Hi, I'm Rebecca

[AllsPhoto]

I run a start-up wedding and family photography business and am working on catching up on current digital protocols and techniques now because digital was infancy back when I was in school for photography.

I think the first photograph that got me hooked on photography was one I took back in high school when I first started. I was able to capture a good header picture during a soccer game and thought it was the coolest thing ever that I managed it.

What I love about photography is that it tells stories and gives us a connection to the past, whether our personal past or the historical past. I think both are important, but I think images of our personal or family past provide the deepest connection and serve to tell us the most. I love looking through old pictures of my family, especially from when they were young because it tells me things about them that I might never have known before.

In fact, my favorite picture of all time is one of a friend’s grandmother when she was a teenager. It’s not a professional photograph, yet it was taken with enough skill that it has a good composition and an interesting perspective. She is up walking on a tiny little 2 inch fence-rail as though it were nothing. This is a woman I never met, yet I know that when she was young, she lived in a neighborhood in a town or city, that she had a high fence in her back yard that walked along often enough that she could do it with a big grin and no trace of fear on her face. She was daring. She was fun. She probably worried her parents a lot. I just love that I can have so detailed an idea of a woman I never knew personally, all because of a photograph.

[Tobie]

Welcome @allsphoto. I guess your first priority should not be only to discover the digital world but also to discover your personal digital setup’s pro’s & cons (one thing about the digital world is how much higher you can push your ISO’s without loosing significant detail and quality). Once you know your setup’s strengths & weaknesses you can get the best from it.

So now show us some of your pics…

[AllsPhoto]

Thanks for saying Hi! I picked up on the ISO improvement pretty quick and I’m loving it. My big thing now is figuring out a good workflow in Lightroom and an archiving system suitable for my needs. Any advice is welcome!

Do I upload pics to individual threads or elsewhere?

[Margaret]

DSC_5254.jpg by AllsPhoto on Light Stalking

Hi Rebecca, I am new here as well, so am not sure how it all works. I just wanted to say that I love this photo you uploaded. The girl is gorgeous and I love how you captured her.

[Tobie]

@allsphoto In terms of LR workflow: I keep it simple: –

1. Rename the folder (in the Library view) to identify my shoot, e.g. ‘2014-09-14’ becomes ‘2014-09-14-GrandCanyon’;
2. Back up the whole folder under its new name to an external hard drive after editing my pics;

.
The nice thing about this is that you can now go to Windows Explorer (assuming you’re using Windows) and remove one or more photo’s from your library folder if you’re short of space (usually under ‘Users/Yourname/My Pictures). The LR catalog keeps thumbnails of the removed photo’s with a ‘File not Found’ bar accross the thumbnail. You can check the name of the thumbnail, copy it back from your backed up directory and wha-la – LR automatically refreshes the file and you can edit it!

Someting to keep in mind is that you can copy settings from one photo and paste it into another so for similar scenes you don’t need to repeat it for every photo.

[Albirder]

I strongly recommend you purchase Scott Kelby’s book on Lightroom, if for no other reason than his thoughts on photo organization. I do not rename my file folders. A single day may have very different kinds of images. I use key words to keep track of things. What you must do is put an extension on the name of the photo as it is imported. I use the camera’s file name plus four digits that give the month and year. So for example if my camera identifies the image as 7991, if I brought it in today it would be 10-14-7991. You have to rename or eventually you will get duplicate names. Also, import all files into a single Master file. My Master file is My Lightroom. You want them in one place! Scott Kelby. He’s the man on photo organization.

[Tobie]

@albirder I reckon it’s horses for courses and each of us would apply workflows which fit our needs best. If I want to group my images for a prticular day, I import the photo’s from one group and rename the import folder. Then the same for the next group, etc.

I’ll never consider renaming photo’s – I can not see how that will add any value and where I’d find it useful. Duplicate names will only be a problem when importing into a single master file, which is one of the main reasons I will never consider a single file. I’ll get very frustrated looking for a pic from a set of 20,000 and I have not even properly started my DSLR journey yet!

If I’m looking for a photo I look at its creation date and I go to that day’s library folder(s). Simple.

Having said all of that – I can also recommend Scott Selby’s book series, specially for someone starting his/her photography career. It’s simple, complete and quite affordable.

[AllsPhoto]

Thanks for the heads up on the book! Because I do a lot of family portraiture and have done sessions for the same families multiple times over a couple of years, I find it useful to organize by giving each family their own folder, and then having subfolders for each session that include the season, year and session type. That makes it easy for me to find their images if they ever lose them, and don’t remember the exact date they were taken.

Where I’m having difficulty is in determining what to keep in terms of the RAW files. Do I keep just the JPEGs of just the images I have delivered to them, or do I keep the RAW files for delivered images as well, or do I keep all of the RAW files.

I certainly keep all of the files for a while to make sure I don’t get rid of a particular image a client wants that didn’t make my cut. However, I’m not sure there is much utility in keeping all of the RAW files permanently, but I can see where it might be good to archive the RAW files for the images I deliver.

[Tobie]

I never throw away RAW files (I only shoot in RAW and only convert the ons I want to use immediately to .jpg). You never know when you need one of those you did not originally offer to your client(s), for whatever reason. I use an external hard drive for backing them up.

[Author]

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