All I can say is Lhasa is everything I had hoped for and more.  The people are absolutely amazing, very friendly and so willing to have their photos taken. The physical environment and the culture seem very familiar to those of us who have spent any time in Ladakh, India. Yet, there is still a uniqueness that is Tibet. Even with the large Chinese presence, you still know this place is special.

We are staying in a hotel very near to the most holy of temples in all of Tibet, the Jokhang. Any given day you will find hundreds to thousands of pilgrims circumnavigating the Barkhor, the street that circles the Jokhang, prostrating themselves before this holy place.

Yesterday, we arrived and my Tisso T-Touch informed me we were are 3,450m (11,318ft, for you Yanks). That is enough to take a guy like me who live at sea level and slow him down! So we made a light day of it.

Click an image to view it full size.

So what this is all about is I went out yesterday and shot a few images at a local Burmese temple; Dharmikarama Temple and a Thai temple; Wat Chaiyamangkalaran. Nothing life changing, but I thought I would share with you the results. I have wasted most of the day trying to figure out how to make them pop up in Slimbox. So, enough of that! You can view them HERE.

We all know Lightroom is powerful. Most of my editing is done and post processing these days, and no longer in Photoshop. In fact, I would say with the advent of Lightroom 2 and local adjustments (see my video HERE) 95% or more of my work is done in Lightroom now. But there are fun little secrets that make this application even more powerful useful for more than photo processing. How many of you use Flickr, Photoshelter, SmugMug? Did you know that Lightroom, with the added help of a few free (yes, free) plug-ins can make your life soooo much easier?

Here is how it works. I am going to show you with the Photoshelter plug-in, but it works the same with all the above and more. There are two ways to start. The easiest is to follow this link to Adobe’s Lightroom Exchange HERE. This is a warehouse of Lightroom plug-ins. Here you will find plug-ins for exporting to the sites I listed above. But, you will also find all kinds of cool plug-ins for web templates, develop presets and more. Most are free! So poke around and enjoy. I said there was two ways to start. The other way is to open Lightroom and go under the new to Lightroom 2 “Plug-in Manager.” This is a handy dialog box that will take you to the Adobe Exchange site by clicking the button on the bottom left of the window. But it is more useful than that, because it now is the simplest way to import your plug-ins. Once you download the plug-in you want to use, in this case the Photoshelter plug-in, then just hit the ad button and ad it to your list of plug-ins. Simple, no more searching for the folder where the plug-ins reside, it does it for you.

The new to lightroom 2 “Plug-in Manager.”

So now you have the Photoshelter plugin loaded or the Flickr plug-in or whatever one you want. Now, you need to select the images you want to load. I chose the Arches of Delhi gallery I made last week. Make sure you have captions and key words already embedded in the image. This is the beauty of this method. Now export like you would do normally export a photo and bring up the export dialog box. Here you will see at the top of dialog box a small pane, click on it and choose which plug-in you want to use.

You must choose which plug-in to use.

You will see the list appear. Once you choose the plug-in you will need to log in to your account. Don’t forget, you have to have an account with any of these services to use them. That may seem like a no-brainer, but… Anyway, then just work your way down the dialog box panes. Name the file, make your setting choice, your size choice, sharpening, etc… Finally choose an existing gallery or make a new one.

Just work your way down the dialog box panes.

Then upload.

Once uploaded, Lightroom will tale you to the site and you can make any changes to the photos in Photoshelter or whatever site you uploaded to.

Your captions and other IPTC data that was embedded from Lightroom 2 follows your image to Photoshelter.

These plug-ins will save you a ton of time and make uploading to your favorite site a breeze. I hope this helped. You can view this gallery in Photoshelter HERE.

The maker of the plugin wrote me and I realised I did not give a link to his site only to Exchange. Sorry about that oversite. The company is called pact software and you can find this plugin HERE.