Today's post is dedicated to highlighting an event that I took part in this past Saturday in conjunction with the Junior League of Moore County. The JLMC is a women's volunteer organization open to all ladies 21 and over in Moore County and is part of a larger, national organization American Junior Leagues International (AJLI). Their mission is (paraphrased) to help young women at risk in our community and to help develop the potential of our membership. I have been a member of the JLMC for three years and I currently hold a board position. Their mission is something that I obviously support which is why I am taking the time to feature it here.

This past weekend the JLMC held their 3rd Junior League Academy for Success, which is a program that we conduct twice a year. There are both life skills sessions - how to open a checking account, get into college, select a career, or make smart choices for your future - and life enrichment sessions - make-up and skin care, cooking, drawing, creative writing, yoga.

This session we offered College Knowledge, Career Choices, Smart Choices Strong Futures, Yoga, Glamour Girls, and Creative Expressions. The girls attending were middle school students from the Robbins area of Moore County.

I have attached some pictures from the day and will be posting the complete set on my flickr page in the near future!


In the Creative Expressions session girls learned some marker and pencil drawing techniques and drew self-portraits.

A Junior League member with her 3 "buddies". All of the girls were paired with a League member throughout the day.

A League member cheers while the girls at her table examine the contents of the swag bags that they earned for attending.

Some of the members of the JLMC after the awards ceremony

The League's Community Chair making the rounds and lunch and chatting with the girls

A League member and some of the participants learning some yoga poses.

This week's site of the week is the Photoshop Insider Blog by Scott Kelby. Personally, I am not really sure that this guy is human ( or if he is he must never sleep). What doesn't he do? He runs NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals, his blog- which is five days a week with a guest blogger on Wednesday's that is always cool, he is one of the hosts of the Photoshop User podcast, he shoots assignments, and he has written like a hundred books.

I own three of his books right now - The Digital Photography books 1 & 2, and Lightroom 2 for Digital Photographers - and they are all great. His thing is that he writes his books like he is your more experienced buddy sitting with you answering your questions without getting bogged down in the minute details. Technical manuals they are not, but they are easy and fun to read with great information and pictures to accompany the lessons (he even includes photos from the books that you can practice with).

His blog is full of news tidbits and information and you can access it here. Have a great weekend!

As promised this week I am posting a follow up to "The Importance of Organization - Part 1" which covered why it is important to get your photos imported into Lightroom (or the photo editing/organizing program of your choice. I obviously use Lightroom 2 since I am writing about it, but you can do similar things in Photoshop Elements and Google's Picasa both of which are cheap or free) I also issued a little self assignment to myself, and you all as well, to get your photos uploaded and I am happy to say that I have the first 2,000 photos uploaded, which almost brings me current to 2005...slowly but surely.

On to key wording in Lightroom 2. If you want to read about this in more depth I suggest you pick up either The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter) by Scott Kelby or The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening.

First, you can add keywords manually in the Key wording Panel of the Library Module. If you use this method you can also select groups of photos (either by clicking and holding select to pick a large group of continuous files or by clicking and holding Ctrl to select non-adjacent files) and then type a keyword that will then be applied to all selected photos.

Method two is to use the keyword suggestion dialog box. Lightroom generates keywords it thinks will apply to the group of pictures and you just select and then click to apply.

If you click and hold on the Keyword Set pop-up menu you can choose to load recent keywords, load pre-saved sets of keywords for common themes (outdoors, weddings) or you can make custom keyword sets. Custom sets can be handy because you can put exactly what you want to have in your set and then use them over and over again.

Further down is the keyword list panel where Lightroom lists all of the keywords that you have assigned to photos. If you want to use this list to add keywords to new photos, select the photos that you want to add a specific keyword to, and then simply drag and drop them onto the keyword in the list.

Lastly is the Painter Tool (it looks like a little spray can). You can select it from the bottom tool bar in grid view (press "G" to jump to this view) Once you select the tool a pop-up menu asks what you want to paint with. Choose keywords and a text box appears where you type the keyword that you want to paint with. Then you just scroll through your photos and "paint" on the appropriate ones. If you click the same photo twice it erases the keyword that you just applied. You can paint multiple words at the same time by separating them with a comma in the text field.

As you can probably tell there are a lot of ways to add keywords in Lightroom 2, but none of them work if you don't DO IT. So, what are you waiting for? Get key wording now and make your life tons easier in the future!

This is a portrait of my good friend Elena that was taken outdoors in 100% available light. It was probably early afternoon when this was taken. One of the things that I try to communicate to clients when they are being photographed is that the more relaxed and fun you are, the more relaxed and fun your photos are.

Having your picture taken should be fun ( and yes, this is coming from someone who hated having their picture taken as a child because I was hounded by my mother with a camera - and the best of intentions - my entire childhood). Try not to think about the fact that you are having your picture taken and just focus on having a good time!

This week I am pointing you to a site that I like not just because it offers good technical info (I love the little back-of-the-napkin lighting diagrams) but also because of the personality that goes with it. The site is the blog of photographer Joe McNally and you can find it here.

Not only is this guy a super talented National Geographic cover shooting guy, he tells the greatest personal stories to go along with all of his knowledge. He actually has a new book coming out on March 12th; The Hotshoe Diaries, which I am pretty excited about and plan on picking up. You can pre-order it at Amazon here. That's it for today. Have a great weekend!

I stumbled upon this topic when setting up the blog entry for Monday. It was one of those things that I know is important, and that I have been meaning to do, but that is just really about as fun as getting teeth pulled.

What am I talking about? Setting up and organizing lightroom catalogs and keywording. I really hate it. I started out with good intentions, really I did. I even spent some time thinking about my file structure, naming conventions, etc. Then the problems started. First, I decided that I was going to use one lightroom catalog for all of my professional files (wedding, portraits, etc.) and one for all of my personal files. Sounded like a great idea until I realized that my computer - not exactly state of the art, but not terrible either - gets totally bogged down with large lightroom catalogs.

The next problem starts coming in when I go to look for pictures that were taken before I got my copy of lightroom. One of the greatest things about lightroom is its ability to sort data on command to quickly find whatever you want. But, that is only is you take the time to put in the data in the first place. It can't find files that haven't been imported and keyword searches only work if you have tagged the photos with keywords. Unfortunately they have yet to come up with software that can read my mind and do it for me. *sigh*

So, my big project for the next couple weeks in my copious spare time *hehehe* is to set up all of my lightroom catalogs, import all of my pictures(past, present, and otherwise) and keyword ALL of them. I thought that I would do a multi-part blog article to cover my approach and help you think about yours. Today I will run down how I am setting up my catalogs and next Wednesday I will go over some tips and tricks for keywording.

So, on we go. I have decided that what is best for me (at the moment anyway) Is to work with multiple lightroom catalogs. Each professional portrait session or wedding gets its own catalog. When I name the catalogs I name them with the date (YYMMDD), my two digit category code, the bride's last name then the groom's last name like so:
"090124_WD_bumgarner_tobias"
I do the date this way so that they are always in chronological order when sorted alphabetically by the computer. For portraits it is the same only there is a different category code and just one last name:
"090124_SP_tobias"

For my personal photos I have a catalog for each year just named "Personal 2009". If I find that the catalogs get too large with all the photos from a single year, I will break them down by month "Personal March 2009".

I then also have one more catalog named "Mollie Tobias Photography". In this catalog I put copies of all of my "keepers" any photos from either personal or professional shoots that I really like and plan to use in my portfolio or marketing materials.

That's the plan for now and I will be working on making it happen over the next few weeks. Check back next week for our segment on keywording!

So, I was feeling a little down the other day. I am not exactly stressed (well I AM but that's not currently the problem) I have just been anxious like crazy. All this energy and no place to go. Well, I made it through another week - yeah! - even getting most of the things on my to-do list tackled - Awesome - but still feeling a bit in a funk. I walked in the door and there to greet me were my cat and two dogs all sitting in a row in front of the door. And they were so excited to see me! One look at their adorable little faces instantly put me in a good mood and so we danced around the room while I chanted "Friday, Friday" and they jumped and barked and wagged their tails. It was great.
People who do not like dogs I will never understand. They love you unconditionally, they are so darn cute, and they are great cuddlers. I understand that some people may be slightly skeptical when I say how "cute and cuddly" my two 60-90 pounds pit bull mixes are, but it is so true. They are the biggest lovers that you will ever see, even if they do have some issues.
I have pictures of them hanging by my desk when I am working and sometimes when I am stressed out or bored I just take a minute to look at how adorable - and dirty- they are and it makes me smile. I hope that you get to spend some time today with your thing that makes you smile. Happy Monday!