I’ve had some time to work on another new gallery for my website. This one I have decided to title “Faces In Places.”
I don’t consider myself to be a people photographer, and a lot of my photos have no people in them whatsoever. But on occasion we come across some irresistible or interesting subject that we just have to photograph.
Most of these are completely candid, although admittedly there are a few where a connection was made. They tend to be the best ones, in my opinion.
I’ve been procrastinating a bit, but this morning I finally put the finishing touches on my first new website gallery titled “Nautica.” I discussed it in an earlier post but had been fiddling around with the pictures and updating the processing on the photos that I thought would benefit.
A direct link to the gallery is here.
We’re off to the NC coast for a few days of R&R and visiting our Ohio relatives who insist on coming south during the hottest part of the summer. We love them anyway and look forward to a few days of sand and saltwater. I may take a few photos….
A little photo-geekery here. Apologies to the non-photographers. 😉
I took this photo back in the fall of 2011 along the Blue Ridge Parkway in southern Virginia. The tree was aglow in fall color and the light made it explode out of the surrounding hillside. I purposely under-exposed by 2 stops so I wouldn’t lose the sky or saturation in the golden leaves. But try as I might I just couldn’t get a final image that captured what I saw. Image #1 is the original file without processing, and Image #2 is my best attempt at that time.
When I was looking for photos to accompany my “trees” post I came across this image and decided to give it another try. I updated the Process Version to the latest one and took advantage of the latest masking and toning tools in Lightroom. I finally got the image I was looking for originally! Or at least very close to it. I may mess with it some more, but I’m happy to have broken the code on this one.
I just hope it doesn’t “force” me to start looking for old files to process…I have a hard enough time keeping up with the current stuff! 🙂
I was recently scrolling through Instagram when I came across a post by Tony Sweet where he talked about how one of his most-photographed subjects is a single tree. I happen to know of one tree in particular in Cades Cove that I refer to as “Tony Sweet’s Tree” even though lots of other photographers know about it too.
In his post states that he has “amassed a pretty large collection of single tree images in various formats, weather conditions, and times of year.” It got me thinking about my own collection of trees, so I went out and found a few of them to post here.
I’ve been thinking in terms of themes lately anyway, and his post made me think of another possibility for a website gallery. The choices never end…. 😉
(As a side note, I noticed lately that a number of people who have subscribed for email notification of new posts were not getting emails. I think I have found and fixed the problem, but we’ll see.)
I’ve been working recently (with both “working” and “recently” having quite a broad definition 😉 ) on a long-overdue update to the galleries on my website, and it has been an interesting project. Years ago when I was doing assignment work, teaching classes and giving talks to photo groups, I thought of my website as more of a way to show off my work and validate my skills, and never really looked at it as a marketing tool. I would occasionally sell a print, or have an art consultant contact me about buying prints or licensing some images. All of that worked pretty well despite the fact that I really hadn’t set it up as a sales site. I suppose I could have worked harder at it and turned it into something, but I was working at the time and just didn’t feel inclined.
At this point in my photographic journey, I’ve gotten away from anything that looks, feels or smells like running a business. I’m retired and want to keep it that way. I photograph for fun, share my work with a few people who appreciate it, and don’t expect people to pay me money (but not complaining when they insist!). My website is still the public face of my photography, and I think a lot about what I want that to be for me. In the past I have tried to limit the work on my website to my “serious” work, preferring to put my “vacation snaps” on my blog or on another website such as Google Photos, or now, Adobe Portfolio. Do I change that and put all of my photos on my website? Do I ditch the website altogether and use one of the free (or less-costly) services? Part of me says that since I’m paying for my website I should use it for everything, part of me thinks I’m paying a lot of money unnecessarily but yet another part of me thinks I should keep things as-is, with my website devoted to my more serious stuff and using Adobe Portfolio for my “snapshots.”
The main advantage to using Adobe Portfolio is how well it integrates with Lightroom on my computer. I can create a Synced Collection of photos that automatically uploads Smart Previews to the online version of Lightroom. From there I can quickly create a gallery in Adobe Portfolio to share with others. There aren’t a lot of options, but it’s OK for my use. Uploading to my website requires a few extra steps and is a little clunky. It works OK but isn’t ideal for frequent updates or high volume galleries.
I don’t have web skills and don’t know my WWW from my HTTP or my SQL (assuming I even have those!). So I rely on a template-based site that gives me a few good layout options and generally just makes some nice looking galleries. Years ago I started with Neon Sky, a Charlotte-based web company that several of my friends were using. It’s not as fancy as some of the more heavily advertised services, they aren’t as quick with updates as I would like, and it probably costs more than I need to spend for what I do. But it works for me and I don’t really want to invest more time and effort into making a switch.
But as the title of this post suggests, what I really want to do is to come up with a better way to organize my photos. My current galleries consist of simple subject names: Color, Glory, Flow, Form and Peace plus a bunch of galleries under the heading of Projects. It feels to me like one of those graffiti rocks that have had so many layers of paint added to it over the years to the point where you can’t tell what the original shape was. Most of what I post fits into those broad categories, but I feel like there should or could be so much more. What about the Rust and Peeling Paint? How about the abstracts, or the close-ups, or candid people shots? I’ve got critters and signs and urban landscapes and more, but without ending up with 20 or 30 galleries that would confuse the heck out of people and make them give up and go back to YouTube, how can I classify my photos more specifically in order to make my galleries into cohesive “bodies of work?” I’ve been working on that, and it has been a challenge in a number of ways.
Starting from scratch with a collection of 80,000 images is overwhelming, so my first challenge was how to start with a much smaller sample. Fortunately I’ve been pretty diligent over the years with using Collections in Lightroom, and I have a well-developed method for rating my photos. I’ve also been diligent about using captions and keywords to help me locate and organize my photos. Using star ratings I narrowed the first pass down to about 6,500 photos – still a daunting task but somewhat more manageable than 80,000.
I’ve made lists and lists of possible theme titles and have given a lot of thought to what the definitions should be for each theme. Then comes the hard part – going through my photos to figure out which ones fall into which categories and making sure I have enough decent photos to properly fill out a gallery for each one. For someone prone to overthinking and second guessing (me!) that can be especially challenging. For example, one of my potential themes is “Nautica,” which I have defined as “Boats, parts of boats and boat stuff.” In my mind I’m thinking more of the details – ropes, sails, ornamentation, etc. and less about pictures of boats themselves. But what do I do with the boat pictures? Do lighthouses go there or somewhere else? How about cruise ships? Landscape photos that have boats in them? Crab pots or buoys? Of course the answers to all those questions are “it depends” and “they’re my rules, it’s up to me.” Sheesh. A few of my favorites accompany this post.
It’s interesting how many ways there can be to slice and dice photos. A number of them will fall into multiple categories. Do I put some of them in several galleries or decide which one is “best?” Decisions, decisions. This has been an interesting exercise so far. I’m nowhere near the end and it still seems awfully overwhelming, but I hope the results are worth the effort when I’m done. I make no promises for when that might be! 😉
I’ve just finished up processing my photos from our Southwest road trip and from our recent visit to Hilton Head Island, SC. Just in time for our next adventure – we shove off again on Saturday! This will be our annual “Friends and Family Tour” as Kathy likes to call it. Other than our kids, most of what remains of our families is in Ohio or will be there for the Fourth of July. I’ve got a childhood friend who lives in western Pennsylvania, and we have friends in Wisconsin. 😉 So off we go!
I mentioned earlier that I only got up early on two mornings at the beach, but I chose them well. I’ve been going to Hilton Head long enough to know when the tides and times coincide to provide the pools I love to use as foreground. An added bonus is when the clouds cooperate too, as they did for me on both occasions. Sweet!
I found it interesting that, even though the conditions were virtually identical both mornings, the overall color cast was radically different – red the first morning and blue the second. I did minimal (for me) processing on this photos and the colors are pretty faithful albeit a bit more saturated than what I saw. I’m sure the difference in color is due to some sort of atmospherical anomaly, but I only know that it made for some purdy pitchers.
Mornings are a lovely time on the beach. I could go out there without a camera, sit on one of the storage boxes the lifeguards use and watch the morning unfold. When the sunrise is early – around 6:15 – like it was in May and June, there are very few people out – just me, a few birds and sometimes a few dolphins. Most of the people are walking, so even if they walk through my frame, a slow shutter speed makes them blurry and sometimes invisible. There was one guy with a dog that had a light on its collar which was kind of annoying, but he thankfully stayed out of my view!
This is a bit of a photographers-only geek post, so bear with me. 😉
The latest update to Lightroom includes a set of “Premium” develop presets that were reportedly developed by photographers for use in streamlining the develop process. I’ve generally not been a fan of “canned” presets because I kinda have my own preferences and like to maintain control over my processing. But there is value to considering other approaches, and sometimes these presets are worth looking at, if only to get an idea for what is possible.
This morning I decided to take one of my photos from our recent road trip and try out the 10 presets contained in the “Travel” section. The results were pretty interesting so I thought I would share. The nice thing is that – as opposed to some of the previous presets – packaged as “Profiles” these appear to affect color balance and saturation and leave the other settings – noise reduction, sharpening, exposure, etc. – alone. I’ll learn more as I mess with the other ones, but I like the idea of coming up with variations just to see what they look like.
No conclusions here – just for evaluation and discussion. If anyone has comments – on the processing, not the photo 🙂 – I look forward to reading them.
Whenever we travel, one of the dilemmas I consistently face is what and how much camera gear to take with me. Usually I default to my three zoom lenses because they are convenient and cover just about any common focal length without a lot of lens changes. On most occasions I’ll toss my prime lenses into the mix with the best of intentions, but either because I’m lazy or I just want to have the most flexibility, the primes often don’t come out of the bag.
I love my Fuji prime lenses for several reasons. First and probably most important, they give me excellent results – sharp when I want sharp and good bokeh when I want bokeh. They are lightweight and small, so it isn’t hard to carry 2-3 along in a small bag or fanny pack.
But I’ve said for years that the more lenses I have with me the more likely I’ve got the “wrong” one on the camera. So I make a point to putting one lens on the camera and go out and “see” with that one lens. It’s especially useful with my prime lenses, because it really forces me to think about composition and framing, to “zoom with my feet” in order to establish what is in and out of the frame or to give me the relationship I want between near and far objects.
For our recent trip to the beach, I reversed my usual methodology and put the prime lenses into my “every day bag” and put the zoom lenses into my “just in case bag” (I use two bags because I like having a smaller, lighter bag to take on day trips and when walking around and don’t want to carry all my stuff at once). I never took the zoom lenses out, opting instead for using only my prime lenses. To be fair I didn’t shoot a lot (for me) with less than 400 photos over a 2 week period. Most of the time I went out with just one lens on the camera, although at sunrise I went out with all four of my prime lenses, and actually used all of them depending on what I was shooting.
We’re home now for a few weeks, resting up for our next adventure. I’m seriously considering leaving the zoom lenses at home this time, opting for a smaller, lighter kit and keeping things rather simple. We’ll see if I actually have the nerve to do it. I’m betting I will!
When I awoke this morning at 4:50am I knew I was in for another morning on the beach. Sucks, don’t it? 😉 I was greeted by some distant lightning that I wasn’t able to capture adequately, but did get a few more pools reflecting the morning light. A little different from yesterday, but that’s why we go more than once! No promises for tomorrow, but I do have a streak going now. 🙂
Today marks the third anniversary of our retirement. I think we’ve spent our time well and look forward to many more years. We celebrated last night at one of our favorite local restaurants and look forward to a few more days on the beach.
We’ve been at the beach for a week but I hadn’t managed to drag my sorry self out of bed for sunrise – until this morning. I was well rewarded. I’m kind of picky about when I’m willing to get up – tides, weather and sunrise time play a role. I looked at the weather forecast before heading to bed last night and decided it would likely be a good chance for photos. We’ve got some clouds rolling in today with a chance of thunderstorms this afternoon and overnight. Tomorrow might be a good morning too, we’ll have to see if I can motivate myself two mornings in a row. 😉