The death of a plug-in

Earlier this week drop.io announced that it was acquired by Facebook and will be stopping its excellent file sharing and collaboration service.
This in turn has the effect of killing all the great products that were created based on the drop.io platform…including my Photo-drop Lr plug-in for Adobe Lightroom.
What does this mean if you already use the plug-in?

1. You can no longer create new drops
2. You can still upload content to existing drops…but
3. drop.io are deleting all content hosted on their servers on December 15th 2010.

There is nothing I can do about this and will be actively searching for a new solution to replace drop.io in my own workflow.  When I find a replacement I will look at creating a new plug-in for Lightroom.
Please let me know if you have any ideas or thoughts on a suitable service.

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New nature keyword libraries

After a conversation on the new nature photography forum www.wildphotoforum.com I have added a couple more Adobe Lightroom keyword libraries to my existing bird libraries:

European Mammals

European Amphibians

These will work with Lightroom 2.x and 3.x.

You can download them at the bottom of my Lightroom keywords page.

Let me know if you have any problems.

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Lightroom 3 - where are my thumbnails?

If you sit down in front of Lightroom and find that you only have grey squares instead of thumbnails...it is probably something to do with your monitor calibration profile.

It happened to me yesterday and after scratching my head for a while, I opened an image in Photoshop CS5...which complained that my monitor profile was defective. 

Bingo, problem solved!

I remembered that I had updated my graphics card drivers earlier in the day, so this must have caused the mismatch.

A recalibration and all is right with Lightroom and Photoshop again.

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Video of endangered Sandpiper

David Erterius has recently posted this excellent video of a displaying male Spoon-billed Sandpiper.

Unfortunately this amazing little wader is critically endangered.  The primary cause of the species’ plight is depressingly familiar - habitat loss on both its breeding grounds and migration/winter feeding habitat.

It is thought that there could be fewer than 1000 adults left…meaning that few of us are likely to ever see one ‘in the wild’.

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Stop motion and time lapse

This viral video of a man walking across America is very cool…especially to someone like me who enjoys creating time-lapse video.

The really impressive part is the fact that it has stop-motion animation too!

The following video shows how they did it – excellent stuff!

(via Chase Jarvis blog)