Which is why we thank God for the likes of David duChemin.

He has managed to push us all (but especially us men) to a point where it is all about vision first and gear second. His mantra “Gear is good, vision is better” has become the hallmark of both his traditional books and his superb eBooks. To me these eBooks are everything I wanted when I was learning to take better images (and still learning). Highly compelling, visually rich, short books that inspire, that explain and that share the insights. It is almost as if they are written to that same mantra “compelling visionary images first, technical and craft explanations second”. Scratch that. It is exactly how they are written.

SAFARI, A Monograph is the second in the his wonderful series “The Print & The Process”, where he takes us on his personal journey as he shoots a series of projects and explains the process behind them.

This latest one is just breathtaking. The images captivate and engage. They transport you to the dry savanna, the equatorial heat and the languid lions watching bemused as another 4×4 of tourists winds it way through the Serengeti. It is hard to believe him when he says this is is first safari – irritatingly, it seems as if the man has no end to his talent.

He unpacks the images from a 10-day safari in Kenya earlier in the year, first letting the images speak for themselves then diving deep into the process behind the photographs. This eBook like his previous one on Venice, offers an honest discussion about the issues connected to the creation of what he called the monograph, including the gear used, the techniques employed, and the lessons learned.

It’s a 62-page PDF eBook that will provide you with inspiration amidst the details of the Why and the How. This is not so much about how to photograph your first safari, though you’ll learn that too; it’s a look at the lessons learned, and re-learned, by a photographer who is now 25 years into his craft.

And then if this is not enough, David also shares his Adobe Lightroom settings used for Serengeti Chocolate, the duo-tone look in which much of his SAFARI monograph has been styled, and a downloadable Lightroom Preset. These books are as “cheap as chips” as we say in the UK, and I for one feel like a kid waiting for the next installment of my favorite comic to hit the newsstand. I devour it when it arrives and the moment of elation is followed by the eager anticipation of the next one in the series.

SAFARI, A Monograph is a available now for $5, but as with all of David’s eBooks there is OF COURSE a special offer:

For the first four days only, if you use the promotional code SAFARI4 when you checkout, you can have SAFARI, A Monograph for only $4 OR use the code SAFARI20 to get 20% off when you buy 5 or more books from the Craft & Vision collection. These codes expire at 11:59pm PST JULY 11, 2010.

Whats more, I am using an affiliate code for FOCUS FOR HUMANITY, so for every book that you buy you do some good and Focus For Humanity gets a slice. David generously gives Focus For Humanity a kick back for every one you order. Just click on the Craft and Vision image left or in the sidebar.

Most of the images that I took fell – deliberately for once – into one of 4 themes: motion, people, abstract or landscape. I had deliberately selected the motion and abstract categories because I really wanted to push myself to experiment and to try things differently. I’ll be posting some galleries of each category in due course.

The people category was well… it just would have been criminal to have spent ten days in Italy and to have ignored some of the wonderful characters, faces and sights that we saw every day. Rather than just look at my people shots as individual pictures, urged on by David, I decided to process them more as a collection, trying out split-toning as a way to create order out of a fairly disparate group of people pictures.

Below is part of the series – I am still not all the way through the images yet as my day job is somewhat all consuming at the moment and I am also building up to the launch of Focus For Humanity, a charitable foundation aimed at providing grants to photographers wanting to switch to full time and work with NGOs!

During one of the afternoon critique sessions, David took us through his Lightroom workflow, including the use of split toning. I think it is one of those things that you need to practice and to have an objective eye for so that you use it selectively, but I loved the idea of taking such a varied group of people pictures – different ages, locations and activities – and creating a link between them simply by turning them to black and white and then applying a split tone.

In this case I chose red for the highlights and green for the shadows –in homage to the Italian flag! It is fascinating to flick between the split tone version and the full color version and to see the marked difference the change makes to how you perceive the image.

So although I will not fall prey to the trap of split –toning every image or doing everything in black and white, I really enjoyed seeing how the images transformed, how the emotion and the story change or how the message received different emphasis just by a couple of different settings in Lightroom.

Let me know what you think!

Scott Kelby has written a detailed review on his blog, and both he and Matt Klokowski have put together a great series of videos looking at and explaining the features over at The Lightroom Learning Centre and also at Kelby training.

The key improvements – in no particular order are:

• Great Noise Reduction - finally Lightroom overtakes all the other options, with a pro level noise reduction capability, which is especially powerful as it works on the RAW images rather than th an 8 bit processed image.
• Watermarking tool – enhanced watermarking tool giving you increased flexibility over opacity a, size and placement.
• New Importing Capabilities – a much more intuitive and visual import process that allows you to see where your images are coming from and where they’re going
• Flexible publishing options – drag and drop capability with the ability then to publish direct to flickr, share with your iPhone etc.
• Film Grain Simulation - to enhance  your images and bring back that film look.
• Sideshow Audio – The ability to embed music into a slideshow, and for the music to be synch’d to the the length of the slideshow and then exported as a package either as video or as a slideshow.
• Imprvoed Vignetting - the main changes are to the post crop vignetting, which has been really enhanced.
• Improved Print capabilities – there is increased flexibility about how the print “grid” is laid out including the ability to have photos of different sizes in the same grid. You can also change the print background colour.
• Workflow improvements – they added the collections panel to the Develop modules meaning you no longer have to flick back and forth between the two.

Embedding Lightroom gallery

Those of you following this blog from the start will know that I had struggled initially to get multiple Lightroom albums and galleries to display correctly across multiple browsers.

If you go down the route of creating your own HTML page for your portfolio, and then linking to this from your WordPress blog, then you need to be incredibly careful about your HTML tags and your validation, as Firefox in particular will not display correctly if you have any errors there at all.

The good news is that there is an incredibly easy solution for users of WordPress, Adobe Lightroom and SlideShow Pro wishing to either create a post with a gallery/album in it, or a separate page. For example I created a page called Portfolio and then linked to this page from the menu, thereby embedding my portfolio in my blog’s look and feel. Simply install the free plug-in from Kimili, used to embed Flash objects.

1. Install the Plug-In
The first thing you need to do is to install the Kimili WordPress plug-in, which you can do simply by going to the “Add New” option in your Plugins panel within WordPress. Just search for Kimili Flash Embed plug-in. Don’t worry about the “might not work with WordPress2.8″ message. It seems to work just fine.

2. Create The Slideshow
In Lightroom, create the slideshow with which ever settings and dimensions you want, but if you are using the “wet floor”, when you write down the dimensions (you’ll need it later) then add a little bit. But don’t worry –  making a change later takes just a second, so you can tweak and adjust before you publish.

3. Upload the Slideshow
Upload the slideshow somewhere on your site. I prefer to keep all of my albums in a directory called /portfolio.

• Export your slideshow form Lightroom to a local folder on your MAC/PC. I called mine portfolio
• Upload with an FTP  or Dreamweaver this folder to your website. Its important that the loader.swf, js/ directory and all the files EXCEPT index.html get uploaded. So I now have a folder on my website called http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/portfolio.
• You can preview your gallery at this stage (although of course it is not embedded in the blog yet). Check mine out at http://www.marcoryanphotography.com/portfolio/loader.swf

4. Create The Post or the Page With The Slideshow

• Create the post or a new page as normal
• Switch to the Code editor (the HTML tab). Copy and Paste the following lines into your  page or post, remembering to modify the following lines with your website details and the folder where you uploaded your gallery AND being sure to take out the word REMOVE – I had to put that in otherwise WordPress would have tried to embed a gallery right into this post! Make sure that the text that begins kml_flashembed is right up against the square bracket, ie no spaces
• : [REMOVEkml_flashembed movie='/portfolio/loader.swf' height='500' width='500' base='.' allowfullscreen='true' wmode='transparent'/]
• You can use an absolute or a relative URL. On my website I chose an absolute URL, although above I have shown a relative URL.

That’s it. You can tweak the settings to fit a post (500 by 500 as above is good) or a full page wide (like my own portfolio). Now ensure you use Preview to check your post or page.

Lightroom Shortcut Keys app for iPhone

For those of you whom use both an iPhone and Adobe’s Lightroom, there is a great little new iPhone app that provides an aide-memoire to all the shortcuts for Lightroom.

Written like a series of flash cards, the app quickly helps you remember those combination of keys that help drive up your productivity and make  Lightroom such a “must have” tool for serious photographers.

You can get the app, LRKeys, for only 99 cents or 59 pence. Go on, you know it makes sense!