Looking Straight down 34th Street, Manhattan, NY

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Looking Straight down 34th Street, Manhattan, NY

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This was taken just outside of the Holland Tunnel on the onramp to whatever freeway takes you to Met Life Stadium in New Jersey. I couldn’t believe the clouds and the light. I grabbed my camera and quickly shot as many frames of the skyline as I could get before the view was obscured by trees and we turned away. When I started editing, I noticed that I caught a perfectly straight view, right down 34th Street in Manhattan. The original capture settings washed out the clouds and the skyline. On my first pass through the images on the plane ride home, I remember thinking that I blew it and missed the shot.

And then I lost the Lightroom catalog.

I finally found a backup on an external drive. Fortunately, I had turned on the preference for the catalog where Lightroom writes its settings to an XMP file that lives next to the RAW file in the filesystem. Theoretically, you don’t move the source/RAW file without moving the .XMP file. The beauty of that file is that it retains whatever the last Lightroom settings were and if you open the file as a Smart Object in Photoshop, you can still access the settings via the Camera Raw plugin even after you make edits in Photoshop. When you save out, the .PSD file is pulled into Lightroom and lives next to the RAW file. Pretty rad.

I tell you that to mention that even though I thought I blew the perfectly straight shot looking right down 34th Street, I did some work on this image, and then forgot about it. When I found the backed up catalog, it had written an XMP file with my work that I was able to import into a newer catalog and I didn’t lose any editing work. Yay for all the other photos I want to share from that trip. Also, yay for looking again at this image. Moral of the story? Always check this:

Lightroom Catalog Settings tip for looking straight down 34th Street

Saved my bacon.