LightRoom goes to Kenya

Taking a laptop on the recent trip to Kenya allowed me get a good feel for what shots were in the bag while in the field. Of course though you need some software to make this easy.

My current workflow involves LightRoom. Though its exact place is not set in concrete at the moment, so I am using it as much as possible to see what fits.

Lets have a look at how I used LightRoom in the field?

Lightroom is the one stop shop of RAW processors, its DAM, its a Processor on steroids, its print tool, its a slideshow generator, its a web gallery tool.

At home its the current processor of choice and DAM tool but for the trip it was mainly used as in importer and review tool.

It was used as an importer because it does a reasonable job of the task.
Yes Photo Mechanic is quicker and given time is the enemy of digital photographers this may force a change in the future.

Another consideration was I had grand plans to do some keywording on the flight home so by importing the shots into LightRoom from the beginning would save some time.

Reality:
Doing a photo safari with Andy Rouse (The Mara with Andy Rouse) is not for the faint of heart, we spent vast amounts of time in the field. Which is fantastic BUT doesn't leave a lot of time for digital housekeeping.

In my plan to keyword on the way home, I forgot my most recent workflow idea.
DNG is the new Master file, ie every shot must be converted from RAW to DNG before keywording.

See post To DNG or not to DNG? for my reasoning on why I use it.

Given I had little time for the digital side of wildlife photography on the trip I decided to import each sessions RAWS into my Preview LightRoom catalog.

There is much rumbling on the net about how slow LightRoom is to import shots. Obviously this is hugely subjective, it depends on the quality of your computer hardware for a start.
As an idea, I just imported and generated a 2048 pixel preview of 1977 DNG images and it took 56 minutes with a MacBook Pro 2.16 Ghz, 2GB RAM.

All that said its still can take some time, so to speed it up, I did not check the Render Standard Preview option.
This sped up the import but meant I took a hit when reviewing the images.

On the time downside, I did choose to copy the files from their original location on my Nexto Ultra ND2525 to a new folder with new names (as per my naming standard).
for full workflow in the field (Digital Workflow for a Wildlife Photographer in the field).

Reviewing with LightRoom was easy and the laptop had enough grunt to generate the previews in the fly without too much delay. Occasionally the "Working" popup appeared but that's expected.

I reviewed the shoot on the Library panel in Loupe View using the x key to tag rejected shots.
Using the left & right arrow keys to move through the folder.
When done, it was simple matter to delete the rejected photos.

Hardly a pushing the boundaries of what LightRoom is for but it did was asked.

Should I have used something else? Maybe, Photo Mechanic is much faster for importing but I haven't shelled out for it yet.

Still using Lightroom gave me the option of keywording direct into my catalog if I had time to follow my workflow.