The Lightroom 4 Map Module

On installing the trial of the new Adobe Lightroom 4, I was immediately drawn to the map module (which I have seen described as gimmicky by various users). Now, whilst I don’t have a GPS enabled camera, I do like to organise my shots by location and I was hoping that the map module would make organising my photos by location even easier with the help of the Saved Locations Pane.

I was sorely disappointed.

The Problem with Reverse Geocoding for UK Users

Initially, the Map module seems quite useful. In combination with dragging images to the map, Lightroom 4 can also apply a feature called Reverse Geocoding which means Lightroom will communicate with Google Maps and add the relevant data, based on the GPS location, into the IPTC location fields. The idea being, for example, you’ve just been on a trip to Canterbury and once you’ve imported your shots, you go to the Map Module and search for Canterbury. The map centres on this location and you drag your shots onto the map and Lightroom populates the IPTC location fields with the correct data.

The way I see my organisational workflow adapting to Lightroom 4′s new Map module, is to never bother with filling in the location fields for photos manually, but to instead, add the photos to the map or a Saved Location and let the reverse geocoding do the work for me on the town, county and possibly the sublocation. To test this, I dragged a photo to a random location in France and the location data provided by reverse geocoding was: Saint-Blimont, Picardie, France. I then created a Smart Collection to only show State/Province as Picardie, and it included the photo. So, it has the potential to work brilliantly, but frustratingly, as yet, not for UK locations.

UK Provinces

Obviously, Lightroom is classifying England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as provinces of the United Kingdom. Whether this is actually the case or not, surely the best way in terms of practicality, would be to fill the State/Province fields for UK locations with the counties’ names instead.

Showing the county data is there when searching for a location.

Now, looking at the Google Maps location names for various places, the county names are clearly there. The information exists, it’s just not getting into Lightroom the way I want it to (and feel it should be). I want to be able to filter my UK photos by county, as I suspect many UK landscape photographers would. This makes it easy to call up all images from that county which in turn is useful for compiling work for county-based magazine submissions, tourist information guides, postcards etc. Fair enough, you can search for counties using the map screen, but this doesn’t isolate the county boundaries, and it’s certainly not as quick as clicking on a State/Province-based Smart Collection.

There is potential for an extremely useful function here, replacing the need for Lightroom users who organise by location having to key in the location data manually and having Lightroom automatically supply accurate location data for them instead. Unless Adobe adresses this issue, the Map module will simply remain a gimmick without any serious use.

Of the thousands of photos I have taken over the last four years, without a doubt, my favourite shot is this group photo of Brighton and Hove (Actually) Gay Men’s Chorus.

Back in the autumn of 2008, I was booked to take a series of promotional shots for the choir for their up and coming album release. The day started with group shots of them in the altar space of the church where they rehearse in Brighton, East Sussex. These shots were fun to do as I lit the background with blue gelled flashes and combined the lighting from those with a shaft of light coming through a stained glass window falling on the centre (it was a gorgeous, clear autumn day). I photographed these shots from up on the balcony.

The record label directors then requested that I take a shot of the choir in the stalls. Even though there were around 30 members in the choir, with the church being quite large, the space would have dwarfed the choir. I could have gone for a shot in the stalls, but I wanted to show the guys in the space they rehearse and take advantage of the look of the location. I came up with the idea of creating a composite shot by photographing the choir on a few stalls at a time and gradually moving them further and further up the church and finally, up onto the balcony.

A real mix of characters.

I knew that it would work in theory, but at this early stage of my photography, actually doing it in Photoshop was a whole other ball game. I set up the camera on a tripod, framed the shot and continued to directing the choir. At this point it could have gone horribly wrong. This shot was potentially going to take a while and the thought of directing 30 people over the course of several shots didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. However, I was really pleased when the guys just took straight to it and gave a great performance by pulling different poses and expressions, handling props, creating interactions and generally working with the location in all sorts of different ways. The final shot on the balcony was particularly good as one of the guys went partially over the edge and the others gave shocked expressions and feigned panicked expressions, giving a great focal point to the image. It’s times like this, when everything falls together that I get such a great buzz doing what I do and I’m so grateful to the guys for making it happen.

The guys really went for it on the balcony!

On returning home with the shots, I set about working on the composite. The final image was created from eight different shots and I did a lot of masking between shots using my graphics tablet, which is one of my favourite pieces of equipment as I’m so much faster at editing shots with a ‘pen’ than a mouse. The trickiest bit was making sure that I was getting the masking right when it came to perspective. I couldn’t have bits from a background row interfering with the row in front. Making sure I had a good spread of characters throuhout was also important and I sometimes had to move great poses in the foreground horizontally to make sure they didn’t cover interest in the rows behind.

I love the cheeky 'looking into the font' pose.

Finally, I sat back looking at the image and thought it needed something else. A little play with the white balance sliders resulted in this striking green colour on the church walls and turned the skylight to a lovely aqua shade. It was finished! Being a fan of all sorts of music, I love doing music promo shoots and this shot in particular is my favourite so far.

Even in the winter, location portraits can be great fun and can produce great shots. Fashion and clothing styles are very different in winter, creating a whole different look.

Warm winter clothing such as big coats, scarves, hats and gloves with their fabulous chunky textures and interesting patterns make for great outfits for winter location portraits. Scarves, hats, gloves and hoods can all be used as accessories to add variation to the shots.

Whether you want a shoot in open fields, woodland or by the coast, when you factor in the subtle colours of the winter foliage and the low, golden winter light, all these things can contribute towards making a great portrait. The added benefit of falling snow or hail can provoke reactions in the subject that would not otherwise occur. So even in winter, the shots produced can really stand out from your typical fair-weather shoot.

Why not choose winter as the ideal time for your location portrait shoot?

I was once asked by a portrait client if I could make a print they wanted to purchase black & white and only leave part of the clothing in colour.  This is a well known technique, often referred to as selective colour, colour popping or spot colour. I received a lot of flak while discussing the situation with a friend when I told him I replied to the client politely declining the request. He said I was being a snob. But this is why I declined:

My main reason for not producing selectively coloured images are that I personally think they look awful. I spend a time getting my colours right and if I do work in black and white, it’s about the lighting and the contrast. Mixing black & white and colour together always looks wrong to me, becoming very unnatural looking, jarring and garish. Selective colour always makes the coloured item become the focal point often upsetting the flow of the eye through the composition. The technique works okay in motion picture, notably films such as Pleasantville and Sin City, but in these cases, they are very stylistic and in motion picture, the eye is drawn more to movement than to colour.

I have only created two images using this technique, one was a genuine exploration in my early days and the other was a recent parody for my photo-a-day project and I have seen only a couple of other rare examples from other photographers that I feel work, but in general I find that the vast majority of images that have been selectively coloured do not work.

An area where selective colour used to be rife is in wedding photography. I totally respect the best wedding photographers out there. They manage to capture incredible images amidst the chaos of a wedding day. These photographers don’t do selective colour, they don’t need to. But searching for wedding photography still results in a surprising amount of colour popped images from various photographers. On one website I noticed a group shot that was badly converted to black and white before being having colour restored on the bridesmaids dresses. Other images tend to be of selectively coloured bouquets, shoes, ties and buttonholes. Champagne shots are one of the worst examples, where the subtle yellows of champagne are made to stand out like a sore thumb look like everyone is being served a  ‘sample’ (something that you wouldn’t even think about if the photo was either in colour or black and white).

Selective colour gets even worse when photographers play around with it and challenge convention. One of the most ridiculous examples I have seen is where the subject is black and white and the background is in colour. Another amusing example was a coastal landscape photo with the beach in colour and the cliffs in monochrome. I applaud these photographers for trying it out, but the results were definitely questionable. It seems like the thought process is “I have this bland boring shot. What can I do to make it a good photo? I know….!”.

My colour popping parody

Searching for ‘colour pop’ on Flickr yields predictable results. The majority being bland shots made to look more interesting through the use of colour popping. There are a load of shots of cats eyes, flowers, fruit, transport and clothing. These shots are also accompanied by a stream of comments, mostly award badges and animated GIFs that proliferate the Flickr popularity contests. On using the search term ‘selective colour’ and sorting by interestingness there were a still only few shots that worked, but these were well composed, well shot and had played on the technique by using highly de-saturated areas instead of pure black & white.

The bottom line is that I won’t produce an image in the selective colour style for a client unless it’s really going to make the image special. There is the argument that I am being paid so I should do what the customer wants. Yes, there is a point there, but I’m not a machine. When you pop some coins in an automated photo booth, it will take the photo regardless – it does not have the soul and vision to make creative decisions about what looks good or not. Likewise, you wouldn’t book a metal band to play at your wedding and demand they play gentle romantic songs. I feel that I would be compromising my artistic integrity and undermining my confidence in my work if I did something that didn’t believe in just because I was paid to do so.