This episode of @lightroomtips - the blog version features a video tutorial about how to use the Quick Collection feature in Lightroom.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first full-blog edition of Lightroom Tip of the Day. I hope to do a full blog edition once every week, typically on Thursday. For my old readers, welcome back. Lightroom is a photo organization and editing software produced by Adobe systems (you know, the guys who do Photoshop?). Over the past two years, it has taken the photography world by storm. I've used Lightroom since it was first released, and find that as the program gets more sophisticated, I am going to photoshop less and less for photo editing. Lightroom is a fantastic RAW editor - the nondestructive editing properties mean that I can revisit and re-edit a photo even after making significant changes - I can even export the photo, decide I want a brand new look, and reset the image to the import settings and start again, all with a few clicks of the mouse. Lightroom Tip of the Day is a Twitter account I have created to give photographers one Lightroom tip every (week)day. The twitter account is @lightroomtips. Today's tip is : Rename presets can help you save time when renaming images. Interested? Read more below.

Today on the blogoshphere I discovered a blog by a fellow Philadelphia area-ian, Dorie Morgan.  Her post “Activities Don’t Equal Relationships” caught my attention – very well written, and with great insight. I love discovering other 20-something bloggers.  I know there are just shy of 70billion of us out there, but I really enjoy when I [...]

I was asked on Twitter today about Lightroom, how to get started and how the workflow goes – memory card -> hard drive -> Lightroom Library and Develop -> backup.  I thought I’d make a quick tutorial about one way to accomplish a basic workflow in Lightroom. First, start out with an empty catalog.  Save your [...]

Updated my website today, putting some new photos in the albums, especially in the Headshots albums.

I find that one of the hardest things to do is figuring out which photos will go best in the online portfolio.  I know that I need to do some more sessions, particularly with guys – almost all my headshots are of girls.  And I’m looking forward to my friends engagment shoot in the spring, to put more information there.

This week I plan to send out a facebook message to all my friends who are actors / into theatre to see if they would like to get their headshots updated and let them know about what I’m currently offering.

Also, aside from photography, I was approached to do a freelance web design gig for someone I know, based off my work on my theatre group’s website (http://www.stbernadetteplayers.org).  I don’t typically do web design, but I’m always up for a challenge, and now that I’ve learned so much more about Wordpress I feel confident in using it for some simple designs – which is (hopefully) what this client is looking for.  I should be having a meeting with him in the next week or so.

What do you do to market yourself and your skills?

It was a dark and stormy windy night. Such nights are often met with power outages here in my little corner of Media, and this one was no exception. We held our breath in the afternoon when the power went out for about 30 seconds, disrupting our party preparations temporarily. However, things [...]