On the road this week with my trusty laptop and forty pound camera bag along for the ride as always. Just on a whim, and because I can, I shot the whole batch of family Christmas photos in duplicate: one RAW version (since I always shoot everything in RAW), and a duplicate of the file stored on my second card as a JPEG (and I never shoot JPEGs). Then, again because I could, I quickly picked through the pile of JPEGs, grabbed sixty of them and with no post-processing whatsoever published them directly from Lightroom 5.3 to a gallery at www.valhoffman.com. Twenty minutes. Wham. Done deal. Best photos I ever took? Hardly! But on the scale of immediate gratification this one’s pretty far up. On the other hand for a guy who generally takes each and every image seriously this was hard to do emotionally, like throwing your children into the sea to teach them to swim. These weren’t award winning images but the family, especially the ones who weren’t present, loved them.

PP