Underexposed

(Credit: O'Reilly Media)

If you want a book to learn or better understand Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, I can recommend Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop Lightroom Adventure (O'Reilly Media) as a good option.

But you'd better move quickly. Lightroom is changing fast--probably a lot faster than the book publishing business can. The software has moved through beta to 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 in recent months, and at this rate, a major update might not be far off.

I've been a big fan of Lightroom as a way to make shooting "raw" photos--the unprocessed data from higher-end digital cameras--a process that not only isn't so burdensome but also can be downright pleasurable. The software enables some of the fiddling that some liked to do in the darkroom, only it's faster, more flexible, and doesn't involve sniffing nasty chemicals.

But there's no question that Lightroom comes with a learning curve, even if you're familiar with the ordinary Photoshop software. Not only do some new tools and adjustments appear, but the task-oriented interface is a dramatic departure for Adobe.

There are oodles of online training resources for Lightroom, from Adobe and others. Aaland's book generally holds its own here, walking users through all the tools and modules. It's amply illustrated with luscious photos he and colleagues took on a trip to Iceland, photos that are useful both to compare the effects of various changes and to inspire photographers to go take their own pictures.

I'm reasonably well versed with Lightroom, but I found several good tips. I liked the background on how the default sharpening setting of "25" is not some arbitrary number but in fact a point on a scale adjusted for each camera model's raw-image characteristics. And he convinced me that the split toning control might indeed be worth messing with on some occasions.

For me, what set the book apart from online tutorials is its collection of recipes--the formulas that photographers featured in the book employ to achieve various effects. A couple I didn't care for (the edited geyser picture on pages 190-191 was tinted a shade of green that matched my own after I saw it), but some others are interesting or handy. One is the Bergmanesque effect on page 220 that's in vogue in fashion photography these days. And who knew all the wacky things that can be done with the camera calibration settings?

One of the things I like best about Lightroom is that it's suited for my style of photography, which tends to be mostly grounded in reality. Unlike regular Photoshop, Lightroom isn't engineered for Impressionist-painter special effects, 3D chromelike text overlays, and multilayer compositing. But images do benefit from some adjustment and refinement, and the recipes give good suggestions and examples of what can be done.

In short, Aaland's book is a good guide for Lightroom newcomers and beyond.

The $270 Lensbaby 3G lens

(Credit: Lensbabies)

I've tried Lensbabies' 3G selective-focus lens, and I like it.

This lens, which looks more like a miniature Lunar Excursion Module than a traditional SLR lens, restores some physicality to a world of photography that's ever more electronic and automated. And the images it produces can be compelling.

The trend in photography in recent decades has been toward ever more automation. We have automatic exposure, focus, shutter speeds, white balance. As computers get smaller, the list of automated camera operations gets longer: newer Panasonic models can tell the difference between a landscape and portrait, and Sony's DSC-T200 can be set not to shoot until it detects a smile. In general, I'm supportive: autofocus fares better than I do in general, and I loathe setting white balance. And a lot of folks in the point-and-shoot area benefit from hand-holding.

But Lensbabies, a small company in Portland, Ore., is going against this grain, and it's refreshing.

A shot taken with the Lensbaby 3G

(Credit: Stephen Shankland)

Though images the Lensbaby 3G produced can be gimmicky, they also can be very effective. These selective focus lenses are so named because a relatively small patch of the image is in focus, and the rest recedes quickly into a blur. The effect is to concentrate the viewer's attention sharply on an in-focus point and, sometimes, to impart a sense of motion toward it.

Here's how the Lensbaby 3G works. There are two lens elements, one fixed close to the camera body and the other at the other end of a flexible plastic tube. You use your fingers to flex, compress or extend the tube, reaching around the camera body (and in my case, wishing I had longer, more dexterous dactyls). The position of the farther lens determines what exactly is in focus, and you can steer it so it's an off-center.

It's fun but tough to focus. It's very intuitive, and I got much better at it with practice as reflex gradually took over from conscious thought. Even so, I was grateful to be shooting digital, because the fraction of dud shots was much higher than usual. And I wished often for a larger, brighter viewfinder so I could see what was in focus better.

Shooting moving subjects was especially unreliable. If you've got time to set up shots in advance with a tripod, though, the lens can be fixed temporarily in a particular position then fine-tuned.

The Lunar Excursion Module

(Credit: NASA)

It's not just the focusing that's manual. The lenses have different apertures, but setting it involves pulling out a washer-shaped disc with a magnetic tool and replacing it with a different disc with a different-size hole. I stuck mostly with the f/4 disc, which lets a fair amount of light through. Using smaller apertures--the lens comes with a good selection--produces a deeper depth of field to ease focusing, but of course it also slows shutter speeds and reduces the selective-focus effect.

Exposure is set using the camera's through-the-lens metering, with no communication with the lens. I often found on a Canon Rebel XT that it was best to drop exposure down by about a stop.

The Lensbaby 3G has a 50mm focal length. It costs $270 for Sony, Leica, Canon, Nikon, Pentax/Samsung and Olympus/Panasonic SLR mounts and $390 for medium-format Pentax 67 and Mamiya 645 mounts. The company also sells a $114 kit with 0.6x wide-angle and 1.6x telephoto kits and a macro adapter for close-up shots.

I spent about 90 minutes Monday night trying to set up an Ooma, a phone system that piggybacks both on your broadband Internet connection and land line. My experience: it was a pain to install, but now it works pretty well.

(Credit: Ooma)

I've griped to acquaintances about how ordinary folks have had to become first system administrators and now, with broadband and multiple computers per household, network administrators. Setting up a review model from Ooma raised these hackles anew.

There was nothing seriously newbie-deterring like command-line utility, or even setup software. The Ooma system setup had two other afflictions instead.

First is the multitude of cables and wires that must be interfestooned with your existing tangle of network cables, phone cords, DSL line filters and such. My case, with a DSL connection, a wireless router and a four-port switch, was an exercise in topological combinatorics and dust-bunny avoidance. It's hard to imagine how Ooma could get around this issue, though, given the company's approach.

My other hitch was that the Ooma system was short on feedback. With no screen, you have to decode mysterious combinations of lit, unlit or blinking lights of various colors to figure out what's up. It took a long time, for example, to figure out one problem I had was that the Ooma's lights were dimmed and not that the system was shutting down abruptly because of some network glitch. It would have been nice to be able to peek at its status over the local network.

Once I finally got everything put together (and figured out how to turn off the direct-to-voice-mail setting), things started looking up. Calls are clearer than our regular old land line was, even with our junky Uniden phones whose failure I eagerly anticipate. It also was nicer than another VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol, aka Internet telephony) experience I've had, Skype. Checking voice mail online is nice. We've only tested the system for less than a day, though.

The Ooma boxes aren't junky, though. To the contrary, in fact. To me, accustomed to products with a half-life of 12 months, Ooma products feel a bit overengineered. But as another Ooma tester I chatted with said, "It is nicely designed, so I don't feel the need to hide it."

Our phone bills are pretty darned low, or more accurately our long-distance fees are paid mostly to cell phone companies, so I'm not eager to pay $400 up front to get rid of long land-line distance bills forever, as Ooma promises. But if you get in on the White Rabbit freebie system (which also serves to build out a necessary network of intercommunicating Ooma boxes), give it a shot.