photo 05 Dec 2006 08:44 pm
I’ll get to it!
Phantom Kitty made this comment on the above picture.
i have almost this exact shot. i’ll have to dig it out.
have you found you’ve taken a million photos over the years, and now wonder how you’ll find time to post to them all? …or is that just me?
I was going to answer there, but it’d be a little involved for a Flickr comment. It’s been something that’s been on my mind lately. The more times I go out and take 500+ pictures in one night, the more I realize that my current workflow just isn’t handling this very well. I told Kirstie Kat this morning in an email, “Gleaning 600 raw files for the few dozen that I want to show off to the world is not a skill that I’m particularly adept at yet.”
I got my digital SLR in May 2004. Since then I’ve taken roughly 13,000 pictures. Right now, I see two major problems with the way I deal with my pictures:
1) Things get lost by the wayside. I think this is what Phantom Kitty was getting at. When I take snapshots I’ll do really minor tweaking in Picasa (brightness, white balance, contrast, cropping) and post up galleries. These are not pictures that I do a lot of post processing on. I don’t think I’ve used Photoshop for any of them. Good pictures take a lot of time and work, and I’m still in a learning stage as far as post work goes. My appetite for picture taking far exceeds the amount of time I have to pour through the pictures, find the good ones, and work on them. Good pictures tend to go up on Flickr. One fact I find solace in is this: a lot of my old pictures suck. As I look through pictures that I took even a year ago, I realize that I’m getting a lot better. But I’d still like to post some pics of that show I saw in a basement a year ago, and some pictures from Thanksgiving last year and…
2) Old Pictures are hard to find. I’ve been submitting pictures to the dane101 MadThemes contest. This week’s contest is Snow. I’ve lived in Wisconsin (this time) for 3 and a half years. I have pictures of snow. Finding them took a little work. I found a few, then looked, found a few more, then remembered some others that I had, and found those. This is not very efficient. I organize my pictures in folders by year/month/date, so it wasn’t too hard to look through winter ones, but for something else (say, “water” or “cats”) things get more difficult. I should probably be using a good photo browser or cataloger that can keep track of photo metadata. You’d think that I, a programmer who does a lot of work on an online digital asset management program, would have this problem in the bag. But I don’t. I’ve been using Adobe Bridge more and more lately, but I still haven’t tagged most of my pictures, and I still don’t tag most of my new ones.
What to do about these problems?
The first problem is a little more difficult, since time is one of the biggest offenders. But part of my time problem is that I’m not good at sorting through hundreds of pictures and picking the dozen or so that I want to work on. Bridge has helped me with this because it has a nice ranking implementation. I can go through 600 pics and give one star to the decent pics, then comb it again and pic out the better ones, and so forth. I still don’t have a concrete idea in my mind about what seperates a two star and a three star image. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, it’s that I should just star trying. I may flounder a little at the beginning, but the only real way to develop this skill is to try it, to practice it, and to eventually get better at it.
Getting better at picking pics will certainly help, but I can’t really spare a lot more time to work on pictures. I have other things to do. I’m not ready to start sacrificing too many other things to work on pictures. And I sit in a chair for 9 hours a day at work. Coming home to sit in a less comfortable chair for another 4 or 5 wreaks havoc on my back. Humans weren’t designed for this much sitting.
The second problem has a much clearer solution: pick an application, learn it, and start using it. I can add metadata to pics in Bridge, but I’m not particularly adept at it yet. It’s certainly not second nature, and it’s definitely not easy for me yet. If I stick with it, though, I’ll get better.
I think a lot of this comes down to this: research and thinking help, but the only way to really change my process is by just doing it. It may be awkward at first, and I’ll probably have to do it over later when I get better, but I’m not going to get better at by thinking and researching.