photo. Use the left and right arrow keys to cycle through the entire set of photos in the grid.

HD dSLR video vs traditional 35mm film

HD dSLR video is all the rage nowadays. But I'm a still shooter and know very little about "motion." I should discuss some terminology and technical issues that relate to motion pictures, but that we don't worry about in still photography. First, video refers to shooting without film (no rolls of film that need to be processed in a chemical lab. Second, you do not use auto-focus for shooting motion pictures. Hollywood studios employ "focus-pullers." Their job is to manually focus the camera at all times, so that the appropriate scenery/actor is in focus. People and things move around, so this is not an easy job.

I learned about the differences between HD dSLR and 35mm film from two sources: Ken Rockwell who used to work in Hollywood before focusing on digital photography and an interview with Greg Yaitanes who recently directed the season finale of House. The episode was filmed entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II. They're coming from a professional, Hollywood studio perspective, but I think much of the discussion is still relevant to amateur filmmakers.

Pros of HD dSLR

• No film and processing to pay for (that same advantage that digital still cameras have over film still cameras) - this will save you tons of money. According to Ken Rockwell, an hour of film costs a Hollywood studio $10,000 - for the film itself and all the processing.
  
• Since HD dSLR is already digital, you can take advantage of an all-digital workflow. This can save you lots of time and money since you can do all your post-production with your own team of people, in-house. The same advantage that digital still cameras have over still film cameras.
  
• You can shoot at ISO 1600+ and do amazing low-light video, which is not possible on film.
  
• The dSLR is tiny compared to the 35mm film camera, so you can record video in very tight spaces and not have to remove walls in your set in order to film from different angles
  
• There are tons of fast lenses available already for still cameras. You can shoot with an f/1.2 lens and get amazingly shallow depth-of-field. Or better yet, use a macro lens! According to Greg Yaitanes, they shot the House episode mostly with the 50mm f/1.2 and 85mm f/1.2 Canon lenses, and they also used the 24-70mm f/2.8, 70-200mm f/2.8, and 100mm macro lenses somewhat. Yaitanes claimed that he could get depth-of-field on the Canon 5D Mark II that was one quarter smaller than film.
  
• Or heck, imagine shooting video with a tilt-shift lens or fisheye! So many creative possibilities open up when you can use still camera lenses.
  
• The dSLR full frame sensor (24mm x 36mm) is larger than the 35mm film frame (approximately 18mm by 22mm). APS-c sensors are comparable in size to film (approximately 16mm x 23mm). So you'll always get shallower depth-of-field with full frame dSLR sensors. This is the reason why Greg Yaitanes chose to use the full-frame Canon 5D Mark II over the APS-c Canon 7D and APS-H Canon 1D Mark IV.
  

Pros of 35mm film

• In general (at "normal" ISOs), film simply has better image quality than HD dSLR video. This is the big issue. Film has a much better response to highlights whereas CMOS/CCD sensors blow out highlights very easily. However, if you are very good at lighting, you can probably use HD dSLR video and get around it somewhat. As Ken Rockwell says, you cannot do HDR with HD dSLR video. At least not right now.
  
• Manual focus on HD dSLRs is very difficult. Since the exciting part of shooting with HD dSLR is the potential for super shallow depth-of-field, that makes focusing even more difficult. But this should change as camera manufacturers get feedback from film makers and they improve the technology. Zeiss recently came out with fast, manual-focus prime lenses, designed specifically for HD dSLR video.
  
• Hollywood studios have been working with film forever, so they know how to use it. HD dSLR video is a new technology and film crews have to learn how to use it.
  

What I've learned about making photobooks

I recently completed by first photobook. I used Adoramapix's online Flash software and had the book printed by Adorama, but my discussion should apply to making any photobook.

I wasted a lot of time because I would process a photo, put it into the photobook, and then move on to the next photo and do the same. Then I would realize that I didn't want to use that photo or that it was cropped wrong or that there was a color cast. Then I'd have to go back and fix it.

You should start by cropping and throwing the photos into the book making software, without any further corrections. Then move the photos around, swap photos in and out. Then wait a week or two and come back to it. Spend some time re-arranging the photos, swapping photos, etc. When you are reasonably sure of your design and layout, THEN start playing with color balance and curves. If you have a group of photos taken in the same lighting situation, record and use the same color settings for all of them. Be especially careful to make colors consistent for photos on the same spread. From your rough layout, you should know what size your photos need to be for 300 dpi. Crop your photos to exactly 300 dpi or whatever resolution the printer claims to use. Otherwise, you are at the mercy of the booking software for resizing your photos.

Be careful what font you use. Frankly, most people, including myself, have no taste in typography. What looks good on the screen is usually not good for print. John Paul Caponigro has some advice on good fonts for photobooks.

Anne Lamott on the frustration and rewards of writing and other creative pursuits

Quotes by Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up. (pxxiii)

All I know is that the process is pretty much the same for everyone I know. The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. It is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it. (p7-8)

What's real is that if you do your scales every day, if you slowly try harder and harder pieces, if you listen to great musicians play music you love, you'll get better. At times when you're working, you'll sit there feeling hung over and bored, and you may or may not be able to pull yourself up out of it that day. But it is fantasy to think that successful writers do not have these bored, defeated hours, these house of deep insecurity when no one feels as small and jumpy as a water bug. They do. But they also often feel a great sense of amazement that they get to write, and they know that this is what they want to do for the rest of their lives. (p14)

E. L. Doctorow once said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. (p18)

I also remember a story that I know I've told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

I tell this story again because it usually makes a dent in the tremendous sense of being overwhelmed that my students experience. Sometimes it actually gives them hope, and hope, as Chesterton said, is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate. Writing can be pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves perhaps a bit too seriously. (p18-19)

I think that something similar happens with our psychic muscles. They cramp around our wounds -- the pain from our childhood, the losses and disappointments of adulthood, the humiliations suffered in both -- to keep us from getting hurt in the same place again, to keep foreign substances out. So those wounds never have a chance to heal. Perfectionism is one way our muscles cramp. In some cases we don't even know that the wounds and the cramping are there, but both limit us. They keep us moving and writing in tight, worried ways. They keep us standing back or backing away from life, keep us from experiencing life in a naked and immediate way. (p29-30)

If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage. I doubt that you would read a close friend's early efforts and, in his or her presence, roll your eyes and snicker. I doubt that you would pantomime sticking your finger down your throat. I think you might say something along the lines of, "Good for you. WE can work out some of the problems later, but for now, full steam ahead!" (p31)

There's an old Mel Brooks routine, on the flip side of the "2,000-Year-Old Man," where the psychiatrist tells his patient, "Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it." ... It means, of course, that when you don't know what to do, when you don't know whether your chracter would do this or that, you get quiet and try to hear that still small voice inside. It will tell you what to do. The problem is that so many of us lost access to our broccoli when we were children. When we listened to our intuition when were small and then told the grown-ups what we believed to be true, we were often either corrected, ridiculed, or punished. ... So you may have gotten into the habit of doubting the voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential that you get it back.

You need your broccoli in order to write well. Otherwise you're going to sit down in the morning and have only your rational mind to guide you. Then, if you're having a bad day, you're going to crash and burn within a half hour. You'll give up, and maybe even get up, which is worse because a lot of us know that if we just sit there long enough, in whatever shape, we may end up being surprised. (p110-111)

If you are not careful, station KFKD [K-Fucked] will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo. Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one's specialness, or how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the list of all the things one doesn't do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn't do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on. (p116)

Here is the best true story on giving I know, and it was told by Jack Kornfield of the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. An eight-year-old boy had a younger sister who was dying of leukemia, and he was told that without a blood transfusion she would die. His parents explained to him that his blood was probably compatible with hers, and if so, he could be the blood donor. They asked him if they could test his blood. He said sure. So they did and it was a good match. Then they asked if he would give his sister a pint of blood, that it could be her only chance of living. He said he would have to think about it overnight.

The next day he went to his parents and said he was willing to donate the blood. So they took him to the hospital where he was put on a gurney beside his six-year-old sister. Both of them were hooked up to IVs. A nurse withdrew a pint of blood from the boy, which was then put in the girl's IV. The boy lay on his gurney in silence while the blood dripped into his sister, until the doctor came over to see how he was doing. Then the boy opened his eyes and asked, "How soon until I start to die?"

Sometimes you have to be that innocent to be a writer. Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it's right. To be great, art has to point somewhere. So if you are no longer familiar with that place of naive conscience, it's hard to see any point in your being a writer. Almost all of my close friends are walking personality disorders, but I know innocence is in them because I can see it in their faces and in their decisions. I can almost promise that this quality is still in you, that you are capable of quiet heroism. (p205)

Lorne Michaels on life

I've been watching rented DVDs of 30 Rock from Netflix. On Disc 2 of Season 2, there is a bonus feature showing footage from a group interview of the cast and crew by Brian Williams at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. I was surprised to learn how much the cast admires their executive producer, Lorne Michaels, who also runs Saturday Night Live.

Brian Williams: Alec Baldwin, same question [of all the things you've done, where does 30 Rock fit]. After all you've accomplished in your career from, gotta throw in Tony Bennett, classic, to Glengarry Glen Ross, the favorite scene of so many people here, this [30 Rock] gives you something else entirely.

Alec Baldwin: I learned from Lorne, that is to say, this is the greatest day of my life, right now, today, here, with all of you, now. This is the greatest day of my life, I'm so happy to be here with all of you, thank you... [cracks up] ... No ... [Alec Baldwin goes on to speak more seriously]

Brian Williams: ... Tina, that brings us circling back to you. I saw that the character, that Alec plays, is absolutely intended to be a mirror image of Lorne. Explain.

Tina Fey: It's not, it's certainly not...

Brian Williams: Misquoted?

Tina Fey: Yeah, of course. It's not entirely Lorne. But there is an element to it that is truncated, you don't get the full sense of it, that is, there is certainly a friendship between the two characters [Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy] that I would like to believe reflects my friendship with Lorne. And there's, I think, a little bit of a worldview that Jack Donaghy has with like "you should have a great life." "And you should have a great house and you should rise above what you think you can be." And that actually is the part that, I feel, comes from Lorne. And then the more corporate aspects are all from sort of corporate biographies that we've tried to read and fallen asleep.

Brian Williams: Lorne, have you in fact urged people you've worked with to have a "great house"?

Lorne Michaels: Yes, I do.

Brian Williams: It's one of your bedrock principles.

Lorne Michaels: Exactly. I always say get an apartment so when you come home at night, you go "who lives here?.. Someone great must live here. Oh, it's I live here." [Tina Fey is mouthing the words and practically beaming while Lorne Michaels is saying this.] Because you work really really hard.

I like the idea: "today is the greatest day of my life." It's a variation on John Wooden's motto, "Make every day your masterpiece."

Here is my take on Lorne Michael's statements (which should not be attributed to Lorne Michaels since I don't know him at all). You deserve to live a great life, you are a great person, and everything you do should be a reflection of that. Today is the greatest day of your life because it's full of opportunity. You have the entire day to make yourself great and even better. And if you've done things right, you've made your life great and you should enjoy it.

What is the comedy ethos?

Thanks to Tina Fey and her awesome TV sitcom 30 Rock, I've become interested and even excited about comedy. I was a big fan of Scrubs for the past couple years, but that show focuses on a narrow brand of comedy: outrageous fantasy sequences and slapstick. 30 Rock has much more variety and takes far more risks.

I've been so impressed by Fey's work and reputation that I even gave Saturday Night Live (SNL) a second chance. I prefer longer-form, character-driven comedy, so the sketch comedy of SNL doesn't really appeal to me. But now I can appreciate sketch comedy in the broader context of the comedy ethos.

I may very well be wrong, but this is what I think the comedy ethos is: First, you can do whatever you want as long as you insult everyone/everything equally. In other words, you can insult whoever you like as long as you spare no one. Second, a true professional will do whatever it takes to make the audience laugh, no matter how disgusting/offensive/disturbing/insulting. Sometimes the goal is not to make people laugh in the "haha" sense, but to shock them or make them think about a topic they ignore or avoid.

I now understand the appeal of being a comedy performer. You are allowed to behave in crazy ways that you'd never get away with in proper society.

Song of the day: "Dream a Little Dream of Me" by Andre, Schwandt, and Kahn

Michael Bublé sings a beautifully smooth version of this song.

Music by Fabian Andre and Wilbur Schwandt
Lyrics by Gus Kahn

Stars shining bright above you, night breezes seem to whisper, "I love you".
Birds singing in the sycamore tree, "Dream a little dream of me".
Say "nighty-night" and kiss me. Just hold me tight and tell me you'll miss me.
While I'm alone and blue as can be, dream a little dream of me.

Stars fading, but I linger on, dear.
Still craving your kiss, I'm longing to linger till dawn, dear.
Just saying this: Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you.
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you.
But in your dreams whatever they be, dream a little dream of me.

Stars fading, but I linger on, dear.
Still craving your kiss, I'm longing to linger till dawn, dear.
Just saying this: Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you.
Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you.
But in your dreams whatever they be, dream a little dream of me.

Link of the day: Looks, 1/f distribution, myth of meritocracy

First, an old link from months ago that I forgot to post: Your looks and your inbox. OK Cupid, an online dating service, does cool statistical analyses of how your profile affects response rate. One idea to take away is that women are very harsh on men's looks. Ouch.

One of the key ideas in my research is quantum noise. So it's neat to find an article claiming that modern movies have a cut frequency that follows a 1/f distribution.

Finally, via Cal Newport and a few links, I enjoyed the following New York Magazine article on why kindergarten admissions tests are worthless. The single most interesting takeaway message is how unreliable intelligence tests are for 4 year-olds.

I wrote to [University of Iowa psychologist David] Lohman and asked what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds. He answered with a careful regression analysis: about 25 percent.

Link of the day: Environmentally friendly apartment in Hong Kong

This video of a "world's greenest home" in Hong Kong is way cool.

Link of the day: Luck and choices

I read an interesting psychology article about so-called "luck" (via Lifehacker). A UK psychologist studied "lucky" versus "unlucky" people. I wouldn't call it luck, but rather a good attitude and a positive, optimistic attitude. According to the results of the study, having those things make you more open to new possibilities and opportunities.

Again from Lifehacker, I found this poetic image entitled "When faced with two choices." It reads "When faced with two choices, simply toss a coin. It works not because it settles the question for you. But because in that brief moment when the coin is in the air, you suddenly know what you were hoping for." I interpret this as: if you are having a hard time making a choice, force yourself to make a decision in a split second. Then you'll go with your intuition and feelings.