Walk in the park

I don’t think I mentioned it already on a blog, but a couple of weeks ago I had a unique chance to see, if wedding photography is something I could do. Tomasz’s brother was getting married, so since we had to make the unplanned trip back home anyway, we took all our gear, I did some reading beforehand (I actually follow two wedding photogs blogs), and we decided to treat it as serious assignment. I think I will tell more about my/our experience in photographing a wedding next week. Because after downloading about 300o images from two days of shooting and deciding that Tomasz is making a photo album (maybe he will share some experience on blog when he is done? ;) ),
I decided to focus on acquiring new skill. I thought how about, instead of just putting put a gallery on blog, maybe I will make a slide show? And the whole new story started.
Now I am digressing.
When Lightroom 3 Beta showed up a couple of weeks ago, I read on few blogs about new features and although Tomasz downloaded it and suggested that I install it as well, I decided I have no need. I remember how excited I was about LR 2 local adjustment capability, but I have not seen anything for me in LR3. For about a week :). And when I stared to think how to put together this slide show, I recalled something I read about LR3, and decided that, after all, I want to try. For a music addition and video format export of slide show.
For a minute, I was put off by the fact that LR3 cannot read LR2 catalog. It was what made me not wanting to try in the first place. But I figured a way around, when it turned out that xmp side-car remembers not only Develop module changes, but also color-coding, which help restore collections in LR3. Export really seemed a blink of the eye, but I was importing images already on hard drive, not through USB. My Import impressions are.. none. I am not unhappy with it, I am also not excited about it. It probably means that is functional all right ;). Nothing impressive (or unnerving, either) in Develop, just sometimes (then- sometimes not) the images edited in CS4 would not automatically “come back” to LR3, so I need to import them manually. Overall, I made the slide show and I am happy with it, but the jury is out there if I will buy it right after it is released. We will see. In this moment, I probably will quit using LR3 for my current projects, and avoid problems with having images in both versions.
And to come back to my slide show. I decided to make two of them, separate the snaps of the wedding day from posed outside images. So today is part one- walk in the park.

[flv:http://www.korwelphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/plener.flv 596 336]