Reflecting Clouds

Lake Louise in Banff is over of popular destinations, there is big Las Veags style hotel at the edge of the lake with many shops inside. I’m guessing it’s open year around providing some great skiing in winter. Many trails begins from these shores and there few tea houses where hikers for hikers which is great idea. Lake is open for boat and kayaks which also can be rented but water is very, very cold. I was told there used to be glacier at the far edge around 10-15 years ago but it now long gone.

There is another shot made by someone else almost exactly from the same place but in different conditions.

It’s been a while since LR3 is out and it has many good improvements over it’s predecessor. Revamp of reduce noise functionality alone worth the update in my opinion, I no longer have to hope to Nik’s Dfine well may be in some extreme cases where localized noise reduction is required.

Among many new features is build-in Flickr publish service, it’s plain and simple but works great with one huge exception – more on that below. Still I switched to use it instead Jeffrey’s Flickr export plugin which by the way was too rewritten as more sophisticated “Publishing service”.

The problem both services suffer is they way, way eager to republish photos which aren’t really changed. Simply viewing photo in Developer module, touching metadata or even showing as part of slideshow (in some case) marks it for republishing.

I was researchinge this issue and found solution, albeit an engineering one for build-in service (that is what I’m using now). Note that this is for MacOSX and requires basic knowledge of the Terminal:

• Quit LR3 and backup your catalog
• Open Terminal, located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app, then type following commands (without ‘>’):
• >sqlite3 <path to your catalog’s .lrcat file>
• >select * from AgRemotePhoto where photoNeedsUpdating=1;

this will show all photos marked for republishing, including their remote URL on respective host server.

To clear specific photo(s):

• >UPDATE AgRemotePhoto
• …>set photoNeedsUpdating=0 where url=”<url from the list above>”;
• >.exit

To clear all photos marked for republish:

• >UPDATE AgRemotePhoto
• >set photoNeedsUpdating=0;
• >.exit

Open LR3 and if all was done right the photo(s) will be moved back to “Published” category where they belong. Note, those commands ignore new photos scheduled for publishing (ones that were never published before).

On the wat back we took a short break by Crazy Creek resort. It’s not really a “resort” it has very short nature walk with cool suspension bridge and waterfall, caffe with beautiful outside area, giftshop and across free way hot pools and something else. The price of admission to the nature walk is very, very steep. We decided to bite the bullet and try it anyway especially since it was about to rain and we had whole area to ourselves and kids were getting restless in the car but I doubt I will ever stop there again.

About the shot, this is classical HDR made from 3 shots using heavy ND filter and whole sequence was lighten by 0.7 stop. Light post processing in CS5.