Back during the Lightroom 2 days (circa early 2009), I spent some intense weeks writing a really great plugin, allowing a user to create custom image metadata fields on the fly. If a user suddenly decides that he wants an extra metadata field to describe the weather for a shot, or the flash setup, or a model's name, or whatever, just a few clicks in a plugin dialog and voilà, it would appear with the standard image metadata alongside each photo. I really wanted this for my own use, and I knew lots of folks would be jazzed about it as well.

Unfortunately, I eventually noticed an incompatibility with how Lightroom sometimes loads plugins. I spent much energy trying everything I could think of to dance around the issue. I'm pretty good at this kind of thing because I routinely push Lightroom's plugin infrastructure well beyond what it was designed for. In a twisted way, this is part of the fun of Lightroom plugin development for me, to come up with “creative” ways to get things done and make my photo workflow easier.

But in this case, back in 2009, it beat me, and with great reluctance I abandoned the plugin.

(I'm populating this narcissistic post with various shots of me that I've accumulated from friends I go out shooting with, mostly by Paul on his visits to Kyoto.)

Over the years I've kept an eye out for a change in Lightroom plugin infrastructure that would happen to allow the plugin to work, but it's never come. (To be clear, I can't blame Adobe because, again, I'm pushing things well beyond the design envelope). But on a whim last night, perhaps in an effort to avoid actually having to address the hundreds of request-for-help emails that have accumulated recently, I pulled the old plugin carcass from my archive and gave it a try.

It still didn't work, but I expected that.

But even though Lightroom's plugin-infrastructure tools have not improved in this particular area, they have definitely improved here and there in other areas, so I gave it another try. Combined with perhaps a bit more ingenuity under my belt this time, after a few hours of hacking around, I figured out a way to make it work!

Woo-hoo!

Getting the custom-metadata plugin working was great news, but also dreadful news.

It's great because now I can use this plugin for myself. It works. It does what I need. My workflow will be better because of it.

It's dreadful because I know others would find it useful, so I feel a strong desire to release the plugin, and that would take a lot more work. I'd have to bullet-proof the thing. I'd have to write up docs and FAQs and make screenshots. I'd have to add all kinds of things to the plugin that I don't personally need, but I'm sure others will ask for (and in some cases, demand). Some of those things (such as the ability to transfer the custom metadata when exporting or merging catalogs) pose serious complications whose potential solutions are all among the “dammed if you do, dammed if you don't” can't-please-everyone genre that will certainly, no matter what, generate complaints and requests.

So in the end, I will spend a ridiculous amount of time doing all this, resulting in yet another incessant flow of request-for-help mails that fill my inbox and increase my stress. That sounds like a complaint, and I suppose it is, but I choose this hobby freely because I like most aspects of it. I just need to be smart about how I handle the stressful aspects of it, lest I let it drive me into another stress breakdown.

I went to bed last night trying to decide whether I want to even try to release it. Do I want to accept the burden of stress that inevitably comes with it? If so, can I do anything now to decrease the amount of stress generated later?

I woke up without an answer, but as I helped prepare Anthony for school, I decided to at least give it a try, to prepare a version with ample caveats about data migration, and see how it went from there. If it became popular, I'd feel good about spending more energy to tackle the tough problems that remained, and if not, well, I just saved myself a lot of grief.

So it was with that frame of mind that I saw Anthony off to school, prepared a cup of coffee, and checked in on the computer. I found among my mail the notice of a gift from a Boston photographer who wanted to register one of my plugins. As per the “donationware” thing, he didn't have to send me anything at all to use my plugins, but he kindly chose to send $5. That was nice, but he also added this personal message to me:

“	Another extortion payment to keep my Lr plugin running. Advice: Make the darn thing about $100, let us pay that and then leave us alone STOP INTERRUPTING MY WORK WITH THESE INSIDIOUS 'RE" REGISTRATIONS. ”

Well, that's not a pleasant way to start the day.

Well, it certainly didn't put me in the nose-to-the-grindstone mood I would need to tackle the custom-metadata plugin.

Granted, the guy did send me a dollar for a previous version of Lightroom as recently as 2010, but I don't think this calls for words like “insidious” and “extortion”. I require nothing. I returned his $5 with a note that I wanted it only if it were a true gift. 'Cause that's, you know, how I roll.

I shouldn't have been surprised, based on the maturity of his initial comment, but his subsequent replies only went downhill from there. Sigh.

Anyway, I thought I'd vent a bit with this post to the sympathetic ear of the friendly audience who reads my blog. (Hi Mom.)

So, would anyone have interest in that kind of custom-metadata plugin?

So, as I mentioned this morning, we had a nice view of the annular eclipse today. I'd never seen one (nor have I ever seen a total eclipse, except on TV). Here are a few more pictures.

That picture above illustrates in one way just how bright the sun is... I was using stacked filters to cut all but 1/_3,200^th of the light, leaving everything dark except the sun, which was still completely blown out. I wonder what the dynamic range is during one of these things, between the surface of the moon and the surface of the sun.

Notice the odd colors in the clouds? Sometimes you see that at night with the moon, and I suppose it's related to conditions in the upper atmosphere, but in any case you certainly couldn't see it in person because either you were using special sun goggles (which made everything but the sun completely black), or you were looking with the naked eye and anything that close to the sun was too bright to look at.

So the colors look odd, but we'd probably see them often during the day if our eyes could handle the brightness. (And speaking of handling the brightness, I've nudged up the variance of some of these shots in Lightroom, to exaggerate the colors for artistic effect.)

For the main event, I moved to near the main gate of the Heian Shrine, which has appeared many times on my blog (such as this shot from six and a half years ago). The sun was coming up behind it lengthwise, so I wondered whether the distinctive “oriental” shape of its silhouette would be interesting.

The sun is completely blown out (no detail whatsoever), but I like how the reflections (refractions?) in the lens make for a green “ghost” of the eclipse just to the right of the sun, and an inverted red “ghost” down below.

I was surprised at how it didn't become dark. The sun was 94% covered (6% exposed) but you couldn't really tell... you certainly couldn't look at it with the naked eye without regretting it instantly, and if you didn't know something was going on, you might not even notice. With 94% hidden. The sun is really really really really bright.

I really couldn't see on the back of the camera whether anything was working out, so I just gave it a shot.

I heard that the park area along the length of the Kamo River (such as seen here and here) was absolutely packed. It sounds festive.

We had a nice view of the annular ('ring-shaped') eclipse from Kyoto this morning. We are on the edge of the shadow's path, so the view for us was of the moon skirting the edge of the sun. We had only 100 seconds of ring. (Folks in Tokyo got five minutes.) I took a bunch of pictures, but don't know whether anything came out. Will look through them later. At the moment (an hour later), the sun still has a small bite out of it, getting smaller by the minute.

Continued here...

I took another walk in Fushimi yesterday (a south-east area of Kyoto), similar to that of my previous post (“A Few Over-Process Under-Thought Photos From Lunch”), but with nice weather. Red and orange seemed to be a theme.

For the most part, cherry trees here in Japan don't bear fruit in a meaningful way (normally just small bitter fruits that are usually unnoticeable to begin with), but at the start of yesterday's walk I came across a real fruit-bearing cherry tree in front of someone's house, with a note “Enjoy them once they become red”...

Sadly, they were not red, so I couldn't partake.

Not far from the previous train-track pic, but a different train line.

Lunch was at カフェちいろば (which, according to the “Lil Donkey” on their website, I take means “Cafe Little Donkey”). The food was very good... the cook has a real sense for quality.

After lunch, I came across what appeared to be a maple-tree bush (short and bush-like, but the leaves seemed clearly to be momiji — Japanese maple) that was predominantly green, but with a few deeply-red elements splashed here and there...

Further along, the red level was escalated substantially with another fruiting cherry tree laden with cherries in their prime...

And finally, some roadside flowers that turned the red up to “11”...

The challenge here is that the reds were so super deeply saturated in real life that display technology just can't handle them at the same time as handling the rest of the image properly. The camera (Nikon D700) itself did an admirable job of it, considering that the detail was there, but once the color data is squished down to the limits of my laptop monitor, the reds become an ugly, solid unrefined blotch. I complain about this technological limitation often, such as in “Why Does “Brightness” Wash Colors to White?” and “Brilliant Flower, Not-so-Brilliant Processing”.

So, in the picture above, I manually toned down the reds by painting negative exposure in Lightroom. This traded off the unnatural solid blotchiness for some unnatural darkness, a trade-off that seemed in this case to be the lesser of two evils.. It's an HDR-like processing that didn't result in an obvious unnatural “HDR look”.

This next closeup shot may illustrate the problem better...

Here's the original shot out of camera, with defaults in Lightroom except the white balance, which has been set from a separate WhiBal shot...

In Lightroom, I lowered the exposure and other develop settings enough so that the reds weren't clipped, so that they finally showed just a bit of the detail that was there a-plenty in real life, resulting in an image that was dark except for the red leaves...

This shows how much brighter the reds should be compared to the rest of the image, but if I set the exposure so that the rest is reasonable, the reds are pushed brighter than display technology currently allows. And so the conundrum.

Flattening the contrast so that both the reds and greens are “reasonable” on their own can make for an okay result (as I hope “Completely Fake HDR” above is), but the completely unrealistic lack of red vividness is a limitation that drives me nuts.

I took a short walk today with some friends to go for lunch. Took some random shots along the way. Went crazy on them in Lightroom. Posted them here.