Creating Contact Sheets in Lightroom to Email

I took a few hundred photos last weekend for some friends with their new addition to their family and wanted to send them via email a contact sheet of all the photos so they could take a look before I spent some time editing them.

Lightroom 3 offers a really effective solution for this although it wasn't obvious at first that I could create a soft copy of a contact sheet instead of printing it out that was small enough to email.

The easy way to do it is
1) Select the photos you want to include on your contact sheet
2) Select Print from the menu
3) In the template browser (left hand side), select the contact sheet you want. My preference in this case was the 4 x 5 contact sheet: a good compromise between size of each picture and number of shots per page
4) On the right hand side, scroll all the to the bottom to the Print Job section
5) Where it says "Print to: Printer", click and select "JPEG File"
6) Click Print!

It will create one file per page.

An alternative would be to follow the above steps but write to a PDF file and send it. The only problem I've found with this is the size of the PDF file which is often too large to email.

Diamond

Today, I clocked up 25,000 downloads on iStockphoto, putting me into the 'diamond' category. It's hard to track which exact photo gets the credit but I think it's this take on online gambling:

Royal Flush hanging on a clothes line.

The Needles

It has been a while since my last update but raising children is taking more time than expected and I've got a whole host of photos just sitting waiting to be edited but no time.

But, a recent trip to the Isle of Wight gave me a great opportunity to take a few good shots and I love this one of The Needles glistening in the sun.

The New Toy

First pictures with my lovely new Christmas present: a Canon 5D MK II. I can honestly say it blows me away. For a start, it just feels better than my old 30D. It's almost like going from a point-and-shoot to your first DSLR all over again.

Cambodia Picture on Travel Website

Found this using TinEye (great search engine for any photographers out there wanting to trace their own work or find any usage of a picture) tonight. The picture on the left is one of mine from a fantastic trip to Angkor Wat, Cambodia a few years back.


This is the original:

Home Studio: Hands!

A couple more examples from my home studio before it gets dismantled and turned back into a bedroom.

I wanted to try and get all the family's hands in one shot without looking awkward and cumbersome. The first attempt was just with three of us:




And the second one required somewhat more coordination and much bribery of chocolate:

Home Studio: First Pictures

It is amazing what you can do with a bit of research (and I'd like to claim a bit of ingenuity but it took me so long how to figure it all out when really it's so simple I'm not sure I can make that claim!).

I have been meaning to try and sort out some decent lighting and make a studio, on a budget, with not much room and not much time...sounds like a recipe for a disaster. I haven't quite got the lighting how I want it yet but I'm really pleased with some of the photographs.

List of equipment I used:

• 1 very big sheet of white paper
• 1 camera
• 1 decent flash
• 1 flash dug out of my Grandad's cupboard and about 30 years old
• 3 pocket wizards (this bit blew my budget but it's well worth it!)

I'll post some more detailed instructions later on how I put it together and where I got the kit. Strobist's Lighting 101, which so many people recommend and link to, is brilliant, but it still took me a while to adapt this for a Canon camera.

Anyway, here are my first results:

This shot showing the contrast of a grown-up's hands around a newborn baby's foot doesn't have the hard isolated white background but I'm pleased with the smooth lighting and the lack of harsh shadows.


These two were some of the first I did with the subject cleanly isolated against the white background and deliberately going for a high key effect. A bit of a classic posey shot but it was fun trying it.