The past few weeks I’ve been busy with work and with helping Robert with the Autumn Leaf Slideshow.  The more fun part of this time period was of course the slideshow.

This year’s Autumn Leaf was one of the best ever in terms of the content, venue, and technical set up.

Content wise we had some fabulous shows from Ted Smith-Peterson, Steve Carter,  Ken Storey, Dave Honan, and many, many others.  I debuted my program, Magic! also.  All the programs contained some fabulous photography and in some cases one of a kind images which could not be made by anyone other than the person who took them.   Dave’s program and Mike Sawyer’s program also used some creative photos and presentation techniques to make their presentations interesting.  Good stuff all the way around.

The venue this year was the Fox Theater in Centralia.  The theater is undergoing renovation right now and is a bit rough around the edges but the bones are there and formed a great basis for the slide show.  It should be a wonderful venue moving forward.  Next year Robert has some ideas about how to bring some of the photography into the lobby to facilitate more discussions and to have more of people’s work on display.  Look for improvements for next year!

Technically this was one of the best set ups we’ve had at a railfan slideshow ever.  Dale Skyllingstad brought professional audio gear and a brilliant projector.  The sound quality was impeccable!  Additionally the set up was easy to complete and literally worked on the first try.  Talk about a stress free presentation!  The icing on all of this was Paul Peterson’s projector calibrator.   If you’ve calibrated your monitor (you have haven’t you?) you know just how much of a difference calibration can make.  The 6 or 7 minutes spent letting the calibrator do its job was literally the best investment of time that we made.  We did not receive one comment on the color or black level from any presenter or viewer and for me that is the best compliment.   If we do the technical set up the same next year I’ll be happy.

The one area of presentation flaw (and I emphasize very minor here) is in the shows themselves.  If you are planning to present next year expect that your show will be held more closely to the presenters guide than ever before.  While there were no major issues with shows this year we do want to notch it up a bit more for next year so expect to see a revised presenters guide, an absolute deadline for show submission prior to the event and comments from me on adherence to the guide.

As is normal there is some photography to be had on the slideshow weekend.  For me that was Sunday.  I was up fairly early and took advantage of the morning fog to take a few photos before I had to head home for the day.

Even though I purchased Photomatix a few months ago, I hadn’t really spent much time with HDR photography. Tonight I had some time and found what I figured would be a great subject for my first attempt at tone mapping. I made this photo of the Black Hills Central Railroad on one of its tourist excursions between Keystone and Hill City, South Dakota.

I’m a bit biased, but I figure it’s not bad for a first try at tone mapping…

I returned home from vacation to find Kodak decided to stop production of Kodachrome slide film. This is no surprise as clearly the demand for most film products has dropped significantly with the digital age and the fact producing Kodachrome is complex.

Being I’m over 40 years old I grew up in the era when the little yellow boxes were everywhere and Paul Simon’s hit “Kodachrome” played on the radio. In the 70s camera’s, even SLRs, were fairly simple and getting the best quality film was your first step to success after good glass. The film of choice? Kodachrome of course.

What’s the attraction for railfans? Kodachrome had vibrant colors and the slides lasted darn near forever. Both of these features helped to solidify it as the film of choice in the hobby. Being one who always wanted something better I jumped to Kodachrome and used it exclusively once I saw what print film did in my SLR.

I moved over to Kodachrome 64 slide film in 1988. My first K64 photo was Amtrak 7 entering the east portal of the Cascade tunnel on June 7, 1988. Over the next 4+ years I shot K64 and K200 in the Northwest and in Michigan finally finishing my Kodachrome run on July 24, 1992 with a Central Michigan B23-7 stopped at signal 2D at Durand.

Why did I stop shooting Kodachrome and film in general? Over the next 3 years my life changed dramatically with a move from Michigan back to the Northwest and the birth of my first child. Moreover I became increasingly frustrated with the whole film process (shoot today, mail tomorrow, results back to you in two weeks) and the limited capability to improve the image in any way without dark room equipment. I desperately wanted something more flexible than what Kodachrome and film in general offered.

Despite my feelings about its post production limits Kodachrome was magical. Yes, the colors were vibrant and accurate and capturing a good sky (quite important to railfans) was easy. I’m proud to say I used it and I still occasionally sing Mr. Simon’s song when I look out and see a deep blue sky with puffy white clouds. So with fond memories of railfan adventures with Kodachrome in the camera I say so long Kodachrome….and everything looks worse in black and white.

Addendum: While researching the Kodachrome song for this post I found several interesting interpretations of the lyrics. The funniest is that the song is actually about LSD. Apparently replacing the word Kodachrome with LSD throughout works just fine. I wouldn’t know.

The popular belief is the song was originally written to fly in the face of those that didn’t believe artists should include commercial references in their songs. Clearly with its repeated mentions of Kodachrome and Nikon this song archives that. Apparently there were several songs at the time that had commercial references in them and were banned from the radio for a time.

Another interpretation is that Paul was just reminiscing about about the good old days of the 50′s and 60′s when color photography really came into its own. Anyway you look at it, the song is great and really memorializes a great product from Kodak.

When I originally started the conversion from Photoshop Elements Organizer to Lightroom I ran into a pretty big snag.  The snag was the captions from RAW images were not transferring into Lightroom when I used the Import from Elements feature.  Everything else imported just fine but not having my captions concerned me.

Since my January 1 attempt I’ve contemplated several workarounds to get the captions over.  My ideas were (in order of feasibility):

1.  Export the captions from Organizer and copy and paste them on each image in Lightroom
2.  Export the captions from Organizer and build .xmp sidecar files that could be read into Lightroom
3.  Wait until a later version of Lightroom and hope that caption transfer would be added
4.  Ignore the missing captions

I ruled out option 4 because I value my captions too much.  Option 3 was the plan I went with for some time but not having my catalog in Lightroom was becoming more and more difficult (mainly due to an import issue that raised its head in March).  That left me with options 1 & 2.

I experimented quite a bit with option 2 as it would make the caption import mechanical and eliminate potential errors.  I have been using Lightroom since the first Windows betas in June of 2006 so I had quite a few images that I’d edited already.  Those edits are valuable just like the captions and I wanted to make sure they were included in my new Railroad catalog.  To do this I wrote out .xmp sidecars containing the edit information.   Now I have a dilemma, some files would have two sidecar files.  That won’t work because Lightroom reads in the data in the sidecar file as a replacement for the data it has in the library.  This means when you read the side car file Lightroom overlays all the information on the image.  With two files I’d either get the edits or I’d get the captions but not both.  As much as I hated it, option 1 proved to be the most fool proof and accurate way of getting my captions into Lightroom.

The conversion 

After much grumbling about copy and paste I decided to make the leap and convert the catalog knowing I’d have a copy and paste job ahead.   Here’s the steps I performed to prepare.

In Organizer:

1.  I used the Write Tag Info to files feature to write what information I could to my image files.  This put the caption on about 1350 of my images that were originally .jpg, .tiff, or. psd
2.  I reconnected all missing files to make sure Organizer knew the location of all the images
3.  I recovered the catalog to compress it and make sure it is ready for Lightroom

In Lightroom:

1.  I selected all the images in the Library grid and went to the Metadata menu and chose Save Metadata to files (this is my ‘working’ catalog that did not contain any keywords, captions or anything, just edits).  This saved all the edits I’d made in Lightroom to xmp sidecar files
2.  I created a new catalog and chose Import from Elements.   This started the import process from my Organizer catalog

In less than an hour I had a Lightroom catalog minus captions from about 7950 images.

The clean up

The conversion process wasn’t perfect and I had many duplicate keywords.  As near as I could tell if an image was in a version set in Organizer the keywords were duplicated, one within the keyword hierarchy and one at the root of the hierarchy.  I checked several out and they were truly duplicates so all I had to do was remove the keywords that were not in the hierarchy and the keywords would all be correct.

As a double check that all of my photos were converted I went to each folder and imported all files from the folder.  I found about a dozen images that were not in organizer and thus were not converted to Lightroom.  In the end I wasn’t missing anything valuable, but it was nice to know everything had converted.

The clean up took between 3 and 4 hours total.

The captions

Thanks to Paige’s comments on the previous post I knew that the Organizer file could be opened by MS Access.  I decided to extract the captions from there into an Excel spreadsheet for ease of entry.  This is the query I used.

SELECT ImageTable.fImageOriginalFilePath,
       ImageTable.fImageOriginalFileName,
       ImageTable.fImageDate,
       ImageTable.fImageTime,
       MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaption,
       ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaption  FROM (ImageTable LEFT JOIN ImageLongCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fImageLongCaptionIdFromImage = ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaptionId)
                 LEFT JOIN MediaShortCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fMediaShortCaptionIdFromMedia = MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaptionId;

The results of this query were exported into Excel where I combined the short and long captions (I used both over the years) into one caption giving me something that looked like this:

The copy and paste

In both Lightroom and Excel I ordered the images by file name and went after it one image at a time.  What I quickly discovered is I tended to give blocks of images the same caption.  When you have a DSLR and blast off 10 images of the same train there really isn’t much different information from one image to the next.  I found I could apply the same caption to a block of images by selecting all the images in Lightroom and then pasting in the caption.  For example if you look at the Excel screen shot above you can see IMG_2347.CR2 – IMG_2350_edited-1.psd all have the same caption.  Instead of copying and pasting 7 times I can finish these images with just one copy and paste. 

In the end I captioned over 1000 images and hour.  With just under 7000 to caption that worked out to between 6 and 7 hours worth of effort.  I spread the effort out in small pieces so as to not kill myself.  I also intentionally didn’t set a deadline to complete this because with my personality if I did that I’d have to find some way to get it done before the deadline which would likely translate into some late night marathon.  

The reward

I’m now working exclusively in Lightroom and I don’t have any more copy and paste to do!  As nasty as it sounds the copy and paste wasn’t really that bad.  My decision to to a little here and there really made the job go quickly and took away the monotony that comes with a repetitive task.   Now that the hard work is over I can sit back and enjoy having a complete Lightroom catalog of my railroad photos.

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Are you having trouble figuring out which of the Adobe Photoshop products are right for you?  Check out Scott Kelby’s discussion on his blog.  Regular readers of my posts on Lightroom will not be surprised by Scott’s conclusions. 

Even if you don’t agree with Scott I hope you can get a better feel from Scott’s post on where the main photo editing products from Adobe fit in.

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