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Nature’s Domain Update + Something a Bit Different

Ray — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:32:43 +0000

Just wanted to post a quick update as to what is going on here at Nature’s Domain. It’s been slow posting this past year I know. I (Ray) have gotten incredibly busy outside of this website and I let things slide. I wasn’t able to post new articles myself or keep up with our contributors to see if they had anything new to post. Things have finally slowed down and I’m very near being completely caught up and I am committed to posting some great new content myself to Nature’s Domain as well as adding some amazing new photographers to our already great contributing list.

Please keep your eye out here for some beautiful new photographs as well as more well written and informative articles about nature photography. All of us here at Nature’s Domain love to get outside and enjoy the nature we love to photograph so it can be difficult sometimes to sit inside but I know we are all committed to keeping fresh new content on this website. As always thank you so much for your support and continuing to visit our website and we always love your feedback.

Now to give you something a little different that hasn’t been posted here on Nature’s Domain yet. A short video of some of the nature surrounding my condo here in Southern NJ. I shot these clips in the summer of 2010 and have finally gotten around to doing something with them. I know this is not photography but it is something I personally think is a great addition to the new modern DSLR. I know there are many varying opinions about video on DSLRs but I have been approaching it with the “if you don’t want to use it then don’t and if you do well then great” motto. I never want to be a full time videographer instead of photographer, although I think there are some great things that can be done with video relating to nature photography. I hope you enjoy the short clip and we all hope you enjoy our website enough to share with others and stop back again.

Thanks,
Ray Hennessy

Watch the video here to see in HD it looks much better.

Around My Condo from Nature's Domain on Vimeo.

Adobe Lightroom for Birders

Ray — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:58:17 +0000

I figured I’d throw some suggestions out there for birders who take pictures or people who take pictures and happen to have birds in their lenses quite often. I fall under the later category, I’m a photographer who happens to also really enjoy taking pictures of birds. I think it’s partly their beauty, partly the challenge (it’s not as easy as it sounds), and partly to get me out from behind the computer. Let me try and stay on topic, that is for a whole different post. I use Adobe Lightroom to organize my entire photo library. I have all my work (weddings and portraits), my personal (family and friends), and my nature (wildlife and scenic) photos all in one library. Adobe Lightroom is an incredibly powerful organizational tool and I am able to use it to properly handle all of my different photography and make it easy to find pretty much anything I want. I’m going to give a few suggestions for general organization and a new method I’ve just implemented myself that really works well for birders.

To start off I’ll let you know my current LR (Lightroom) catalog, which is what Adobe calls the photo library, as of this writing has over 23 thousand photographs in it. It still runs quite nicely and doesn’t seem to really slow down compared to when I had 100 photos in it. I’m going to generally describe how I organize everything because to describe it thoroughly would take way too long for one post. I import all of my personal and nature photographs into LR and allow LR to organize them into folders by date. I then use collection sets, collections, and smart collections to organize everything so that I can actually find stuff. Keywording is also another very important (although time consuming) step I use to be able to locate a particular photo. If anybody would be interested in me describing that more, mention it in the comments and I’ll be happy to do that in a future post.

Now, onto how this can be helpful for birders. The key is using LR’s ability to have nested (hierarchical) keywords. I’ve basically created the keyword structure that matches my favorite bird identification book, or in my case iPhone App called iBird Explorer. Below is a screen shot of how my keywords look in LR, I’ve only expanded a few to show the structure, the entire list expanded would be a bit long but you should be able to see how it works.

As you can see above the main keyword is “Birds”, nested inside of that keyword are different likenesses (ex. “LIKE_HAWK”), following with categories of that likeness (“FALCONS”, “HAWKS EAGLES AND KITES”, “VULTURES”), followed by the actual species (“Bald Eagle”, “Northern Harrier”, “Osprey” etc.). There are a few advantages with this structure. First, it’s easy to take a look at what you have by different groupings, second if you apply the keyword “Bald Eagle” to a photograph LR automatically applies it’s parent or containing keyword to the photo. Following the “Bald Eagle” keyword LR will apply the “HAWKS EAGLES AND KITES” keyword, then the “LIKE-HAWK” keyword and finally the “BIRDS” keyword. So the photograph I have added the “Bald Eagle” keyword to automatically has 3 additional descriptive keywords applied to it. Once the structure has been created all I have to do is apply the keyword for the actual bird only and the rest is done. You can download the keyword set I’ve created for use in Lightroom here

The next step is taking all that info and organizing it into something I can easily view. I do this by using the “collection sets” and “smart collections”. Collection sets are the containers that can hold additional collection sets and the smart collection inside them. Smart collections are groups of images based on criteria. I created a collection set for each of the groupings that match the keywords. The final step is to create a smart collection based on keywords. I’ve chosen to create the collection of images down to the last grouping before the individual species. For example I’ve created the smart collection called “Hawks Eagles and Kites” that adds all images that have that keyword applied to them. You can see that structure below and a sampling of the images in that smart collection.

The Collection Sets and Smart Collections

The settings for the smart collection

Sampling of images in the collection Hawks Eagles and Kites

Now that I’ve created this setup, the only thing I have to do to organize my bird photographs is to import them and keyword them with the species of bird. LR then handles the rest without me having to do any additional work. I can even select a smart collection of birds such as the “Hawks Eagles and Kits” group and type in a search for, let say, “Red-Tailed” and it will filter that set of images to show only red-tailed hawks. Click the image below to see that in action.

It took about 2-3 hours to create everything and organize it properly but it now saves me a ton of time while importing new bird photos and keeping them incredibly organized. I think my next project will be to go through each bird type and toss the old “not-so-good” shots from years ago, although it’s always fun to look back and see what I was shooting back then. I hope this was at least a bit informative and if you have a different way of handling your organization, whether with Adobe Lightroom or another program, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Ray

Welcome to the Nature’s Domain Blog

Ray — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 01:08:56 +0000

Welcome to the Nature’s Domain Blog. I’m Ray Hennessy and I’ve started Nature’s Domain along with my father to try to create one place for people interested in purchasing nature related photography. We have an archive of stock photography that anyone can browse or search to purchase nature images for commercial and personal use. Commercial use may consist of advertising, website, promotional, or any use that generally generates profit. Personal use includes desktop wallpaper, screen savers, personal printing, school projects and things of that nature. Some images are also available to purchase as prints, magnets, or mugs. Each photographer that is a member of Nature’s Domain has the option of selling their images how ever they may choose so products and prices may differ with different images.

We will be adding other photographers to the archive of images as time goes on. Currently we have one other photographer that is getting their images together and we hope to premier his imagery soon. We are also currently searching for additional nature photographers who are interested in selling their images to join Nature’s Domain. If you or someone you know may be interested please contact me here.

This blog will be a place for all members of Nature’s Domain to post their thoughts, experiences, and tips about nature photography and all things related, and of course we’ll be posting images as well. If you would like to stay up to date please subscribe to the RSS feed and we will continue to post new info and updated photos right here. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you enjoy our collection of nature photographs.

Ray Hennessy