Lightroom sync — I give up

I’ve found it to be very convenient to edit photos on my iPad, it’s not where I edit 100+ photos but if I got less than 50, then I really like editing in Lightroom Mobile. My main photo app is Lightroom Classic, I’m not enthusiastic about it, but I’m used to it and knows how to edit my photos. With the promise that I can sync photos I’ve imported and edited in LR Mobile to LR Classic, it seems like a no-brainer to use this combo.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The syncing between LR Mobile and Classic is 100% unreliable! Unreliable in the sense that there is always one or more photos that LR Classic tries to sync, but it never finishes. This mean that I don’t know if the photo has been copied from “LR Cloud” to my desktop, sometimes it has, and sometimes it hasn’t.

Searching for a solution, a common comment is “Let it be, it will sort itself out eventually”, my experience is that it doesn’t happen. I’ve been waiting for weeks, but Classic is still waiting for the same photo to finish syncing. Numerous times I’ve tried starting from scratch, deleting everything in “LR Cloud”, then start to import new photos on my iPad and usually in a day or two I have a photo that doesn’t finish syncing.

Yesterday, something happened that made me decide to stop trying. I had taken two photos on my phone that I needed on my desktop, the photos had synced on my iPad and everything looked OK. However, Classic refused to download them and instead was trying to finish a sync of another photo. I tried everything I could come up with to get Classic “un-stuck”, but I couldn’t figure something that worked. Instead, I exported the RAW file to Photos, let it sync to my Mac (less than a minute), exported it from Photos to my desktop and imported it into Classic where I could do what I needed to do (printing).

This was the final straw and I decided that from now on, I’ll be importing photos into Photos on my iPad, do my editing in Darkroom and later archive the photos in Classic using PhotoSync. This means that my editing will disappear, and it’s a bit cumbersome. But, according to my experience, it’s 100% rock solid. I will of course test LR Mobile once in a while to see if the syncing have improved (it hasn’t in several years, so I’m not holding my breath).

I’m amazed the Adobe hasn’t managed to get this to work, given that they have had such a long time to fix it.

Playing around with shadows

And depth of field

Just for fun while waiting for different stuff

Another experiment in editing, this time I tried to exaggerate the colors and texture. It could have been a pretty OK photo if the tree had been more separated from the forest in the background and the tree to the right hadn’t been in the picture. Well, I’ll learn … hopefully.

A little experiment in editing and color grading, I wanted to see if I could the it to look like some post-apocalyptic photo but failed. The are too many lights, the walls are too clean, etc.

The LUMIX G9 couldn’t handle it

I’ve been using the LUMIX G9 for about two years now, and I’ve been very happy with it. It has worked well in various situations, and it has been a joy when I’ve been walking around in different forests. But during the last 6-7 weeks I’ve discovered one situation where it doesn’t work, and now I need to figure out what to do.

I’m talking about is the lag between pressing the shutter and the actual exposure being made. It’s not a giant delay, in fact, I haven’t noticed it before, but it’s enough for me to missing photos.

What happens is that I’m indoors photographing martial arts, i.e., people move around quickly, and I discovered that I was missing shots because people had moved between me pressing the shutter and the photo being captured. And no, it’s not me!! I used to have a Nikon D4s, and I was able to capture these kinds of photos without any problems. I also tried a Nikon Z7 while using the G9, and I did not have this issue with the Z7.

According to the experts, it’s caused by the G9 using contrast detection for the autofocus, and there isn’t much I can do about it. So now I need to figure out what to do. I could stop photographing martial arts, or I could get an Olympus camera who apparently is faster than the G9, or … start building up a new camera system (you can probably hear my wallet screaming). Well, this is something to think about during the holidays.

Sketch images

I decided to go out and try to take a few images during lunch. Instead of my usual walk I took the car and drove around a bit. I saw a few places that looks promising but it wasn’t possible for me to stay and properly explore the different places. I just took a few images to remember these places, hopefully I get the chance to take closer look before Christmas but things tend to happen … so who knows. Anyway here are a few of the photos I got.

I’m bad at editing photos

One thing I’m really bad at, is editing photos. With this, I mean that I don’t really edit my photos. Sure, I make minor changes to exposure, contrast, colour temperature, etc., but I very, very rarely try any substantial edit. But when I see other photographers work I realise that I should become braver, learn to imagine how I want the picture to look like and figure out how to do the actual edit.

And don’t get me started on tools like Photoshop, I have no idea how to use these programs. What is most irritating is that I can’t figure out why I haven’t bothered to learn how to use them.

So, here are a few quick edits I tried today … trying to relax after work. Note, they are not intended to be examples of good edits, instead I consider them as rough sketches for things that I should become better at. They are also a bit overdone, ideally you shouldn’t suspect that a photo have been edited … unless, of course, the photo should look overdone like the first photo below.

I took this photo in Stockholm a couple of years ago. I wanted to get a “spooky” feeling and decided to try out some Lightroom Presets. In other words, I didn’t actually do any editing, I just clicked around until I found something that looked like I wanted.

The next photo was taken a few weeks ago. The original is a bit flat, dull and cold, so I tried to enhance the colours to get a bit more depth. I also wanted to make the sky warmer and enhanced the colours in the clouds.

Here I tried to enhance the yellow, orange and brown. The idea was once again to get a warmer, more autumn like, feeling.

Another autumn photo, it looks like I’m only taking photos in the autumn, and once again I’ve tried to get a warm feeling. I changed to color temperature to get the feeling of sun rise … in reality the photo was taken in the middle of the day.

It’s fun to see how different edits change the photo, but I find it difficult to go from what I see in my head to something I can see with my eyes. I don’t understand what kind of adjustments I should make … but I suppose it’s a matter of getting more practice.

Halfway there

In July I started a “One photo per day” project to see if I could beat my previous record of about 150 days. The goal is 200 days and I’m happy to say that I’ve now halfway there. Today I uploaded nr 100, and to celebrate I moved the whole thing to an album on my photo site (for some strange reason it’s easier to manage photos on a photo site compared to regular blog site … who could have guessed).

Stopped using that site but they are available on this blog

Experiment

This summer didn’t end up as I had hoped. Among several things I had hoped to get done was a lot of photography, but this didn’t happen. Instead I ended up doing a lot more house renovating stuff that I could have imagined. And now vacation is over. Anyway, yesterday I decided to try to take a few photos again and and the same time try to do an experiment.

I recently watched on online seminar which got me thinking about several things of how I photograph things, without going into details I have a huge problem in that I don’t take photos “intentionally”, instead I snap photos without thinking much if I can get a better photo by moving around finding another angle, wait for better light, etc.

So yesterday I tried to kick myself in the behind by putting on a wide angle zoom (14-28mm) before going out into the forest. This is something I never do.

I can’t say that the result was especially good but I got me thinking so I consider it a success. Here are the photos with some comments why I don’t think they are that good.

This is perhaps the photo that I find most interesting, it was the light that caught my attention but at the same time I go “meh” when I look at it. It’s interesting to me for how it looks like in the forest, but it doesn’t really work as a photo.

A “standard” photography, it could have worked much better if the groups of trees to the left hadn’t been there … but I couldn’t move to the right without getting serious wet. I like the clouds, the grass and the light but those trees “destroys” the photo. I would have liked to have the center of the photo more to the left so that a few of the trees to the right wasn’t in the frame.

Kind of interesting from a personal view but the photo is bad, the trees to the left shouldn’t be so prominent, and the fallen tree is completely wrong in the photo. My only excuse is that I couldn’t really move to some other place that would fix these things.

I find these red plants quite interesting and beautiful, but the top photo isn’t that interesting. I tried different angles, framings, etc but I couldn’t make a good photo. The top one is the one I think shows the plants best, I think this photo would get a few likes if I posted it to Instagram but it doesn’t really work for me.

The second shows how it looks where this plants grow, on top of a small hill, and I think it’s fun to see the environment. But the plants should be more prominent.

I’m quite fond of tree stumps with some kind of mushrooms growing on them. Sometime I see one where the mushrooms make the whole thing looks like some futuristic city from StarWars/StarTrek. This one is quite boring, it’s just a recording of how it looked like when I walked past it.

As I wrote above, the photos above are not very interesting but I started to think about things, which I consider a success.

A new project

I’ve tried to do a 365 project1 a couple of times, but I’ve always failed after about 100-150 days. This means that I’ve started the project January 1st and stopped somewhere in March–May. And the last photos are usually taken late in the evening when I remember “Ohhh, I need to take a photo”, and then I abandon the whole thing.

Well, I got inspired to try again when I saw the site by Woody Campbell, he takes one photo each day, and apparently he plans to continue doing this for the rest of his life. My plan is not as ambitious, I just want to see if I can reach 200 photos and set a new personal record.

My rules are simple:

  1. The photo has been taken that day.
  2. It doesn’t have to be published that day, it’s OK to publish in batches.
  3. No need for fancy photos, it’s enough with photos from my daily life.
  4. It’s not OK to just publish a photo, there has to be some text in addition to the photos.

You can follow along by going to micro.mostrom.eu/categories/daily/

  1. You take and publish one photo every day, and in my opinion the photo should actually be taken that day. ↩︎