In my "Namiko Candid Bride Portrait" post the other day, I mentioned that I'd made a photo book for my brother-in-law Shogo's wedding, and showed a two-page spread of a photo of his bride that I was proud of. You can see in the last photo of that post a bit of the 80-page book I created. In this post, I'll talk about the workflow I use to create photo books with Lightroom, InDesign, and Blurb.

This workflow requires Lightroom 3. As for InDesign, I use CS5, but the same workflow should work with older versions of InDesign (at least [...]

For a while I was posting installments in the story about my brother-in-law's wedding last month, with the most recent installment being "Shogo and Namiko's Wedding: Reception, Part V (Entertainment)" three weeks ago. I stopped putting up new posts midstream because I suddenly had the idea to make a photo book of their wedding as a gift, and so dedicated a lot of time to it, and also because I wanted to hold back the rest of the photos until I could present the book.

The photo above is probably the best photo I've ever taken, except using "photo" and [...]

Yodobashi Camera, a small chain of large camera/electronics stores, opened a new branch in Kyoto on Friday. They have about 20 branches around Japan now, with the main store in Tokyo's Shinjuku said to be the largest camera store in Japan. They have a branch in Osaka 45 minutes away by train (which I mentioned five years ago in an early post on my blog), but mentally it feels much further away, so it's wonderful for me that they have a branch in Kyoto. It's in the building immediately north of Kyoto Tower, which itself is just north of Kyoto [...]
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I've pushed out a couple of new plugins recently....

Bulk Develop Settings allows you to pragmatically calculate and apply luminance noise reduction based upon a photo's ISO setting, and on any exposure boost done in post processing. Lightroom has a way to set the default noise reduction based upon the camera and ISO, but you have to set it individually for each ISO, but for me that involves many dozens of different ISO values, even for just one camera model. It's too ungainly to be of use, so I made this plugin.

Order Prints Locally allows you to upload photos [...]
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This post is about the aftermarket GGS Glass LCD Screen Protector, and about the store I bought mine from. First about the protector itself...

Nikon cameras come with a cheap thick plastic LCD screen protector that easily scratches, scuffs, and just looks ugly. When it scuffs enough, it becomes cloudy and makes it worse than nothing. So a couple of years ago, I bought a GGS brand glass protector for my Nikon D200, and loved it. Along with a Katz Eye focus screen, they're the two must-have aftermarket changes to a new camera body.

When I got a D700, I [...]