PigPog

Nyan Cat from 1988, on Nintendo? Is Nyan Cat older than we thought?

This is a neat idea – a piece of stick-on whiteboard designed to stick to the back of your laptop’s screen. The same thing could be done using the Staedtler Lumocolor Memo Board.

Josh’s experience is interesting to me, as I’m something of a fat bloke myself. One of the most common mistakes people seem to make is to think that it’s all somehow much more complicated than just eating less. His thoughts on protein have inspired me to eat more tuna, and jerky and nuts would be good to try too. Well worth reading if you’re a fat geek like me!

More abandoned stuff, and it’s getting older. A kitchen dating back to the 1830s, found in the basement of a house. Briefly used to shelter from air raids during WW2, then hidden away again.

More abandoned stuff. This time, an old Russian gun-ship – in the watery sense, not a helicopter.

I’m always a sucker for any photos of abandoned and rusty places. Buffalo Central Station, in this case. Nice.

-HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT » http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/09/abandoned-buffalo-central-station/ «

That’s really very muddy. But was there one person in the buggy or two?

:: from biertijd.com » http://biertijd.com/mediaplayer/?itemid=29931 «

Don’t get me wrong. On the whole, I’m pretty happy with Flickr. It does a decent job. But Thomas Hawk got me thinking recently with his enthusiastic (Is Thomas ever anything but enthusiastic?) promotion of 500px. It does a nice job of showing off your photos, but one of the things that’s different about it, at least for now, is the focus on top quality photography.

There’s plenty of top quality photography on Flickr. But there’s also a lot of mediocrity, and quite a lot of complete rubbish. I try not to post too much complete rubbish, but I sometimes do, because I want to show something I saw and just didn’t get a good photo of. Much of the photography I post would come under the heading of ‘mediocre’. Not bad, but not really ‘portfolio’ stuff. I’m happy posting it to Flickr, but would feel bad about uploading it to 500px. It would lower the tone of the site, and I don’t want to do that.

It would be good to have somewhere to point someone who doesn’t already know my photography, to show what I have done. The best pictures I’ve taken. Like a portfolio, rather than introducing someone to my most recent photos, which may happen to be a bit, well, crappy.

It’s certainly good to have somewhere to share the photos I’m taking day-to-day. Some are better than others, but I don’t want to only share the very best. I want to show people the reasonably decent stuff too.

I also sometimes want to share photos that really aren’t very good. I may have spent an hour trying to get a shot of a swift flying past our window, and failed, so I want to share the blurred black shape that was the best shot I managed to get, to tell the story. Maybe there was an interesting bit of street art, and I want to show it, but screwed up the one photo I took. I still want to be able to show these off, but perhaps don’t want people thinking I’m actually happy with this sort of shot.

500px is pretty good for that first category, for showing off those portfolio pieces that you’d want to show anyone while modestly saying “Well, you know, I dabble a little in photography – never really taken anything good. What these old things? Well, that’s very kind of you, but…”

Flickr is good for the second category. It doesn’t show the photos off well enough for the first category, though, and the default view is just your n most recent photos. Sometimes, my last few photos weren’t very good. It has a bit of a work-around for the final category. I’ve seen some people who will post their single best photo from a set as an actual public photo, then post several more as private photos, so other users don’t see them. They then add comments to the public photo, with small versions of the other photos. People can see all the photos if they want to, but the photostream only contains the very best. Neat trick, but only works in some circumstances, and it’s extra work. It also means people you can’t link to many of your photos, and people can’t comment on them.

For the third category, the really rather bad photos, I just upload them with the rest, but I don’t really like to.

The obvious answer would be to use 500px for what it does well, and Flickr for what it does well, and either compromise Flickr with the bad shots, or stick them somewhere else – maybe even leaving them on the hard drive, tale untold. One problem with that is that I’m lazy. I can export a batch of pics to Flickr quite easily. I can upload there directly from my iPhone for pics taken there. Adding another step to send a couple of the best each time to a different site is likely to get put off, and never done. If I also upload them to Flickr, they’ll be in more than one place, which doesn’t feel right to me. If I don’t, then the majority of people, who will only look on Flickr, won’t ever see my best photos.

I think the more practical answer for me is to keep using Flickr, and live with its faults. Maybe something will come along that beats it firmly enough to take over, but the number of users Flickr has causes a lot of momentum. Maybe Flickr will get the work put into it at some point to sort out its problems, and really bring it up to date. Unfortunately, the former is looking more likely than the latter these days.

I recently wrote a post about my photo workflow – how I get photos from my camera to Flickr » [ | : UK, US], etc. I admitted in the post that it was a bit over-complicated for me, and that set me off rethinking it. I now, a week later, do something quite different.

If I was taking pics that I really thought needed more processing, or were going to be used for something special, I’d still go the old route. It has lots of redundancy, and gives the best quality results. I don’t intend to do a wedding again, but if I did, that’s how I’d do it (actually, I took even more precautions that day, but that’s another story). For day-to-day stuff, though, it was taking too much time and effort.

The first thing to reconsider was the quality of the captured data in-camera. I was only ever using RAW images, with the camera set to take RAW along with the lowest quality jpeg. I decided I could make do with just jpegs. The camera is faster that way, and I get lots more images on an SD card » [ | : UK, US]. They copy to the computer quicker, too. I decided to try an experiment. I shot roughly the same pic (of a cuddly zebra called Z9) on each of the three jpeg quality settings, then opened them all up in Aperture, zoomed in 1:1. I couldn’t see a difference. The lowest quality looked just as good as the highest, and was under 800kb rather than over 4Mb. So for most stuff now, I’ll use the lowest quality jpeg setting.

As for copying to my Mac » [ | : UK, US], I won’t create a folder, copy the pics, then import them into Aperture. I now plug in the camera with a cable sitting on my desk ready, run Aperture, turn on the camera, and import the pics directly. It means the pics are stored in the Aperture library, but I’m ok with that. I’m letting go of a bit of control for a lot of convenience and speed. They can be moved out again later if I want to. Also, because there’s no RAW conversion to do, Aperture doesn’t seem to take anywhere near as long to process the images once they’re imported.

I’m also making a bit more use of some Aperture » [ | : UK, US] presets I’ve downloaded from various sources, which gives me some of the fun of quick filter effects that I’m used to in iPhone » [ | : UK, US] apps. Exporting to Flickr still takes a while, but it’s just left to run, and the results do look good.

In the end, I’m paying almost nothing in lost image quality, at least as far as I can see; and I’m gaining a lot of time and ease. I’ve only really tried it once with a real day’s photos, so it might all change again next week, but so far it feels quite liberating.

Update: See Part 2, where this all changes a week later.

This is what I do with my photos, from originally taking the shot with my DSLR (a Nikon D90 » [ | : UK, US], though this pretty much all applies to any camera using memory cards), through copying the files to the computer (iMac » [ | : UK, US]), to importing them into my editing and cataloging software (Apple Aperture » [ | : UK, US], though much of it would probably apply in a similar way to iPhoto, Lightroom » [ | : UK, US] and others). It may not be the best way to do these things, though it works for me. I suspect, if anything, it tends towards a bit too much safety, and puts too much time and energy into doing things the ‘right’ way, making it all too time-consuming. I’m photographing as an amateur, though, and losing a day’s shooting won’t cost me in real cash. It might be too little safety if you’re shooting weddings for money.

I’m not saying anyone should copy all this, but there might be some ideas here if you’re interested in this sort of workflow geek-out.

Camera

I use 8Gb SD cards. They’re big enough to fit all I’m generally likely to shoot in a day, but still fairly cheap. I shelled out a bit more for a reasonably fast branded card this time, though I’m never entirely sure how much difference it makes. Figures from DPReview suggest it’s worth it if you value performance – my D90 can take pics faster with a faster card. I’ve only once ever filled an 8Gb card and had to move on to another, when shooting a wedding. For any normal day or outing, one card is way more than I need, even shooting RAW all the time.

I use a single card, to avoid the inconvenience of having to stop and change. My dad has always preferred to use two or three smaller cards for a day of shooting, so one accident or faulty card can’t lose everything. I’ve never had such a loss, so I don’t worry about it. I’ll probably regret that the first time I do lose a card full of images, but I used to hate having to stop and swap cards around back when cards were low-capacity and expensive.

Reading the Card

My camera mounts as a camera, not a mass storage device, which I don’t like. For that reason, I prefer to take the card out, and use a separate card reader. If the camera mounted like a card reader or USB memory stick, I’d probably just plug it in and use it that way. The card reader I use is the one built into the front of my printer. No reason: it’s just there, and it works ok.

Folder(s) for Images

I have a Photos folder. Inside this, I create a new folder, named for the date, and a very short description of the ‘event’, in the format ‘yyyy-mm-dd ‘. If I took a few pictures whilst wandering around Tiverton today, the folder would be called ’2010-05-07 Photowalk Tiverton’. The dates mean the folders can be sorted easily by when the pics were taken, and the short description means I can have more than one folder per day, if there’s more than one ‘event’. I used to just use the date, but a few occasions came up where I did two very separate shoots, and didn’t like throwing them all in one folder.

Events

Events? I use the term in a similar way to the way iPhoto uses it – any collection of photos taken around the same time. ‘Photowalk Tiverton’ is a pretty common name, as is ‘Canal’. It isn’t usually much of an event. I’m not overly strict on dates. A trip with an overnight stay might still be one event to me, so I’d probably just use the date of the first day.

Why Folders?

I could just import photos straight into Aperture, and let Aperture store them in its library. There are a few of reasons why I don’t.

• Matches older folder structure – this is how I’ve kept images since before I started using Aperture.
• Performance – I can keep the Aperture library on the internal HD, which is faster, while the images are on a slower external USB drive. Aperture’s work is spread over two drives, on different busses, too, which may give some performance gains (I don’t know if it really does). I don’t have room to keep all the photos on my internal drive.
• I can have some of the same images imported into iPhoto. I don’t use iPhoto much now, but have at times. This way, the same images can be in more than one program, without duplicating the images themselves.

If you’re looking at a new setup, have plenty of space on your internal drive, and won’t use other software for the same images, you might want to just push the pics straight into Aperture, and let it handle them. I may yet move the Aperture library to an external drive, and bring the photos in to it, at a later date.

Time Machine (Backups)

Once they’re in the folder, Time Machine handles backing them up. I don’t wait for this, usually, but unless they’re ‘scrap’ images, I don’t wipe the card until I’ve let Time Machine do its thing.

Wiping the Card

Often doesn’t happen until later, or even the next time I use the camera. My D90 can format a card using just two buttons, so I generally format it rather than just deleting the images.

Aperture

I import the images into Aperture, choosing the option to leave the images in their current location. Generally, I try to leave this to finish, then leave Aperture alone for a while afterwards; preferably leaving the Mac pretty much alone, too. Aperture is memory-hungry. Importing takes a while, and Aperture can be busy building thumbnails and previews for quite a while after that. Trying to start working on images before it’s finished can be frustratingly slow. Check the status bar at the bottom of Aperture’s window to see if it’s busy – you can click there to get a window showing you what it’s up to, and how much it has to do.

Tagging and Rating

I’ve been far too lazy recently, and skipped tagging all but the best images. I’ll really regret this later, I know. The best way is to tag all the images with relevant keywords before starting to do anything else. Don’t edit, don’t rate, just add keywords. Doing a lot at once is quicker, as you can usually apply the same keywords to lots of images at once. If you do this, you’ll be able to find images much easier later – rate first, and tag only the best ones, and all the others are pretty much lost for good. In practice, I often only end up tagging the ones I consider good enough to use, which means I’ll have great trouble finding any lower quality shots later.

When I export the images later, the tags I’ve set get carried over, so they’re important for Flickr’s use as well as my own searching in Aperture.

I generally rate anything as ‘reject’ if it’s really bad – out of focus, badly exposed, or just generally bad. I also usually reject all but the best of a ‘set’ of the same image. If I took five shots in a row of the same duck, I pick the best of them, and reject the rest. I then base the stars-out-of-five rating on this rough idea:

1. Competent, or worth keeping for some reason, but not good enough to share. Also, I often give one star to images I’m going to use in a ‘Photo Construction‘ or panorama.
2. Nothing special, but worth sharing – will be uploaded online.
3. Good image.
4. One of my best.
5. One of my very best. Rarely used – I only have eight images with five stars currently in Aperture, though I haven’t gone back and rated all my old images (yet).

Exporting to Share

I switch Aperture to only show two stars and better. It’s easy then to select all, and export them together, creating a new ‘event’ set in Flickr at the same time. I use the Flickr Export plugin for Aperture to do the exporting. For the little it cost, the ‘pro’ version of the plugin has been worthwhile. I believe the current version of Aperture exports to Flickr without needing a plugin, but I bought the plugin for a version that didn’t, so I haven’t really used Aperture’s own exporting feature.

Sometimes, I’ll export a few separately to add to Facebook. I usually do this with any shots containing people who I know on Facebook, or for any establishments/products/etc I ‘like’ on Facebook.

Aperture Vault

At the end of all this (or sometimes before the exports, depending how paranoid I’m feeling), I update the Aperture Vault. This is a backup copy of Aperture’s database held on another drive. There isn’t really any good reason to do this when Time Machine is backing Aperture up. I’ve always done it, though, and when I lost the contents of my internal disk, and Time Machine turned out not to have been working for a while, I was glad I had. So I keep doing it.

Current Usage

I use my D90 much less now than I used to. Most of my photos are now taken with my iPhone, often using Hipstamatic. The main advantage is that it cuts all of the above out of the process. I take a photo, wait a minute for it to process, and if I like it, push it straight up to Flickr. The phone gets backed up when I plug it in to sync. Every so often, I open Aperture while the phone is plugged in, and pull the new images into one big folder in there.

It’s a lot less organisation, less backups, and lower image quality. In return, though, it’s quicker, easier, and more immediate. That counts for a lot.

The Future

Eye-Fi have just announced that their cards will soon be able to connect to an iPhone app, and push photos from a ‘real’ camera to your phone in a few seconds. That would combine the performance, flexibility and image quality of the D90 with much of the speed, convenience and immediacy of the iPhone. It could be a winning combination for most day-to-day photography.