I've made some advances in my photographic workflow! If you're not interested in reading about that, you can probably skip to the picture. *grins*
I've been shooting with two bodies; my Canon 30D and the Pentax K100 that I inherited from my grandfather. I keep my 10-22 on the Canon and an 18-250 on the Pentax, which is a surprisingly good lens for one with that kind of zoom range.
Anyway, a problem I've had is that once I put all the photos together into a folder, it's hard to go through them in chronological order. Irfanview, my quick-and-dirty editor, goes through the directory by name, so it does all of the shots from one body first, then the other.
Working at the archives, I had a need to do bulk renaming of files. I came upon a freeware tool called, appropriately enough, Bulk Rename Utility. The UI took a little getting used to, but I picked it up soon enough and have made good use of it for scans of plat books. Looking at it more recently, I noted that it can insert time and date into files names. Ah-ha!
Early on my trip with Posi, I remembered to synchronize the clocks on both of my cameras. In the evenings, I transferred all the files to my laptop and used Bulk Rename Utility to insert the hour, minute, and second of creation as a prefix in the file name. That done, I resorted them, and my mission was accomplished. I could now easily browse through pictures from multiple sources in chronological order. This helps a lot both in making sense of the images at a later date and time, and in the weeding process. I'm now doing this for all the events I shoot, like the Ginza Festival I've been posting images from.
----
Another bit of process I've picked up comes from working at the archives and thinking about my pictures from the viewpoint of curation. In an archive, you can't curate every collection down to the item level. There just isn't time. Likewise, my prior workflow for posting images online is not manageable. I can't put individual tags and descriptions on every image I post. This is part of what leads to me having many thousands of backlogged images.
At Ginza, I photographed a few different groups on stage. With each group, I did a rough-cut of images, which dropped about 9 out of 10 of them. With a few, I did a second pass, culling more of them out. Then I edited, occasionally dropping a few more photos that just didn't seem to come out right. Then, I posted each group as a separate unit that all got the same description, title, and tags. I'm really not losing much by not, for instance, tagging 'flute' on images of a flautist and 'drum' on images of a drummer. And the process is so much faster. When a typical road trip leads to many hundreds, if not thousands, of photos, any workflow changes that save time add up really fast!
Could the next step be to focus on taking fewer and better pictures? I still feel like that's something that will develop naturally over time. Though given how many photos I still take, maybe that's not so much the case....
I'm realizing just how much I like to have firm control over an array of aspects of my life. I think that realization may be helpful in finding places where it's okay to relinquish some of that control as well.
---
Anyway, here's the Midwest Buddhist Temple Taiko Group!
Copyright Stormdog 2013
( More photos behind the cut. All photos copyright Stormdog 2013 )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
