My cousins came to spend the Easter weekend with me. We got to explore around the Mt. Dandenong region, East of Melbourne, and went on some incredible forest walks. I spent the last 2 days field testing the Panasonic Lumix LX3 as a carry around camera to replace my dSLR on really big walks and apart from a few irritations which were more to do with me learning to use the new camera it stood up admirably and allowed me to take some really stellar photographs.
My cousins love mushrooms, preferably of the non toxic variety pan fried to perfection, and spent a good deal of time invested in learning about the edible English mushrooms while staying there. Hot on their list of Autumn activities is pounding the forest paths around Victoria with a guide book and their amazing knowledge of these little forest dwellers in search of all sorts of amazing fungi. I will be their designated photographer.
To be fair, until I got in on the action of spotting the little guys hiding under logs or in mossy alcoves I had no idea how fascinating they were and how many different varieties you could find within a couple of steps of each other. From spiky rough puffy ones which explode in a cloud of spores when you touch them to red topped delicate mushrooms with lacy gills the choice is seemingly endless. Getting up close involved lots of kneeling in the moist leaf litter and putting the manual focusing and macro abilities of the LX3 to the test.
It was beautiful to be out in the fresh forest air for the majority of the last two days. I can see the schroom hunting will provide us with some great macro photography over Autumn and in all likelihood I will have to take my SLR and my macro lens along for some of the future walks.
It really was great fun.
I have received a number of emails asking how I manage the workflow of images from my camera to my library and how I go about protecting and backing up my photos. With this post I hope to share some of the tips (and pitfalls) I’ve discovered in trying to simplify, reflect, readjust and further simplify the way I manage my images.
First things first and this is the most important point before we continue; There is no right or wrong process when it comes to workflow! Every photographer approaches their workflow in a way which makes sense to the type of shooting they do and their own personal preferences. TWIP podcasts #62 and #63 on workflow illustrate how diverse each of the podcast members’ workflows are. I continually seek to refactor my workflow, looking for the simplest set of processes which meet the requirements I have for my images.
Antoine de Saint-Exuper once said:
This is my ideal, thus this post encompasses a snapshot in time and, if I work hard and keep looking to simplify and improve further, it probably won’t be relevant in a month’s time – it will have changed into something which works better for me.
Setting the Scene
Initially I recommend getting a feel for what resources you have at your disposal. Do you have any external hard drives or USB memory keys lying about. What computer do you use? How many photographs and what type of photography are we talking about; are they family snaps or client’s wedding portfolios?
If you have a lot of photographs like I do then you probably have some of them on your primary computer and the rest floating around in some sort of disconnected storage; an external disk, a set of DVDs or some file host on the Internet. Questions I’d ask here are: Does your primary photo management software (be it iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Aperture or Lightroom) know where all the photos are? Are offline files referenced properly and can you search for information associated with them?
Do you have some way of keeping the important photos offsite? What if, God forbid, the house burns down or someone nicks your hardware in the middle of the night?
Do you have some sort of archival strategy in place? In 10 or 20 years time will those scratched DVDs in the drawer still work?
Below is a diagram of my hardware and storage situation. It may seem very complicated at first glance but it is a breeze to set up and is automated to the point where I can forget about it and get on with the business of taking pictures. I will talk through aspects of the diagram later in this post.
Keywording
This is the next task I perform and I have it first because for me it is the most important way to find information about my photos and search across years of archives. It was the most neglected aspect of my workflow for a long time and the sweat and effort to keyword 4 years worth of photos taught me the valuable lesson ‘keyword on import’. If there are any recognisable events in the photos I can quickly bundle them up in a selection and use the Aperture album creation hotkey to turn the selection into an album to which I can refer later.
First Pass gut feel
Next comes a quick pass over my import. I go into full screen mode and quickly move through the photos not paying too much attention to the details. I trust my gut feel here enough to know if the composition is good or bad. In Aperture I flag photos I want to mark as picks with a 4 star rating. Lightroom users can do the same or use the ‘flag as pick’ option to do the same. I prefer the star rating because the graduation means something to me which we’ll get to later.
At this point I can leave the process and carry on with it later if I like. I have my photos in a managed environment. They are keyworded, in albums as required and I have identified the couple which are important to me.
I also usually click the button to backup my vault at this point. The vault backup contains my library (keywords, metadata, adjustments, file library and any managed files). As this process is a synchronisation rather than a full backup every time it is usually really quick and updates only the files/information which has changed.
Adjustments: Time to whip out the Loupe
At some point I’ll want to take a closer look at the technical aspects of the photos. I usually go through my picks with the loupe looking at the finer details and making minor adjustments to contrast, sharpness and exposure as required. Photos which I want to retain as picks but need more serious adjustments I will rate as 3 stars and then attend to them in a later editing session. The photos I will use for my portfolio I will rate as 5 stars. The rating system allows me very quickly to move between all the photos that need work (3), are part of the pool of picks (4) or are my very best shots which will make it into books or onto walls (5). The majority of my Online photos (Flickr, Ipernity etc.. ) come from my 4 star pool. At any point if you feel the photo doesn’t make the grade you can simply remove the star rating.
Second pass gut feel
As this step can happen at any time I recommend you leave a bit of time between your import and adjustments and the second pass on your non picks. In this workflow you will be working only with your picks for most of the time seeing the non-picks only when you look at the contents of an album for example. It is usually a good idea to take a little time at a later date, sit down and browse through photos you felt didn’t make the grade. I am constantly surprised by the little gems I find which then finally get to make it as a pick.
Non picks become referenced files, picks become managed
Photos I’ve selected not to be picks leave my laptop hard disk – there really is little point in them eating up my precious free space. In Aperture you can easily move files around using the ‘Manage referenced masters’ option. Select a group of pictures and put them on a drive of your choosing – in my case above my 1 terabyte drive. The files are still referenced by Aperture and you can still browse and search on the files. If I need to use any old files such as a group of bracketed photos for a HDR image then the ‘Consolidate masters’ option sucks the files back into my library (alternatively I can plug back into the big drive and export the masters to a local folder).
I have set up a couple of smart folders which make the identification of files that need to move easier:
So that’s really it, a simple set of steps which have ensure I have a set of photos sorted into albums and picks which are easy to browse and search on and are easy to backup.
Make sure your photos walk out the door
The last point I want to make is ensure you have some sort of offsite backup available. You can have the fanciest systems, terabytes of storage, a wall of Drobos but putting all your images in one place leaves them vulnerable to loss through natural disaster or theft.
I rsync (a sync command in Leopard or other UNIX based systems) my referenced photos to a seperate portable Hard drive and ensure that Aperture also keeps a vault on that disk. This disk goes everywhere with me, when I’m going out for the day it is either in my camera bag or in the cool centre console of my car. At work it lives in a bag in my desk drawer. I know that a meteorite can hit my house (in this scenario my family and pets are vacationing in Fiji) and that all my expensive computer equipment can go up in a ball of flame and I will not lose a single image. I can buy new furniture, I can build my house again brick by brick from the foundations but I cannot replace my wedding photos, or the pictures of my son or my portfolio.
Cloud Backup
Call it simple paranoia but my portfolio photos are very important to me and represent a tangible emotional and dollar investment. These photos are usually converted to DNG as my long term archival file format of choice and a copy of the photo with keywords and adjustments are then saved as a full size JPEG. These files are exported to a local backup folder where a little piece of software picks them up and uploads them to secure cloud storage.
My cloud backup of choice is Jungle Disk. Jungle disk is part of Amazon.com’s S3 storage services. They allow you to create an encrypted drive using a key you provide. You can setup the software to automatically backup files from selected locations to your cloud drive. The main reason I like them as a provider is that you only pay for your files in transit (bandwidth is charged for upload and download only) and having the online drive encrypted means the files are totally safe from being viewed or stolen. I also use Jungle disk to backup my important documents putting them safely in a place where I can access them from anywhere.
Wrapping Up
I won’t hark on much more on this topic of workflow and backups, you have a good idea of one possible workflow which may work in part (or entirety) for you. I am more than happy to answer any questions on actual details of this workflow or my storage solutions; just leave your question it in the comments and I will get back to you.
Now stop worrying about backups and get out and take some photographs!
I am a long time user of Apple’s Aperture and have dabbled modestly from time to time in the iPhoto pond. Like many all over the world I bought into the iPhoto 09 hype and also fell for the clever Apple marketing scheme of putting a sufficient ‘salivary gap’ between the keynote and the product release.
Well I received my long anticipated copy last night and after installing it immediately got to work putting it through it’s paces.
Referencing the Aperture library
The first thing I liked was that, by disabling the iPhoto copy-to-library functionality in the preferences and then using the Aperture media browser, I was able to import around 15,000 of my picks into the iPhoto library in short order. iPhoto references the photos in the Aperture library and only makes a copy in the iPhoto library if you do any adjustments on them. A note here is that iPhoto uses the Aperture JPG preview of the photo rather than the original which makes it blisteringly fast and is sufficient provided you have your Aperture previews set to a sufficient size; for what I would want to do with iPhoto (email, face tagging and the odd Facebook post) anything over 1000 pixels on the long edge is fine. If your Aperture previews are too small you will need to reset their size in Aperture preferences and rebuild them. I kept a healthy watch on my hard drive space during the import and was very pleased to see that iPhoto, used in this referenced way, was quite light on my precious free space.
Facial Recognition
This is the wow feature for me and the only one I hope Apple ports to Aperture pronto. Click on a couple of faces and tell iPhoto who they are and iPhoto starts showing you photos in which they appear; As you keep confirming, iPhoto keeps learning. What really impressed me was that as I was selecting progressively earlier pictures of my son it kept recognising earlier and earlier photos of him which meant I was able to tag 8 years of photos of him in relatively short order; iPhoto essentially learned ‘how’ he was getting younger back through the years.
In Aperture I would like to see this feature integrate with keywords better and leverage off all the people I’ve key-worded in my main Aperture library – used in combination with existing tags or metadata, facial recognition would be a potent feature.
Geo-tagging Location information (Places)
I was very disappointed with the geotagging option in iPhoto. I am a bit of a location nut and love embedding location data in my photos. I use a GPS logger when I am out in the field and embed the co-ordinates into my photos in a batch process on import but I still have a good few years of photos which have no location data and I was hoping this would be the answer.
Sadly it is not. The iPhoto video makes it look to easy but in my experience I found the process of clicking the photo, searching for the location, wading through all the business listings from Google, dropping the pin, naming the location and saving the data to be too much of a hassle. If you’ve taken 60 pictures in one location it seems you’re out of luck because you can only tag one photo at a time. [update: select many photos and click the i button on one of them to set the location information for the selection, thanks Jim MacDonald]
I see no significant advantage over better programs such as the Aperture ‘Maperture’ plugin.
Flickr and Facebook Integration
These are in iPhoto for the consumer market. I have similar plugins in Aperture which actually do a far better job and hook me into Facebook, Flickr, iStockPhoto, Smugmug and a heap of other online systems. Apple would be really stupid to include these as a built-in option in Aperture. I believe that a baked in solution here is silly, iPhoto should have rather leveraged off the development which has been done in the Aperture plugin space to integrate with already existing 3rd party plugins.
I like iPhoto 09 and in combination with the other iLife enhancements it is a good upgrade. The facial recognition is the only thing I’d want to see make it (in it’s current incarnation) into Aperture and only if it can leverage off all the hard work I’ve put into my tagging and metadata already. I wasn’t blown away by iPhoto 09 and it certainly (for me) didn’t live up to all the upgrade hype.
iPhoto 09 makes better use of my system resources and seems a bit snappier in some areas. Its integration with Aperture was a pleasant surprise and there are a few new adjustment tools thrown in for general photo touchups. There were a number of annoyances though – poor geotagging, the way the recommended faces move around as it prompts you for other faces which might match (which meant I was accidentally rejecting photos which weren’t under the mouse cursor a second ago) and a couple of performance slow downs due to the load iPhoto was under.
This is a good consumer level photo management upgrade to the previous version and a worthy contender to other applications like Picasa. I am endlessly amused by the number of posts I see on the web by people trying to decide between iPhoto and Aperture (or Lightroom); my advice in this regard is ‘if you are asking the difference between the two then stick with iPhoto’. New users who want an easy way to manage and share their photos – stick with iPhoto. Any serious photographer who needs the heavy lifting in the adjustment and workflow department then Aperture is your baby.
Now that I’ve played with it a bit (and because I am an Aperture user) I probably won’t use it again; other members of my family who aren’t power-users will love it because it makes general purpose photo management easy and fun. From that point of view it scores a resounding 5/5.
As a final note, contrary to the general consensus, I am pleased these new features came out in the consumer product first – that way I can feedback to Apple as to what I would like to see in their pro-level software rather than the other way around. ‘Yes’ to facial recognition and a definitive ‘NO’ to everything else.
Some people like taking things to their extremes and then adding some. I came across these two links today which I thought would be interesting to you.
The longest exposure:
Taken of the Clifton Suspension Bridge over a 6 month period from 17 December 2007 to 21 June 2008. (source)
Then head on over to the Legacy Photo Project to see the world’s largest camera and biggest photograph.
The pinhole camera was a former fighter plane hanger, the print was a 9.62m x 33.83m black and white image. The logistics that went into making this photograph were incredible:
Awe-inspiring and well worth its spot in the Guinness book.
I had to include this little cartoon strip because I don’t know how many times this has happened. Someone takes a look at your photographs and comments on the camera. In a way it would be like meeting a great playwright and complementing them on the fact that their pen writes great plays or noting that a painter’s brush was an inordinately skilled artist.
The latest in camera and gear does not make you a good photographer!
The gear: Sure we all like to have nice gear but put a point-and-shoot in the hands of a pro and he/she will consistently deliver great photographs. Put a D3X in the hands of a complete amateur and the photographs will be horrendous. I still remember that my first year with an SLR produced horrible photos – I was so disappointed; here I spent the money to get a great camera and the photos were often worse than what was coming out of my point-and-click.
The eye: This is the hardest thing to quantify but the way a photographer sees and then chooses to interpret the scene is a unique quality that cannot be measured. Even when photographers are shooting the same scenes their interpretations are often radically different. Here is an example of some photos taken last year by a photographer friend and myself; Rob and I were shooting the same scene, often standing next to each other, but as we’d read and interpreted the subject very differently the photographs turned out quite differently: http://www.ipernity.com/group/walk.melbourne
Next time you want to complement someone on a beautiful photograph make sure you don’t mention the camera 
picture: Apple Time Machine
I am notoriously impatient, especially with hardware and computers. My abhorrence for slowness and lag has meant a costly exercise of hardware upgrades to keep up with the curve. Mix lag, slowness or system speed issues with my sanctified realm of photography and I grow horns and start breathing fire. And so, due to some weird quirk of software combinations combined with thrashing out some massive TIFFs through Silver Efex, my laptop started to disk thrash and throw up it’s electronic hands in surrender. It was 11pm … it had been a long day … I did not have much sleep the night before and now was faced with a computer which won’t compute; I did what any self respecting person would do and reached for the hard reset.
Not my shining moment.
On logging in I found my user profile was now horribly corrupt! I could log into other profiles no problem but not into mine – I could see my desktop background but that was pretty much it. Thankfully it was late at night with the family tucked up safe in bed for the expletives that resounded around the living room were a hark back in time to the harbour back-streets of 18th Century Amsterdam.
It was here that I realised my backup strategy combined with the use of Time Machine would pay dividends. I had never had to do a full system restore on my Mac before and was nervous whether it would work – thoughts of hours lost doing PC Windows reinstalls provided a bleak outlook for the rest of the weekend.
As an extra precaution I booted up with my Leopard disk, opened a terminal and backed up my entire user directory to my external backup drive – I figured at the very least I could get restore the important bits in the event the full restore didn’t work. The following is actually a one line command broken over 3 for simplicity:
tar -cvf
/Volumes/[my_backup_drive]/userprofile.tar
/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/Stuart/
I didn’t really need to perform this step but the extra safety net was of some comfort. For more info on the tar command look here or type ‘tar –help’ from your Mac command window.
I then selected the option to restore my system from a Time Machine backup, was presented with a list of all recent system snapshots (I selected one from two hours before), clicked ok and went to bed. In the morning I followed the prompt to restart the computer, held my breath and logged into my profile – it was like the problem had never happened, full seamless restore, user profile working like a charm and I was back in business.
Time Machine is complete peace of mind, the only upgrade I have planned in the near future is to point my Time Machine backup, photo library and all photo masters at a Drobo.
It’s nice when software works as it’s supposed to.
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