I once complained that I had ruined every photo before I even took it by accidentally leaving the camera in low-quality JPEG mode (instead of raw mode, which gives much latitude in recovering from exposure mistakes).

Today I did myself one better.

After driving 2½ hours last night to a hotel near a particular spot where I wanted to make a sunrise photo with the family, we got up at 5:15 and by 6am we had parked and were ready for the 30-minute hike to the location, when I took my first shot of the day, of a picturesque ridgeline [...]
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This is a followup to yesterday's post with photos from the Hokyo-in Temple in Kyoto, a temple with some of the most harsh, restrictive anti-photography policies I've ever encountered.

On one end of the spectrum are places that allow even tripods, such as the Yoshiminedera temple. Moving along toward more restrictions, the Heian Shrine allows tripods, but only if you pay a ¥2,000 (about US$20) fee. Most places don't allow the use of tripods at all, but the Hokyo-in Temple featured yesterday doesn't even allow you to have a tripod in your possession. Even if securely sequestered in your backpack, [...]

What is it about taking photos with an iPad or other tablet that makes it look so stupid?

My iPad has no camera so I've never been tempted to take a photo with it, but even if I could, I'm not the kind to take advantage of its social-networking benefits (like immediate posting to Facebook or Instagram or whatever the current fad is). So I'd probably not use it for photography any more than I use my iPhone, which is to say, not at all unless it's the only camera around and my quality threshold happens to be low.

But [...]

Today Adobe released a release candidate for Lightroom 5.3, which I believe fixes the nasty Lr5 Publish/Selection bug I've written about. If you give 5.3RC a try, let me know whether it seems to be fixed for you as well...

I have an update on the nasty publish/selection bug that been plaguing some Lightroom users of late, in the selection shown in the grid is sometimes wrong.

It seems that the bug exists only when Lightroom is started with a section in the Publish Segmented Grid ("Modified Photos to Re-Publish", etc.) is closed. So, if you ensure that all segments are open, then restart Lightroom and maintain them open, your grid-selection experience should be bug free.

The opened/closed state of each grid section is globally shared among all collections, so opening all four possible sections (New, Modified, Deleted, and Published) [...]