Well, that’s coming to an end.

What you’re about to read is a totally inclusive, top-to-bottom, front-to-back workflow for organizing, sorting, and managing your digital photos using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Similar techniques will, I’m sure, apply to Apple Aperture, though all keyboard shortcuts and terminology will be Lightroom-specific.

For the record, I use Lightroom on a Mac and chose it because of Adobe’s openness to beta testing and feedback from the photography community, which I believe has made Lightroom the best tool for the job. Let’s get to it.

Organizing Files on Disk

First, why? Why organize your files on disk when Lightroom is such an apt cataloging tool? Why add another layer of complexity to your photo import workflow when Lightroom can just “take care of it,” assuring you that each RAW file is placed in a location appropriate to its metadata?

Because that’s totally wrong, that’s why. Lightroom is an amazing cataloging and organizational tool, but what if you couldn’t use it? What if your catalog, and its backup, and the backup’s backup, got destroyed? Or what if your operating system was in some state of utter bedlam, preventing you from opening Lightroom at all? Or what if you brought your external drive full of photos with you on a trip and found out that Lightroom on your laptop wouldn’t work?

Applying at least some moderate level of organization to your physical RAW files will make finding them that much easier if you ever have to do so without the aid of Lightroom. Surely not an eventuality we all hope for, but one that we should nonetheless plan for.

My Method

There are an infinite number of ways to organize your RAW files on disk, but I don’t have an infinite amount of time (and neither do you) so I will only tell you how I do it.

1. My top-level folder is called “Photography,” then
2. Within that folder there are three folders for the main categories of my work, “Events,” “Places,” and “Portraits.”
   1. Events contains folders named for each event and those folders contain the photos.
   2. Portraits contains folders usually of models’ names, and those folders contain photos. If I have done more than one shoot with a model, there are folders by date for those.
   3. Places, however, contains a geographical hierarchy like “United States,” then “California,” then “Death Valley NP,” and
      1. As with portraits, if I’ve been to a location more than once, there are folders by date.

I know that list might be a little bit complicated to absorb, so go ahead and re-read it if you want to. The basic idea is to have your major categories represented as folders on your hard drive such that you can locate, at the very least, the group of photos you’re looking for in the event you can’t use your catalog for it.

Enlisting Lightroom’s Help

You can get Lightroom to help you build this structure. Let me tell you what I would do if I were importing photos from a location shoot that I did in a place I had never photographed before.

1. Open the import dialog and choose the photos I want to import from the thumbnail view.
2. Choose “Copy Photos To A New Location And Add To Catalog.”
3. Browse for the correct geographical folder. I usually use the browse dialog to create the folders I need along the way. For example, I might browse into “Places,” then “United States,” and then I may have to create a folder for “Massachusetts,” and then another within that for “Boston.” There is a “Make New Folder” or “Make Folder” button in the dialog (in Windows and OS X, respectively).
4. In the future, if I already have the state folder created, I may simply select that and check off the box next to “Put in subfolder” and type the city or location name in there. That’s completely up to you.
5. If you want to organize the photos by date within the folder you’ve selected (and this precludes using the “subfolder” option above), select “Organize: By Date” and Lightroom will create a subfolder for each date in your import (by the photo’s created date).

A quick side-note: this is the time to select your metadata preset and choose some basic keywords to apply to all the photos you’re importing. This article isn’t really about keywording, but that won’t stop me from giving you orders: keyword your photos. That is all.

Awesome! Now all of your RAW files are organized in a coherent way on your hard drive. But you still have thousands of new photos that you just imported and unless you’re Ansel Adams they’re not all keepers. Actually, even if you were Ansel Adams, they still wouldn’t all be keepers. So what you need to is treat your catalog like an emergency room.

Treat Your Catalog Like an Emergency Room

What I’m talking about is triage.

tri • age n.

1. The determination of priorities for action in an emergency.
2. Sweeping through your photos and separating the good from the bad.

Obviously the second definition is not exactly Miriam Webster material, but… I reserve the right to exercise my creative liberty.

Anyway, the idea is to prioritize photos by their quality so you can spend more time sorting through the really good ones and less time staring at the really bad ones. Doctors do this in emergency situations to make sure that patients who most need care get it first, to maximize the survival rate. For a doctor, determining priority among patients can be a real challenge, and prioritizing your photos can be tricky, too.

Luckily, Lightroom gives us some very helpful tools that come to our aid in this situation. You probably already know of them. They are:

1. Flags (picks and rejects)
2. Ratings (on a scale from one star to five)
3. Labels (colors)

Any given photo can have a flag (picked or rejected), a rating (one through five stars), and a color label, although all three attributes are optional. By default, a photo has no flag, no rating, and no color label.

With two possible flags, five possible ratings, and five possible color labels, that’s a whopping 50 potential categorizations a photo could fall into (if you use all three attributes)! So how can you best put these attributes to use to streamline your workflow?

I don’t know. But I can tell you how I use them.

My Method

The very high-level outline of my process goes something like this:

1. Eliminate rejects (using the reject flag, “X” on the keyboard)
2. Mark potential keepers (using the pick flag, “P” on the keyboard)
3. Light, experimental development to test the viability of the keepers
4. Un-flag bad picks (if development doesn’t work out; that’s “U” on the keyboard)
5. Complete development
   1. Label completed images ready to go to the gallery in green (green for gallery, get it?)
   2. Label experimental or fun images that will go to Flickr in blue (no mnemonic device for that one, I have a Post-It note on my monitor to remind me)

I then I use either the Export to Photoshelter or Jeffrey’s Export to Flickr plugins within Lightroom to send the images where they need to go.

You may notice that I don’t use star ratings at all. I used to use star ratings to differentiate between images to throw away, edit, or which had been completed, but since the advent of flagging and color labels I find that star ratings provide more specificity than I need. There are only rare occasions when I have a few photos that are very similar where I might use star ratings to indicate which ones I like more, just so I can remember later when I come back to them, but that isn’t part of my everyday workflow.

You’re Done!

You have absorbed my entire workflow and read all of my suggestions for using Lightroom’s sorting and cataloging tools. I hope that this helps you to keep your images in order!

My approach to inspiration is not to chase it; I tend to walk around in a place or idly browse others’ works until the desire to create something strikes. Still, it’s nice to have a “toolbox” of tricks to get you past those creative lulls in life. According to psychologist Jonathan Schooler (no, really, that’s his actual name), daydreaming is one possible answer.

Well, if you know you’re doing it, that is.

From Boston.com (Jonah Lehrer):

“If your mind didn’t wander, then you’d be largely shackled to whatever you are doing right now,” says Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “But instead you can engage in mental time travel and other kinds of simulation. During a daydream, your thoughts are really unbounded.”

And who wouldn’t want to time travel? The key, though, is self-awareness of your wandering mind. The study concluded that people who were able to recognize when they were daydreaming demonstrated more of a predilection to creativity than those who were only able to identify their daydreams after they happened.

When I read this story I began thinking about my own daydreaming habits. I think I can say with certainty that I absolutely know when I’m daydreaming… Because I love it. There’s nothing like taking a little break from reality now and then!

Despite photography’s firm basis in reality—capturing real light reflecting off of real objects—it is in so many ways an escape from reality, and an art form that can benefit from your daydreams just as much as any other.

So the next time you find yourself staring off into the distance and traveling mentally through time and space, don’t pull yourself back down to Earth so quickly.

Via Lifehacker, via Boston.com

In this day and age, you can buy nearly any piece of photographic equipment with a bubble level built into it somewhere. Tripods, ball heads, camera brackets, and even little standalone levels that clip into your hot shoe like the one shown above (made by Hakuba). Do I think these products are clever? Absolutely. Do I recommend purchasing one? Not really.

If you’re building a house, making sure things are level is pretty important. You probably wouldn’t want to walk uphill from your living room to your kitchen, for example. In photography, however, we’re talking about making art, about expressing emotion, about things far divorced from the mechanics of building robust structures for people to live in.

The bubble level started showing up in photography equipment to help people level their images with the precept that keeping your image level is a good thing. I can’t argue with that; if you have a noticeable horizon line in your image and it isn’t wildly and purposefully off-kilter, it should darn well be horizontal. If it is wildly and purposefully off-kilter, you don’t really need a bubble level to do that.

There are three reasons I believe these bubble levels are useless:

1. Bubble levels integrated into tripods are fundamentally worthless because they only tell you if your tripod is level, and unless you have your camera screwed directly onto your tripod (please, please answer “no” to that), it doesn’t do you much good. A tripod can be very steady and secure without being level.
2. A bubble level on your camera does not guarantee that it is level with the surface of the ground (read: what you see), but rather that it is level gravitationally, which may be different. If you are shooting a horizon line that is actually a subtle hill or other topographical feature, the bubble level may actually make your image appear not to be level.
3. Fundamentally, your final image may appear to be level or not level based on features of the composition, including hills, vertical elements such as trees or man-made structures, and so forth. A bubble level isn’t savvy to composition.

Basically, bubble levels only help you if you’re shooting a water horizon, which positively must be gravitationally level because it’s water, or if you’re shooting a scene where gravitationally level is exactly what you want regardless of any other topographical features, such as wide angles of mountain ranges, deserts, and so on.

For my money, I’d rather adjust the frame by eye than buy a doohickey to do it for me and hope that my situation lends itself to the device’s abilities.

Okay, so, how do you level the frame without a bubble level? Here are a couple of tricks I use:

1. Use your autofocus points. If it’s daytime and you can see your autofocus points, align them with elements in the scene to make sure they’re level. the AF points in your viewfinder are guaranteed to be level with respect to the frame, so it gives you a visual hand-hold for lining up horizons and buildings and everything else.
2. Squint. Seriously. One of the more important habits I’ve picked up over the years is to take stock of the entire frame as a composition, which can be hard to do when your face is pressed up against the camera and you have one eye closed and you’re possibly contorting yourself to lean over to where your tripod is perched. If there is a horizon and a tree that should appear to be horizontal and vertical, respectively, pay careful attention to how they appear to be oriented within the frame as a whole rather than how the horizon or the tree line up with AF points or edges of the frame on their own.
3. Fix it in post-processing. I know, that sounds like a cop out, but it’s your last line of defense. If you’re going to be editing all of your photos anyway (as I’m sure you do), it’s a better investment to tweak the horizon a little in Lightroom than to buy a bubble level and wind up having to tweak it in Lightroom anyway since the horizon wasn’t gravitationally level in the first place.

At the end of the day, having one of those little gizmos is probably a net benefit if you know when to use it and when not to use it. But for my money, I’d rather concern myself with the aesthetics of the composition as it appears through the viewfinder than whether or not my camera is gravitationally level or not.

Edit! I ran into a very congenial gentleman here in the Great Smoky Mountains who was on leave from the Army, preparing for his third tour in Iraq, camping and photographing in the park. He was shooting some panoramas with his D200 and told me that a hot shoe bubble level is essential in that case. Now, I could probably go out on a limb and argue against that point, but instead I will concede that shooting panoramas sounds like a pretty good reason to use a bubble level. One of the few.

I am very excited to announce a photography workshop in Death Valley National Park, California, hosted by Christopher Blake and Aaron Bieber (that’s me!), to take place in April of 2008.

This will be a thrilling four-day workshop in Death Valley open to photographers of all skill levels. We’ll spend four days and nights making photographs from before sunrise until well into the night. Aaron and Chris will serve as your guides to aesthetic approach and technical application as you explore some of these breathtaking Death Valley locations:

• Badwater
• Artist’s Palette
• Dante’s View
• Stovepipe Well Dunes
• Eureka Dunes
• Golden Canyon
• Devil’s Golf Course
• The Alabama Hills
• and more!

There will be a strong focus on night photography including work with light painting and star trails. This workshop is designed to coincide with the new moon, giving us nights filled with stars. If you have never done photography at night before, or if you want to get better at it, this is the right workshop for you. Between the two of us we have 12 years of experience making wonderful images at night.

This workshop gives you the opportunity to photograph a famous and unique location with two professional photographers who will help you get the most out of every hour and out of every exposure.

Who should attend this workshop?

Anyone who wants to advance their photography skills and get the absolute most out of a trip to Death Valley. In a limited amount of time we’ll bring you to the best locations at the best times and work with you both in the field and in front of the computer to help you get great results.

Itinerary

Here’s the plan.

Friday April 4th

$image:right/Places/DeathValley/Tendrils.jpg$

We will meet in the afternoon (you’ll be emailed the exact time and place to meet at least two weeks prior to the workshop). Each participant will receive a workshop package including information and equipment (listed below). We will then have introductions, get to know one another, and get a feel for what each of you hope to accomplish during the workshop. We will set out in the early evening to photograph sunset and then do an introduction to night photography.

Saturday April 5th – Monday April 7th

Each day of the workshop will be broken up into three sessions, described here:

Session 1 – Dawn

We’ll meet in an agreed upon location and set out to photograph dawn, then return to the inn for breakfast.

Session 2 – Late morning

After breakfast we’ll get together to review the work we’ve done so far, go over any questions, and plan shooting locations for the remainder of the day. Participants who shoot digital and have a laptop with them are welcome to share their work with the group. Chris and Aaron will be available to do one-on-one critiques and offer guidance.

There are a few locations that can be effective during morning and afternoon sun, such as Golden Canyon, so we may opt to explore one of those locations together during the day. If you wish to explore on your own, you are welcome to.

Session 3 – Sunset

$image:right/Places/DeathValley/SilverOrb.jpg.html$

We will travel to our chosen location to photograph sunset. After night falls, we will commence night photography sessions. It is not unusual for the ambitious in the group to photograph well into the night.

Note: Some of you may not want to join us for the next sunrise session. You can meet us at breakfast, normally around 9-9:30 AM.

Since the conditions in Death Valley change from day to day, it’s impossible to predict the perfect location for each session. Both Chris and Aaron have a good deal of experience with Death Valley and will plan our locations to best fit the changing conditions. Our first priority is making great photographs, no matter what the circumstances.

Though we will be photographing locations as a group, each will offer the opportunity to spread out across a large area. Two-way radios can come in handy, so we’re going to give you one. It’s an effective method for the group to communicate across distances of a mile or more, and we’ll also use the radios to communicate between vehicles while traveling to each location.

Registration

The cost of this once-in-a-lifetime experience is only $1,199 and is open to photographers of all skill levels. To register, please send us an email. We accept all major credit cards as well as personal checks. After you contact us, we’ll mail you our registration package. Workshops are filled on a first-come first-served basis, so don’t miss out!

Workshop fees are refundable up to 60 days before the workshop, less 10% for processing fees. Within 60 days of the workshop a refund is not possible.

Please feel free to e-mail us with any questions.

This workshop will have a maximum of ten participants. Sorry, but no guests are permitted to tag along. We find that the group is most focused and productive when we are all actively photographing, and we don’t want to dilute the experience for any of our attendees.

Important Notes

• This is not an all-inclusive trip and as such does not include transportation, food, or lodging. Your registration package will contain a thorough list of available hotels and campgrounds as well as our advice on staying in Death Valley.
• Though meal cost is not included, we’ll eat at the same time each day and you may wish to join us, or feel free to go out on your own during this time.
• Your registration package will also include detailed information on the trip as well as a very basic questionnaire that we use to tailor the workshop for you.
• We will not be taking any long hikes, but some hiking will be required. This is not a stressful amount of exercise by any means, but you should be in decent physical shape and able to navigate the irregular desert terrain.

Gear

You’ll need some things on this trip…

What you should bring

$image:right/Places/DeathValley/DevilsLandscape.jpg.html$

Although this workshop is open to all skill levels, you should have at least a 35mm SLR (digital or film) camera and a tripod. You should also have a basic understanding of how your camera works. We would be glad to help you get the most out of your equipment while on the workshop, but it won’t be a fundamental course, so be sure you are familiar with the basics.

If you want to brush up or review, you may want to read these articles (posted here):

• Histograms, Huh?
• Be a Control Freak—Shooting Modes Explained
• Focal Length Reciprocal Rule

And also these assorted articles from Earthbound Light Photography:

• I Bought a Digital Camera But My Photos Are Still Blurry
• Program vs. Aperture Priority vs. Shutter Priority vs. Manual

If you are interested in advice on what to bring (or what to buy), you can email Chris. He has a lot of equipment experience and would be happy to share it with you.

The weather in Death Valley can go from very warm to very cold. You should pack accordingly, keeping in mind that in windy conditions before dawn and after the sun goes down it can feel very cold.

What we will give you

As part of the workshop experience, we will provide you with a few essential items that we have found to be indispensable on these trips. The Death Valley Workshop package includes a GMRS (family band) two-way radio with several-mile range; a bright xenon flashlight for light painting and general navigation; a rugged, waterproof National Geographic map of the park that we will refer to often; and lots of information about the art and science of photographing on location and specifically in Death Valley. All of these items are, of course, yours to keep.

Who are you?

Here’s a little about us and why you’re going to love to learn and explore with us in Death Valley.

Christopher Blake

I am a fine art travel photographer living in the Boston area. I have worked exclusively with digital cameras for the past six years, focusing on traditional fine art landscapes, HDR (high dynamic range), and night photography. I have an extensive background in information technology and I leverage that knowledge to get the most out of my photographs. I am excited to share my experience in travel photography with you in Death Valley!

View Chris’s gallery, The Curious Lens.

Aaron Bieber

I am an illustrator, photographer, web and graphic designer living and working on the scenic Connecticut coast (I am also the author of this blog). Though I have been very serious about photography for many years, I come from a traditional art background and I have written at length on the topics of photography as an art form and the techniques and practices unique to photography as a medium for artistic expression. My main interests in photography are geometric abstractions and exploring the invisible world as can only be seen through the lens of a camera.

With over ten years of Photoshop experience and as an outspoken fan of Photoshop Lightroom, I do my best work in post-production. I look forward to helping you make the most of a very unique experience during this workshop!

View Aaron’s gallery, Fisheye Multimedia Galleries

Ready to Register?

Just send an e-mail to Death Valley Workshop registration and let us know!

There are three major ways to grow as an artist; to strengthen your aesthetic senses and the quality of your work:

1. Emulate the work of artists you admire,
2. Experiment on your own, exploring the subject matter that interests you, and
3. Participate in critique

Emulation is very common, especially when getting started in art, and exploring subject matter of interest to you essentially describes doing art, so I’m sure you do that already. Critique, however, is where many artists are weakest.

Participating in critique means two things: evaluating the work of others and considering others’ evaluations of your work.

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For the most part, valuable critique will be given to you by people at or above your level of artistic accomplishment. The reason I say this is because people at different levels of accomplishment may express their ideas in different ways, and the closer someone is to your level of accomplishment, the better you’ll be able to understand where they’re coming from.

Participating in critique necessitates the use of some artistic vocabulary. Critique is only useful if it can be understood, so being able to express yourself in artistic terms is an important skill for growing your abilities. A great resource for expanding your artistic vocabulary is the very thorough ArtLex Art Dictionary. There you will learn that color, for example, can be described as “saturated, clear, cool, warm, deep, subdued, grayed, tawny, mat, glossy, monochrome, multicolored, particolored, variegated, or polychromed.” Knowing what these kinds of words mean will help you to be much more expressive in your critiques.

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In photography specifically, there is no better site than PhotoSIG for participating in critique. PhotoSIG’s critique system is built in such a way that it encourages thoughtful feedback and rewards posts that the artist finds helpful. On top of that, the community is very large so nearly all work receives decent exposure, and there is a whole lot of talent to tap into. I highly recommend signing up for a free account and critiquing some photographs there.

You can read some critiques that I’ve written on PhotoSIG by visiting my photo critiques page

Flickr has a nice comment system built into it, but because it isn’t geared toward formal critique, it isn’t quite as effective at generating thoughtful, useful feedback. The best places on Flickr to solicit critique are the various “groups” created by certain photography groups and geared toward artistic growth in particular. Naturally, the Strobist.com Flickr group is a good place to start, though Strobist deals chiefly with off-camera flash images, so don’t try to get feedback on your landscape work there.

There are a few Flickr groups specifically for sharing critique, among them Photography Critique, The Photo Critique Forum, and Critique. I didn’t spend much time reading through them, but they each have hundreds of members, and hey, it’s free.

Happy critiquing!