I was planning to write a book for a long time but it was not easy to put everything together and edit the content so that it is clear and easy to follow. Well, after many weeks of work, I was able to put it together in a beautiful PDF document that has bookmarks for easy navigation. Now, you’re the judge if it’s clear and easy to follow.
A photography workflow is the made of a sequence of steps that you make to get your pictures from your camera to the intended format. Whether it’s e-mail, the web or print, you go through a certain set of steps to create that format from your original pictures. This sequence of steps can be complicated or simple, it can be efficient or inefficient depending on many factors. If you would like to learn about creating an efficient photography workflow, read this tutorial.
Almost everyone that owns a digital camera takes pictures on Christmas and New Year holidays…ok…lots of pictures. This is also the time when we make new year resolutions. Have you every made any resolutions about your pictures? I believe that there are two new year resolutions that anyone taking pictures should not only make but also make sure they keep.
Last week I published the first part of the interview I conducted with Hans Fremuth from Metability Software about image metadata. In this section Hans talked about the current state of the image metadata standard development and in particular about the XMP standard developed by Adobe. In addition, Hans provides insight into how he organizes his own pictures on his computer. This article is the second part of the interview.
I am still surprised when I get pictures as attachments in e-mails that I receive. The surprise is that I see humongous file sizes like 3 or 4 Mb. It is obvious to me that those who send me these pictures are sending full size images. Even using DSL, if I have six or seven of these pictures it still takes a while for me to download them and see them. In addition, I am sure that it takes the sender a lot longer to send the email since the upload speeds are much lower than the download speeds on any internet connection. So, how are we to e-mail pictures as attachments? Why is it still difficult? Well, read on.
I find myself today in almost the same situation as when I started this blog. In the summer of 2006 I had my first baby, my daughter! That was three years ago. Now, three years later I had my second baby, my son! This is a great blessing indeed! Because we live in modern times with digital cameras, babies come with…well, among many other things, lots of pictures. And all these pictures need organization. There are a few things about organzing baby pictures that make the task a little different especially if you’re only using folders for organizing your pictures.
Usually transferring pictures is the simplest step of any photographer’s workflow. However, the results of transferring your pictures can affect your entire picture collection. There are some simple things that anyone can do to transfer their pictures in an efficient way. I can think of five things that proved to be very helpful over the years in the way I organize my photo collection on my computer.
Many times precision is achieved by approaching the target in small steps. This is true also when it comes to your photo collection. It would be great if we could have unlimited free time to add tags and geotags to all of our pictures. Unfortunately, this is not the case and many times we have to choose how precise we want to organize our pictures. So we approach precision in picture organization in layers…layers of organization.
Now that you have asked the right questions, figured out your purpose and defined your photography workflow steps, what do you do to make everything more efficient ? Is there something extra to be done to tie everything together in a nice and smooth process ? While I believe that there is nothing you can do to eliminate hard and repetitive work, there is one thing you can do to make all that hard work…easier.
In my last two articles I have written about basic questions to ask when creating or modifying your photography workflow. However, what do you do after asking these foundational questions ? Where do you start analyzing your current workflow? This article will explain the simplest steps of a photography workflow…this is the “ABC” of photography workflow. These are the steps that are part of any photography workflow no matter how simple or complicated. This is where all photography workflows start, this is the birthplace of a photography workflow.
You’ll probably ask immediately: good enough for what? Well…that’s exactly the question to ask when it comes to your photography workflow. While my last article deals with similar basic questions, this article is a variation on the same theme but with a twist. I hope you like the twist.