Keywording

This morning I went out in the garden to see if a small butterfly I had seen there yesterday evening was still there. It was so I took some photos of it. It was quite difficult as it was a bit windy and the wind blew it around.

After that I was adding some more metadata to the photos I was processing yesterday. Unfortunately I kept getting an error message in Adobe Bridge like Error writing metadata to _MG_6140.CR2. I had to make a note of what files this error came up with, close Bridge, then open it again, and apply the metadata changes to files that failed. If I just tried again without first closing Bridge, I'd still get the same error.

Googling I couldn't find much info other than to reset Bridge by holding down Ctrl when you open it. I did this, and then realised what the problem was. Some of my CR2 files I had converted into TIFFs and then opened in Capture NX 2 (Capture NX is a much more fully featured image editor than Canon's Digital Photo Professional, and I like the U-point technology). I then saved the filed edited in Capture NX 2 as a NEF as well as a JPG. This meant I now had 2 raw files with the same name but different file extension (e.g. _MG_6140.CR2 and _MG_6140.NEF).

For RAW files, Bridge writes an XMP sidecar with the same filename as the RAW file, e.g. _MG_6140.XMP. This meant that only one XMP sidecar file could exist, and could only apply to one RAW file, when I had two RAW files. The simple solution was to rename all my NEF files, so I now had _MG_6140.CR2 and _MG_6140a.NEF.

This fixed the metadata writing problem, though I still had to go through the files, exporting the metadata from the JPGs and then importing into the affected NEFs and CR2s.

Most of the morning and part of the afternoon I was keywording the photos.

I photographed a DPRK I love egg model in 360° (i.e. I took photos while rotating the egg), similar to the photos you'd take for a QTVR object movie. Then I cut out the egg in each image in Photoshop. This meant you could produce an animation with the egg moving in any direction you wanted. Mauser and Bo then made a short animation, though they only 2 of the angles:



It takes ages to cut out all the different angles of each egg, and with all the different eggs that would need to be photographed and cut out in PS, I think it will be much easier to animate them in the traditional way. I will use the rolling motion as opposed to jumping though.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek TNG, with Mauser and Bo, it was pretty bad again. I also watched some of Bo's youtube videos and sorted two ezine articles for my photo tips website.