[Photography] 8 Tips for Photographing Fast Action and Sports

In this article, we’ll give you 8 quick tips for photographing fast action and sports.

But what if you don’t shoot sports?

There is a lot of value in learning how to make images that work across different genres. You might avoid sports or wildlife images. Perhaps you find landscapes boring. However, each genre requires a unique skill set that needs to be practiced in order to make images that work. When you practice photographic “cross-training” your work in your primary genre will benefit. In other words, get out of your comfort zone once in a while.

Regardless of what you like to shoot for personal projects or commercially (i.e. portraits, landscape, social documentary, wedding, wildlife, etc.) your reflexes and hand-eye coordination needs to be sharp and fast. When your observation skills are finely tuned, you can anticipate moments before they happen.

How can you learn to anticipate action and synchronize your eyes with your right index finger?

A great way to practice this is to shoot sports. Live theatre or dance performances are also useful activities to shoot for this purpose, but sports (especially motorsports) is the fastest of fast. Moments come and go in rapid succession so you get more opportunities to respond than in other types of photography, relatively speaking. Consider that a vehicle traveling at 60 miles an hour is moving at 88 feet per second!

8 Tips for photographing fast action

In the eight points below, I aim to share technical settings that are useful when shooting action or sports. Follow these, and not only will you be closer to making images of action and sports that work but your overall technical capability as a photographer should improve as well.

Granted, making images of this type is not easy but anything worth doing should never be easy.

1 – Use a long lens

Use a long telephoto lens such as the common 85-200mm focal length and try to get close to the action.

A telephoto lens will give you the flexibility to quickly adapt to the changing situation. Sports move quickly and so must you. On a football pitch, the action may go from one end of the field to the other within seconds.
Depending on where you are standing you need to move quickly as well. A twist of the wrist will get you there with a good telephoto zoom lens.

2 – Don’t go too long

You can go bigger such as 300-600mm focal length, but super long lenses are not necessary. They are also bulky, heavy, and expensive.

Super telephoto lens can be useful especially when shooting motorsports. A race car or motorcycle on a track moves way faster than a ballplayer on a field. Depending on how much you expect to shoot sports,
you might want to wait on the purchase of a super telephoto.

3 – Minimum shutter speed

The shutter speed should be inversely proportional to your focal length to avoid camera shake. For example, a 200mm focal length lens should be shot at around 1/200 or 1/250 of a second while a 400mm lens should be shot at 1/400 of a second, handheld.

A tripod will basically negate this rule. However, some places forbid tripods or it may be unsafe to use one so be prepared to shoot without a tripod.

4 – Practice panning

Panning is when you place a moving subject in your viewfinder and them by moving the camera from left to right or right to left, following the subject’s direction and speed.

The benefit of the technique is that you are afforded more time in which to compose the image. It is generally advisable to place your moving subject off to one side of the frame, and moving into the negative space on the other side of the frame. This gives your subject room to breathe and a place to go, so to speak.

Panning takes practice but it is one of the basic techniques in which all photographers should be proficient. It usually works around 1/60 of a second or faster for faster-moving subjects. Experiment until you feel proficient and happy with the results.

Go to the nearest street and shoot the cars until you get the car in the frame and mostly or entirely sharp.

5 – Use a teleconverter

A teleconverter is a small device that fits in-between your camera body and your actual lens that increases the focal length by some factor. Increases of 1.4x or 2.0x are common. A 200mm lens can quickly become a 400mm using a teleconverter.

Teleconverters have the benefit of being small, compact, and relatively inexpensive (especially compared to 400mm or longer glass). Additionally, the teleconverter will normally communicate with your digital camera and retain metering, autofocus, EXIF data, and more.

Be sure to get the same brand for all your equipment so that it all works together. There are exceptions to this rule but you will need to do a bit of research to sort that out.

The downside of using the teleconverter is that you will lose at least one stop of light. During broad daylight, you can probably afford to do that but at night, you need all of the light than you can get without having to sacrifice ISO. Teleconverters are great little devices, however, you will need to consider trading sharpness for that extra reach.

6 – Blur the motion

Consider if you want motion blur (and how much) or want to completely freeze motion. Some amount of motion blur can be desirable in your images so that the viewer can get a sense of the speed and action of the subject.

Alternatively, you might want to freeze motion and keep things tack sharp. It’s really a matter of taste, and how you intend to tell your story through your images and techniques.

7 – Freeze the motion

To freeze motion you will need around 1/500th of a second, 1/1000th, or even faster depending on the speed of the subject.

My old Nikon FE SLR shoots at 1/4000th of a second and there are DSLRs that will shoot at 1/8000th. Dial in a number, test, and adjust as needed. When you shoot sports, It’s advantageous to use “S” Mode or Shutter Priority mode for best results.

8 – Use low ISO

Set your maximum ISO to about 100, 200, or 400. You can go to 800 (or higher) and get usable images but the odds fall considerably against you at this “end” of the ISO dial. Less is more ISO, especially with action and sports.

Using the lowest ISO possible will give you the sharpest images given the shutter speed that you are using. Sports and sporting events are usually colorful activities with lots of details in the frame. Therefore, when shooting sports, you ought to aim to use the lowest ISO possible.

If you are shooting with a really fast shutter speed such as 1/1000th or higher, given the amount of available light, you may need to use a higher ISO such as 800 or 1600 to compensate for the reduction in light hitting your camera’s sensor. You get to make this decision before pressing the shutter on every image. Do you want sharp or do you want to freeze motion or do you want both?

There are limits and you need to be mindful of these especially when shooting fast moving objects.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve found this tips helpful. Are their any others you’d added to this? Please share in the comments area below.

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[Photography] Why You and Your Camera Do Not Always See Eye to Eye

Your camera captures images with the potential of over 4000 tones between black and white (if captured in grayscale) or 4000 shades of color in RGB. But once the image is captured, the camera’s job is finished. Then the real work begins.

The shadows of early morning lighting caused the detail in this JPEG file to bury all the important shadow detail in the darkness.

The distribution of these tones is your responsibility. Each one of these 4000 tone levels is like photographic currency. Never leave money on the table. Put them all to good use. Here’s where the histogram comes in.

The RAW file of this same shot had plenty of high-bit range to push around and adjust, making my friend appear as though he were in ideal lighting.

But before you can understand the histogram, you must understand how the image sensor in your camera sees light. Image sensors are linear in the way they capture light. Unlike the human eye, the camera’s image sensor registers light by volume; the brightest light hitting the sensor fills that sensor’s light bucket first, occupying over half the available registry.

This may make mathematical sense but that’s where the problem starts. Your eye isn’t a mathematical instrument and it doesn’t quantify light the same way a digital camera image sensor does.

Camera Tonal Distribution

If you look at the way camera sensors register light you’ll see that exactly half of the information recorded by the image sensor (2048 of the 4096 registers) belongs to the brightest of the six stops of light being captured. The next brightest stop records half of the remaining information (1024 registers) and so on.

By the time the darkest stop is recorded, only 64 of the 4096 light registers are left to record all the shadow detail. Since humans quite naturally recognize detail in even the deepest shadows, we notice a lack of detail in these areas instinctively. Over 25% of the image potentially appears very dark and lacking in detail.

Oddly, this lopsided method of capturing light is referred to as linear in that each successive stop records half of the remaining tones in the photo. This ain’t logically linear to the human eye! If the actual balance of human light recognition were expressed as Gamma, it would be gauged at something more like 1.7 and 2.5, depending on the lighting conditions.

Your eye has a nearly infinitely adaptable capacity to register light and is simply more attuned to recognizing detail in low light than your camera.

Let me restate that – your eyes are designed to see more detail in the darker areas than in the extremely light areas. This is completely backward from the way digital cameras record light. This disparity then presents engineers with a significant challenge; how to transpose a linear index into a non-linear or human system.

Because this image was shot toward the sky on a very overcast day, the darker tones lost all detail. But because the image was captured and saved in the camera’s RAW format, the 16-bit color space gave me the ability to adjust many individual settings, recapturing the scene as my eyes remembered it (above).

Out of the 4096 tones that are captured, precious few are left to record critical differences in the darkest parts of an image. The darker tones (since they reflect less light for the image sensor to use) are crammed into a very small portion of the recorded tonal range.

The result is that the three-quarter tones, those found between black and the three-quarter tones almost always appear very dark and lacking in tone separation. Therefore, images that are not adjusted (in post-production) to display low-end tonality will always print dark in the three-quarter tones. Let me say that again – always. A non-linear tonal adjustment is mandatory if your image is to print correctly.

The late afternoon sun off Longboat Key in Sarasota provided ideal warm lighting, allowing me to use the original JPEG format with very few adjustments.

The exception to this statement happens when your image is captured in a controlled lighting environment (like a photo studio) where lights and reflectors can be strategically placed to illuminate shadow areas or when the subject is ideally positioned in outdoor lighting. When carefully arranged lighting is possible, little post-production services may be needed at all. But very few of those ideal lighting scenarios likely exist during your everyday shooting.

JPEG Tone Distribution

Under this controlled lighting JPEGs can produce spectacular results simply because the tone distribution algorithm is designed for ideal lighting conditions. In the absence of ideal lighting though, this algorithm applies the same stock tonal shape to every image assuming that the lighting is perfect.

The result from imperfect (light, dark, or imbalanced) lighting and a JPEG capture is an imbalanced picture containing only a fraction of the editing range of the same scene captured as a RAW image. The editing “elbow room” of a JPEG is severely restricted in color and tone distribution.

The highlights captured by this JPEG image were too blown out to recover.

The same highlights captured and edited in RAW format allowed me to extract full detail in the highlights while retaining all the detail in the shadows as well.

Here’s where the tone distribution-monitoring provided by the histogram can be used to guide the editing process, even from JPEG images. It’s actually a good idea to regard the histogram as a tone map. The histogram will reveal the ratio of tones in the image residing in the lighter or darker portions of the image.

A Word About Bit Depth

Without getting into a long detailed discussion, it is always advisable to shoot both RAW and JPEG images of every scene. This is a simple setting on your camera that requires absolutely no extra effort on your part but provides a much deeper level of tones to push around and rearrange.

This recommendation follows simple logic; RAW images provide more flexibility to adjust the full range of tones while JPEG images are prefabricated one-size-fits-all interpretations of a scene. RAW images are like film-based color negatives while JPEG images are like Polaroids. Negatives (RAW files) can be adjusted freely, Polaroids (JPEGs) are very restricted.

RAW Tone Distribution: The Phoenix Scenario

In Greek mythology, the Phoenix is a long-lived bird that is cyclically regenerated or reborn from apparent oblivion. Used in this sense, any digital image capture that is apparently “dead” by all appearance can have life breathed into it by powerful image editing software.

Such is the case with this image captured during an overcast day in Kailua Hawaii. Absolutely no detail can be seen in this JPEG image; all appears hopeless. A reject, right? Not so fast, quickdraw!

We’re here to raise the dead, remember? While nothing can replace the correct exposure, don’t throw in the towel on an image that looks too dark until you’ve tried this magic collection of tone tools.

Without the extraordinary bandwidth provided by the 16-bit RAW file format, this level of recovery would be impossible.

The image was seriously underexposed and appeared to be hopelessly dark. But when it was opened in both Camera Raw and Lightroom software packages, and the same adjustments applied, identical results were achieved.

Whether the image is captured in jpeg, tiff, or raw format, it can be opened in either of Adobe’s raw interpreter packages, Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom. Within either of these packages, both chrominance and luminance controls are provided that allow you to rearrange tones and shape images extensively.

To open a tiff or jpeg file in Camera Raw, you must first locate the file in Adobe Bridge, right-click on the file and choose “Open in Camera Raw…” You can open these files in Lightroom either internally or by dragging the file onto the LR icon in the dock.

Camera Raw control panel (left) and Lightroom control panel (right). Top histograms belong to the original while the bottom shows the adjusted image. Both software packages offer virtually identical tools to shape and reconstruct the image.

Recognizing the differences between the way your eyes and your camera sees light will give you a head start on adjusting camera images to more closely resemble the look and feel of the original scene.

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[Photography] Why This Pro is (sort of) Switching from Canon to Sony

Throughout the internet, there are quite a few photographers trading in their DSLRs for shiny new mirrorless cameras. I never thought I’d join the crew switching from Canon to Sony, telling myself that it’s not the bells and whistles of brand new cameras that define a photographer’s abilities. That all changed when I took the plunge and ordered a Sony A7RIII.

After having it for about a month, I’ve fallen head over heels in love with this camera and use it almost as much as my Canon DSLRs. However, I’m not giving up on Canon yet. In this article, I’ll shed some light on why I’m straddling the Canon-Sony lines, and how my experience with Sony has been so far.

My History of Cameras

I’ll start off by admitting that I’ve never been much of a camera brand loyalist, to begin with. My first digital camera (I never shot film) was a Nikon D40. I played in the Nikon world for several years, eventually ending up with a Nikon D700, and host of accompanying Nikkor lenses.

In 2012, I traded in my Nikon gear for the Canon 5D Mark III and 6D, intending to dive into the video and filmmaking world. While that Canon has hardly been utilized for video, it has built my entire professional photography portfolio in the past 6 years. I haven’t bought a full-frame camera since then.

In 2015, I embarked on a month-long backpacking trip to Asia, which sparked my purchase of a Sony a6300. This dipped my toes into the Sony world, and although it took a lot of adjusting, I quickly fell in love with my little mirrorless camera.

It was much smaller than my DSLRs, image quality was on par, 4K video quality was exceptional, and the extra features such as face detect, eye autofocus, focus peaking, and more felt sci-fi compared to my Canons.

Fast forward to this year, when I’ve ramped up video production and am making as many videos as I am photos, and it just made sense to upgrade to the full-frame Sony A7RIII.

What I Love About Sony Cameras

Eye Autofocus

You’ll never have another excuse for taking an out-of-focus portrait again when using a Sony camera. Their eye autofocus is fast, accurate, and very hard to live without once you’ve gotten used to it. Pair it with face detection, and you have the perfect camera for photographing anything with people in the scene.

A Truly Silent Shutter

When I first started shooting with the Sony a6300, I marveled at the silent shutter mode that helps you shoot candid shots much more stealthily. Canon has a Silent Shooting mode that is definitely quieter than normal, but hardly without noise. Sony silent shutters are truly silent, which can be very important while shooting in live performance venues or in areas where the extra noise is frowned upon.

Canon versus Sony side by side.

The Electronic Viewfinder (EVF)

Like most mirrorless cameras, the Sony A7rIII comes with an electronic viewfinder. Compared to DSLRs that use optical viewfinders (OVF) unless you’re shooting via live view, an EVF gives you a real-time preview of the image you’re capturing.

Generally speaking, I love the EVF for crafting and composing better images in-camera, but I do wish for the option to switch between EVF and OVF. This especially comes into play when photographing concerts with heavy LED lighting that can almost wash out the EVF and make it difficult to compose images.

Sony PlayMemories App

It’s far from perfect, but the Sony PlayMemories app and its ability to quickly transfer images from the camera to a smartphone via a QR code is genius. This approach is much easier and reliable than Canon’s Wi-Fi transfer system.

Sony also used to include PlayMemories apps that could be installed in-camera, such as a time-lapse feature. For unknown reasons, Sony removed these apps from the Sony A7rIII and A7III. Hopefully, they are restored in a future firmware update as these apps were incredibly handy.

The Camera Can be Powered Internally via USB

The ability to charge my camera by simply plugging it into a wall or external battery pack has been a lifesaver. This is handy not only if you happen to forget your external battery charger, but also for powering your camera through any extra-long photo (like time-lapse) or video sessions.

What I Miss from Canon Cameras

Ability to Shoot Smaller RAW Files

A feature I use quite frequently on my Canon cameras is the ability to shoot smaller RAW file sizes (M-RAW, S-RAW). This gives you all of the advantages of a RAW file but in a smaller file size.

Unfortunately, this is a feature that Sony cameras don’t offer. It would be especially helpful to have on the Sony A7RIII, whose uncompressed RAW files are 81.9 MB apiece. The only way to decrease this size is to shoot compressed RAW files (about 41.0 MB each) or shoot in JPG.

Needless to say, I’ve purchased two more external hard drives since I started shooting with the A7rIII.

Straightforward Features and Settings

Sony cameras, like Adobe Photoshop, are jam-packed with features. This can be either a blessing or a burden when you’re just trying to take a simple photo or video. More often than not, I find myself fumbling around with Sony’s menus and settings just to snap a quick photo.

Yes, you can customize buttons and menus to your liking. But it can get confusing when you have to choose between six focus modes and six focus areas at any given moment. In comparison, cameras like Canon DSLRs and even Fujifilm mirrorless cameras seem much simpler to operate.

Consistent Colors

Many photographers are quick to criticize the colors of Sony cameras, claiming that Canon has a much better color science. I tend to agree with the critics.

In general, photos taken with both my Sony a6300 and A7RIII have pretty good colors. But occasionally (usually when shooting indoors with artificial lighting), both cameras process colors oddly. This can usually be corrected in post-production, but compared to my Canon DSLRs that nail colors almost every time in a variety of conditions, this can be frustrating.

Why I’m Not Leaving Canon Just Yet

Even though I own two Sony cameras, I’m not fully giving up on Canon just yet. Here’s why.

Sony Lenses Aren’t Cheap

Across the board, Sony lenses tend to be several hundred dollars more expensive than their Canon equivalents. Even if I traded in or sold all of my Canon gear, it would take a significant investment to buy into the Sony G-Master line of lenses.

My compromise in the meantime has been a mixed bag. I sold half of my Canon lenses (mostly prime lenses that I never used anyway), purchased a few mid-range, all-purpose Sony lenses (i.e. the 24-105mm f/4), and invested in a Metabones V adapter (more on that below).

My Remaining Canon Gear is Hard to Sell

I’ve historically been very hard on my Canon DSLRs, and both show significant wear and tear. Trade-in and resell values for both of my DSLRs and remaining Canon lenses aren’t great. How many people do you see switching to Canon these days? In the meantime, I’m inclined to keep and use my Canon gear for now and wait and see what happens. After all…

A Canon Full-Frame Mirrorless Camera is Coming Soon

Photography news sites are abuzz that both Canon and Nikon may soon release full-frame mirrorless cameras. It’s hard to say how good these cameras will be, and if they will use EF and EF-S lenses, or a whole new lens mount. But I’m hanging on to the hope that Canon can get its act together and compete in the mirrorless world.

Canon body on the left, Sony body right.

Two Things Worth Mentioning

Sony Batteries Have Improved Greatly

Mirrorless cameras have long been criticized for poor battery life. This is certainly true for my a6300, which usually lasts for about 350-400 shots per battery.

However, Sony introduced the brand new NP-FZ100 battery to both the Sony A9, A7rIII and the A7III. More robust in build, this battery powers your camera for up to 530-650 shots or a little under 2 hours of video recording time.

In practice, I find that these new batteries last much longer and are almost on par with Canon DSLR batteries.

Sony-Canon Lens Mount Adapter Works – Sort of

There are several lens adapters which will let you mount Canon lenses to Sony cameras. The most popular adapters are the Sigma MC-11 Mount Converter ($199.00) and the Metabones V adapter ($399.00).

I’ve been using the Metabones V adapter to put my Canon lenses on the A7rIII and a6300. The adapter works most of the time with fast and accurate autofocus, and even eye autofocus works extremely well.

However, there are moments when my camera will simply freeze right after focusing on an object. This is easily corrected by simply switching the camera off and back on, but it seems to be a problem with the adapter. So far, this is the only real problem I’ve seen while using a lens adapter.

Canon lenses that work on my Sony cameras with the Metabones V adapter:

• Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 II
• Canon 24-70m f/2.8 II
• Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 II
• Canon 50mm f/1.8
• Canon 35mm f/1.4
• Canon 85mm f/1.8
• Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro

In Conclusion

As a photographer charging into the world of videography, it made sense to start shifting away from Canon into the realm of Sony. Since getting the Sony A7rIII, I’ve seen a huge uptick in the quality of my videos and photos. However, I’m also hoping that Canon will soon release a competitive mirrorless camera that meets the video and photo needs of today’s creatives.

Have you made the switch to mirrorless cameras yet? If so which brand and model did you decide on and why? What’s your take?

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[Photography] 4 Tips to Organize Your Photos in Lightroom

Lightroom is one of the most widely-used programs for photographers today, with good reason. In addition to extensive editing options in the Develop module, Lightroom also contains a bevy of tools to help you organize your photos as well.

It can make the process of managing thousands (or tens of thousands) of pictures much more seamless and intuitive. Getting started with Lightroom’s organization functionality can be a bit intimidating, but there are four simple ways in which you can easily and quickly use the program to get a handle on your photos.

Understanding the Lightroom Method

Before you begin using Lightroom’s organizational options it’s important to know one thing about how the program works. It never, and I mean never, does anything to the original images on your computer. All the organization tips covered here deal solely with how Lightroom sorts and displays images within its own internal Catalog, which is kind of like its own database for keeping track of your pictures.

Lightroom will never move your pictures to a different location on your computer, nor will it change the filename or any other property of your pictures. Basically, no matter what you do in Lightroom, your original pictures will always be safe and unchanged, so you never have to worry about making a mistake.

Feel free to try things, click on buttons, and play around with the features in Lightroom as much as you want because you’ll always have your original files safe and sound.

Lightroom contains a variety of tools to help you organize and manage your images.

1 – Smart Collections

If Lightroom didn’t have Smart Collections I’d probably fall out of my chair and start crying like a baby. Smart Collections are the bedrock upon which my entire Lightroom organizational methodology is built. They are simple enough that anyone can learn how to use them but powerful enough to meet the needs of the most demanding photographers.

Imagine taking a hamper full of laundry out of the dryer, dumping it on your floor, and as the clothes fall out they are immediately sorted and folded into individual piles: pants, shirts, lights, darks, and even socks. Pure bliss, right? That’s kind of how Smart Collections work, and they are so useful it’s almost magical.

Smart Collections can help you make sense of the chaos that is your photo library.

Smart Collections automatically sort your images into folders depending on criteria that you specify, and you can even have Smart Collections within other folders called Collection Sets. (Again, this all happens ONLY within the Lightroom Catalog database.

Lightroom will never move your photos around on your computer or change the folders they are actually stored in!). You can set up Smart Collections to automatically sort your photos into virtual folders such as…

• All images that were taken in the month of January 2018  (see screenshot below).
• Include all the images that were taken with either your Nikon or Canon camera.
• Any images that have not yet been edited in the Develop module.
• All images that were taken at a specific geographic location and have a five-star rating.

One of the easiest ways to use Smart Collections is to just create one for each month of the year. I do this at the beginning of each year so my pictures are automatically sorted by month and I never have to think about it again until next January rolls around.

It’s a simple way to get started with Smart Collections and will help you see how useful they are for your entire photography workflow. You can create Smart Collections that fit almost any criteria you can think of, which can dramatically decrease the amount of time you spent managing your pictures.

2 – Flagging and Rejecting

This might sound simple to veteran photographers, but for someone who is just starting out or otherwise unfamiliar with Lightroom, the Flag/Reject technique can have a huge impact on how you organize your pictures.

On its face, the technique is simple. As you scroll through your photo library, press the P key to mark a photo as a Flagged (or Picked), press the X key to mark a photo as rejected, or press the U key to remove either of those demarkations from a given image.

This simple act can be incredibly useful as a way to organize your photos, especially when used in conjunction with Smart Collections. As you flip through your pictures it’s easy to press P, X, or U so later on you know which pictures are your favorites and which are not worth keeping.

You can then have the Flagged images automatically displayed in a Smart Collection without doing any extra work on your part. Additionally, you can click the filter icons at the bottom-right of both the Library and Develop modules to quickly show or hide the photos you have marked as Flagged, Rejected, Unflagged, or a combination of all three.

The white flag indicates that image is marked P or as a Pick. Notice there is also a white line around the thumbnail so you can easily find the flagged images.

3 – Keywords

One of the most useful features that Lightroom has to offer as it relates to photo organization is that of keywording, though it also requires some degree of effort on your part to make it truly worthwhile. In the Library module, you can activate the Keyword panel on the right-hand side of your screen and type in descriptive words that identify a given photograph, such as Soccer, Nature, or Macro.

To use multiple keywords for a given picture just use a comma to separate them, and you can assign as many keywords to a picture as you like.

Lightroom even has banks of keywords you can use to select common descriptors for categories like Outdoor Photography, Wedding Photography, and Portrait Photography. These make the process of adding keywords even easier because you can just click on the ones you want to use, and they are automatically assigned to the photo or a group of photos that you have selected.

Lightroom makes it easy to assign keywords to photos in the Library module. You can also assign keywords to a group of photos during the import process as well.

To use keywording for photo organization you can create Smart Collections that specify certain keywords or, in contrast, do not contain specific keywords.

For example, you could have a Smart Collection of photos that include the keywords Wedding and Ceremony and another Smart Collection that requires the keywords Wedding and Reception. You can also use the Filter Bar (View > Show Filter Bar) to sort photos in real-time by adding specific keywords to your sorting criteria.

4 – Face Detection

Some people decried the inclusion of face detection when Adobe added it to Lightroom in 2015 because it’s generally not seen as a feature that true professionals use very often. While I can’t necessarily disagree with that sentiment, I do find facial recognition to be a fantastic way to organize your photos for beginners, casual shooters, and even sometimes for working pros.

Nestled at the bottom-left corner of the Library module is a small little Face icon which will activate Face Detection when you click on it. If you have never used this feature it will take Lightroom quite some time to analyze all the photos in your catalog for faces.

This also illustrates one of the biggest weaknesses with this feature: speed, or lack thereof. Face Detection is, and this is putting it mildly, as slow as molasses even on some of the latest computer hardware. But it still can be highly useful and, when properly trained, a great way to keep your images organized.

The initial facial analysis will take a long, long time. Better go get yourself a cup of coffee while you wait. Or two cups.

Click the question mark below each photo to add a name, and the more photos you name the better Lightroom’s analytical engine will be at figuring out which images contain which people. It will also group photos together that are nearly identical so when you give a name to one face it will add that name to all the faces in the group.

After you start the identification process you can click on a single face at the top of the screen under “Named People” to show all the pictures that include that person.

The most difficult part of the Face Detection process is detecting and naming faces. If you’ve got tens of thousands of images in your Catalog this can take a really long time. So I recommend starting with people who are most important to you and working out from there over time. Begin with your family, closest friends, or repeat clients, and then branch out to other people as you progress.

I find Face Detection to be in roughly the same category as the shop-vac out in my garage: I don’t use it every day, but when I do need it, it’s extraordinarily handy. Your mileage may vary, but you just might find that it’s worth your time to try out.

You can enter names for everyone in a single photo, and unnamed people will have a “?” above them.

Conclusion

These four tips are just some of the ways in which Lightroom can help you manage your ever-growing collection of photos. If you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber you will continue to see improvements over time, especially with regard to overall speed for things like Face Detection.

But even if you use a standalone version like I do, you may find that these features are often indispensable. Each also has their own set of nuances and additional settings that can help you tweak things even further.

What about you? What are some of your favorite ways to organize your photos in Lightroom? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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