Where oh where do we start on this topic. This evening someone jokingly brought up the topic of me doing “birth photography” when they have their next child. I was on the floor dry heaving taken back by the comment. Who wouldn’t?

But that got me thinking. Do people actually hire photographers to take pictures of their babies being born? So I went to Google and typed in “birth photography services”. To my surprise this is quite the big business! But I digress…

I couldn’t do this type of photography. I think it takes a person of the female persuasion to even considering doing something like this. This is territory that I stay far away from. So in closing, no, I do not do this type of photography

Technorati Tags:Photography, Birth

I find that I all to often praise Lightroom for all the great things it does. Often featuring it’s wonderful abilities in tutorials, but today will be a different post. We will be focusing on five “beefs” that I have with Lightroom 1.2.1. Folder OrganizationI find that I all to often am getting frustrated with the lack of folder organization there is in Lightroom. The simplicity for a user that shoots a couple hundred images every couple of months is great, but if you shoot thousands of images every week the the folder system tends to fall over on itself from complexity.I feel that Lightroom should start moving in the direction of Aperture when it comes to folder organization.2. Export QualityDo you ever export an image from Lightroom and wonder why there are these weird “halo” lines, even when you export at 100% quality! This is one of my biggest beefs. Lightroom needs to be able to export a better quality image then it is now. An export from Photoshop will not yield this bad quality, so why should Lightroom?3. Catalogue SystemMaybe it’s just me, but the new catalogue system that was but in place in 1.1 has been the bane of my existence. I have had roughly 4 versions of my “master” catalogue go corrupt because of Lightroom crashing. Makes me feel very fortunate that they have a back-up catalogue feature that can run every time Lightroom opens.The quality and functionality of the catalogues need to improve. It is off to a decent start, but not for the mainstream. A feeling I keep coming back to is that they should set in place a “Master” catalogue and then off that catalogue you can create “Sub” catalogues. A “Sub” would be used for on location style shots, organizing smaller number of images for one specific client, etc.4. Bridge vs. LightroomI really am starting to feel the crunch to move straight over to Bridge and stay there. It is offering just as many features if not more then Lightroom is at the moment. Adobe needs to separate these products enough to keep people purchasing it. At the moment the only thing holding me into Lightroom is the promise of a great product to come…someday.5. Vignetting a Cropped ImageThis has to be one of my pet peeves. Sometimes certain images look better in a different crop then how you shot them. So you go into the develop module, tweak the crop and continue editing. Later you want to add a vignette. Slowing moving the sliders over to bring in the right vignette you soon realize that the vignette is only showing on one side of you image. This perplexes you! Being the smart human that you are and a great problem solver, you try and figure out what happened.After a couple minutes of frustration you start to realize that the Lightroom vignette tool will always vignette the entire image, not just the cropped on. Thus if you crop an image to the far left, you will only get a vignette on the left side and none on the right of the cropped image. “Oh the joys!”, you exclaim!Please Adobe, fix this!This was from a small list of things I hope gets fixed or tweaked in the coming patches / months. Time will tell if Adobe really keeps Lightroom a frontrunner.