Yes, the shortcuts continue as I strive for perfect productivity in Lightroom. I came across this wonderful site that Adobe Labs actually put together of all the shortcuts that are in Lightroom.It is time to indulge in the vast list and become overwhelmed at the amount of things to remember Oh but wait, or you could learn 1 or 2 every couple of days like myself

The flagging feature is a great new feature in Lightroom v1.0. It’s allows for quick rating without using a staring system. On the surface, flagging is fairly uneventful, but it’s all about digging deeper into this system when you really start to find the potential of flagging.First of all, to flag an image either as a “pick” or as a “reject” simple hit the P key for pick and X key for reject. If you wish to keep the image unflagged his the U key.Now to get into the nitty gritty of the flagging system. Once you have flagged images as picks or as rejects, you can get Lightroom to do many things for you.One of them is to select all the picks. This is good when creating a collection of all the best images from a shoot. To select all the pick flagged images hit OPTION+COMMAND+A.If you wish to delete all of the images that are flagged as rejects (remember to be careful about deletion, I generally keep all images until I absolutely know I never want to keep them) hit the COMMAND+DELETE keys. Lightroom will then prompt you for the way in which you want to delete the rejects.So if you feel that a staring system just isn’t tickling your fancy and need a cleaner, more simplified way of organizing your images use the flagging system along with these shortcuts to gain the most out of them.

It’s coming to that time again that I start to pack up my life and move. This time it’s going from Home to Qwanoes, and since I am doing the photography there again this summer I am starting to really take advantage of my staff discounts at Bestbuy and Futureshop. Here’s a list of things that I’ve gotten so I am just that much more ready for Qwanoes.

- ThinkTank - Modulus Speed Set (plus these extra bags: Whip it out, Lens Case and R U Thirsty)
- Manfrotto 680 monopod
- 2GB Lexar 133x CF Card
- 2 Batteries for my Rebel XT

One thing I’ve really noticed is that this year I don’t only have way more equipment, but I am also way more ready for what to expect. I am excited to see what moments I am blessed with capturing and hope that it will bless others.

If you’ve never heard of Qwanoes, you have to head over to qwanoes.ca

- Jordan

As soon as I saw this I knew that this was going to be the new way that I want to clean my sensor. Good bye are the days of using blowing air and expensive sensor swabs.

*Warning - This may scare many who clean their dSLR*

Check it out here: Tips from the Top Floor

As the time comes closer, I have been looking into spending a little bit of cash on some new accessories for my time this summer at Camp Qwanoes. One of those accessories will either be a Thinktank Photo belt pack or a nice Photog vest.

After doing some research and asking others about what they think, it seems to be coming clearer that a belt pack will probably be the best option. It’s simple, easy to use, and doesn’t have that super geek factor the vest does.

Another accessory that I have also been drooling over is the new portable harddrive from Hyperdrive. They call it the “HD Space” and boy does it look sleek. They claim to have uploads as fast as 1GB / minute. Coming in at a relatively small size and a really good price, this looks to beat the snot out of the Creative Zen Vision W that I had a couple months back to test.

And yes yet another product I am look into getting is a nice lightwieght yet inexpensive monopod. I have yet to do some research on this, so if anyone has any recommendations I would love to hear em. Or if anyone has an old one they don’t want anymore…drop me an email - info@jordannielsen.com.

So you just uploaded 3000 images from that photo shoot you were just at. After the import you start to realize that organizing 3000 images is a huge task, not to mention the fact that keywording adds to that task. Well, for all you who are feeling this 800 pound gorilla here are a few shortcuts to make that task go a little faster.Somethings to keep in mind when keywording is making sure that you use as much of the screen as you can. So mask sure that you are in fullscreen mode (hit the “F” key to switch between the screen modes).If you want to put the same keyword to a lot of images, just select the images that you want. Once they are selected just hit COMMAND + K and that will take you to the “Keywords Tags” box. Simply input the keywords that are the same to each of those selected images.If you are wanting to stamp images with some keywords simply hit OPTION + COMMAND + K and that will bring up a dialog box which you type in the keywords you want to be stamped to the images you want. Your cursor icon will turn into a stamp like tool and you can then just stamp the images that you want.Quick Note: Erasing Keywords when Stamping - When you are in the stamp tool if you accidently stamped an image with a keyword, you can just put your cursor over that image again and your cursor will turn from a stamp tool to an eraser.Use specific Image keywords. This is not so much a Lightroom tip but rather a tip that will work any time you are keywording an item. When keywording, it is a good practice to use keywords are descriptive words.For example: In this image I didn’t keyword the image with a location that I took it, that is what my folder system is for. Rather I keyworded the image with descriptive words, like; boy, smiling, camper. When using keywords in this way you will find that if you are looking for a specific image with maybe a boy camper, you will find it easily.So next time you import your images, make sure you keyword them! This is one of the most overlooked tools of any photo management software. Metadata is your friend

If you are like me, you are working on a laptop most of the time. One of the biggest limitations of a laptop is the smaller screen real-estate. One great feature of Lightroom is the ability to actually hide the side bars and the top and bottom bar. Now you can do this using your mouse, but there is a much quicker way of doing it.To do this, it doesn’t matter what module you are in it just works.

To hide the side bars merely hit the “Tab” key.To hide all of the side and bottom bars hit “Shift+Tab“Of course to bring them back you can also hit the keys again to bring back the bars. If you also wish to just have the top and bottom bar hidden use the “Shift+Tab” then when all the bars are hidden go and hit “Tab” key to bring back the sidebars.Now you have the ability to quickly regain some screen real-estate to quickly view images larger or see more of your images in grid view.

Well it is official, I am heading back to Qwanoes for another summer as their photographer. Soon I will be whisped away from the freezing cold that is Alberta and into the liquid sunshine that is Vancouver Island.

I will basically be doing the same work that I did last summer but with one small advantage, I know what I’m doing and what to expect. I am super excited about this and am counting down the days till I head out.

Oh and did I mention that I got my 30D back from the Canon Repair facility in Calgary. It seems the shutter was basically busted and some other mechanism as well. So it now work great like it did on day one. My only beef, they left a large piece of dust on my sensor…oh well, can’t complain to much I guess.

Cheers!

If you’ve ever used the brush tool in Photoshop you will undoubtedly know the shortcut to resize the brush. Well the folks at Adobe took that and implemented it into the Clone / Heal tool in Lightroom.

When you want to do some basic Clone/Healing in Lightroom all you have to do is go into the Develop module and hit the “N” key to go into the Clone/Heal tool. On the screen there will be a round brush appear. To resize this brush you merely have to remember back to Photoshop and the brush tool. To make the brush larger you hit the “]” key and to make the brush smaller you hit the “[” key.Using these shortcuts will help you to quickly clone out that pesky dust spot, zit, or whatever the object and get you back to doing your workflow with ease.PS. To go back to Develop mode hit the “D” key.

If you’ve ever noticed that in the developer settings there is a very nifty feature called the “before and after” preview. It is a great feature that can allow a person to view where the picture was and how it looks after some editing. Here is a quick shortcut that will really help and it’s a key that you use all the time…

Y - to bring up and take down the “before and after” preview.Use, abuse it…that’s what it’s there for. Not only will you notice how great your image is looking but you will also notice how addictive this view is.