This week’s travel photography article is about not getting overwhelmed of taking care of thousands of images you have shot with your digital camera.
As always, the Travel Photography article has two sections. The first part is about keeping the photographs organized, such that you can easily access what you are looking for. The second part contains an image review. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
ORGANIZING IMAGES
Organizing photos was never a big deal in the days of film. You would shoot just a handful of pictures in a whole year. And when a film roll is complete, give it to a neighbourhood studio which would process it, print it and put it in an album for you. Nothing else needed to be done. Since the time the world has gone digital, we have been shooting so much that there is a deluge of photographs churned out from the camera. An active photographer may end up shooting tens of thousands of images in a year. Managing them becomes a big a job. Here is how I try to keep my photographs organized.
Delete Unwanted Photographs. This is something we always postpone. Very often, more than half the pictures we shoot are junk. There will be images that are shaken, blown out, completely dark, undecipherable pictures, or things that you don’t intend to keep ever but have shot for the heck of taking a picture. When we save it to the computer, they all get stored along with the good ones until the day comes we start complaining about lack of space in the hard drive.
When you know that you have unwanted images, delete as many pictures as possible in the camera itself. Quickly go through the photos after you download them, and again delete anything you don’t require. It leaves a lot less number of images to manage.
Organize them in folders. It is important to put the photographs in some order. If you download images to desktop or to a temporary folder and hope to put them together sometime later, it is never likely to happen. You will move it out of desktop to some other unknown place, and eventually forget about the location. After some time, you have a dozen different places where your photos are stored. It will only result in having to search hard later when you need those images.
I use the hierarchy of folders to store my photographs, as shown in the picture below.
- Level 1 and 2. Since the volume of pictures I shoot is high, I have partitioned the hard disk and have dedicated a drive only for storing images (The drive ‘Images (F:)’ in the picture). If you are just getting started with a new computer and expecting to store a lot of images, it would be a good idea to dedicate a drive for pictures (plus perhaps videos). If not, you could simply create a folder where all the images are stored (folder ‘digital images’).
- Level 3 and 4. Located under ‘digital images’ folder are all my photographs. I further divide the photos into folders based on locations or events. In the picture above, the folders ‘Bangalore’, ‘Coorg’ and ‘Ladakh’ fall into this category. It could also be events, such as ‘marriage in family’, ‘Ugadi celebrations’, etc. If I have too many images from a location such as Bangalore or Ladakh, I divide them further into subcategories such as ‘City by Night’ under Bangalore, or ‘Leh’ under ‘Ladakh’.
- Leve 5. I don’t store the images directly under the category of locations or events. It can very much happen that I return the same location again and again. As you can see in the picture above, I have made two visits to Coorg. It is likely that the first set of pictures are entirely different from second – I would have experienced and shot different things, and would have gone with different people. So I prefer to keep images from each visit apart.
- Level 6 and 7. Under the date folder is where my RAW images go for the given location. Within the date folder, you see another folder called ‘processed’. This is where all the processed jpeg images get stored. If you don’t shoot raw or don’t process your images, you can do without this additional level.
- Level 8. Here, I store small size images for posting on the web. From the ‘processed’ folder, I downsize the photos to smaller sizes such as 640×480, 500×375, etc. They often get re-used for uploading in various websites (such as paintedstork.com, flickr, facebook, etc), so I keep them at one place instead of discarding them after uploading.
With this arrangement, it is easy for me to find any picture that I am looking for. If I need an image from my 2006 visit to Coorg, I know exactly where to find it. Instead of fumbling through haphazardly located folders all over the computer, I usually know where is the image that I am looking for, and manage to get hold of it in less than a minute.
Tagging and Rating. This would be useful for people who have hundreds of thousands of images and find it hard to manage even with organized folders. Software like Picasa (and many other such solutions) discover all the images in your computer and let you keyword them and rate them. It may help you get hold of the precise image you are looking for in no time. The only problem is, it also takes some some additional time and effort, which would be worth it only if you have very large volumes of pictures.
Backing Up. Backing up the photos is a wise thing to do if you value your photographs. It insures your photos against possible computer crash, virus attack, physical damage and theft. I use an external hard-drive to keep a copy of all my photographs, and synchronize them once a month or so. You can also opt to burn photos into DVDs and stack them away.
IMAGE REVIEW
The image below is posted for review by flickr user mridula
It is a photography that easily makes me envious, and makes me want to be there. The location looks great and the rainbow is beautiful. The framing of the rainbow, with a fading mountain in the background and the tent in the middle gives a clear idea of being out somewhere in a remote location on a nice day. The pictures would have looked much better if the tent was kept erected. A few more combinations or framing ideas could enhance the picture: it could be a lone tree or a big rock in the foreground, or someone standing/sitting at the edge and staring at the rainbow. There is sensor dust popping up in many parts of the frame. The camera sensor can do with cleaning, but the dust in this picture can be removed using photoshop.
If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images, post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography and tag them as itpcritique. Only tagged images are taken for reviewing. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
The weekly travel photography section is back again, after a short two-week gap. Read all earlier articles in the series here.
As always, the Travel Photography article has two sections. The first part of today’s article is about protecting your camera in the monsoon season. The second part contains an image review. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
In my earlier post on Photographing The Monsoon, Shrinidhi left a comment saying, “pls add some tips on how to protect the camera in rainy season- My fear that camera may get damaged due to water entry forces me not to take out the camera if it is likely to rain.” I would have liked to treat it as a Q&A at the end of an article, but the topic was worth a separate post in itself. Here it goes.
PROTECTING YOUR CAMERA FROM RAIN
Fungus. One of the biggest problem that haunts camera lenses is not caused by the rain itself, but the damp weather. If you keep the cameras and lenses packed away in the closet and wait for the monsoon season to end, you may be surprised to see fungus growing inside the lens. Fungus in the lenses is usually a grey fibrous material that slowly spreads in the inner surface of the lens. It grows in moist weather when the lens is stored for prolonged duration without exposure to light. The simple solution to keep fungus away is to keep using the camera often, instead of tucking it away in a closet during the monsoons.
If you do happen to notice fungus growing in the lens, do not panic. A little bit of it doesn’t make a significant difference to image quality. If you explore the lens to light frequently, the growth of existing fungus will be stunted. If it hasn’t spread too much, fungus may even shrink a bit on continuous exposure to light. But if there is a lot of fungus on the lens surface, it may be time to take the lens to a service center.
Using camera in the rains. I would not go ahead and ask you to expose your cameras freely to the rain, but at the same time, there isn’t a need to worry too much about precipitation. Most cameras are robust enough to let you shoot for a short while in a drizzle. But when you do that, ensure that you wipe the camera free of all the raindrops when you are done shooting. Do not let the water droplets linger on the surface. Don’t stay in the rain for long enough to get the camera completely wet. If you do, water could seep deeper into the body. Avoid exposing the camera in heavy rains. In case you get into a situation where the camera is accidentally prolonged to rains for a long time (or has fallen into water), remove the battery immediately and leave the camera for drying in a warm place. If you are lucky, your camera may function properly again.
Plastic bags. If you are going for long walks or treks in rainy days and intend to carry the camera with you, wrap it in multiple layers of plastic bags, or in a ziplock bag. It can keep your camera safe even if you are getting yourself wet in the rain. That way, when you reach a beautiful location and if the rains have subsided, your camera is dry and ready to work for you.
IMAGE REVIEW
The image below is posted for review by flickr user Guzman Sanchez
I am struggling to find areas for improvement in this image. There aren’t many I can think of. The positioning of the performer at the right side corner, with smoke moving towards the left works very well in the photograph. Despite being shot at a very low shutter speed(1/5 sec), the image seems to be sharp. The blurred hands are effective in showing motion. The streak of smoke on the top adds well to the image too. The image conveys the overall atmosphere very effectively.
This week’s Travel Photography article is written by Anoop. Anoop blogs about his experiments in photography on Me and My Camera Obscura. I am a fan of his images of birds in action in Mysore’s Karanji Kere. Today’s article is about a filter commonly used along with SLR cameras – Circular Polarizer. Circular Polarizers can help enhance outdoor images taken in sunny days and are also useful in eliminating reflections.
As always, the second part of this article has weekly image reviews. If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images and post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography. Don’t forget to tag them as itpcritique, so they can be chosen for review. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post, or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.
CIRCULAR POLARIZER by Anoop
‘Circular Polarizer is a must for daylight outdoor photography’ – this is probably the only line I would write if I had to write just one line about them!
Circular Polarizers are filters mainly used in photographic situations involving reflections. These filters consist of two rings. The inner ring screws on to the front thread of a lens and the outer ring is freely rotatable.
Though I have my circular polarizer always screwed onto my 18-55mm lens, there are circumstances where I have had to use my camera without them. In such cases the thumb rule I follow is ‘If there is enough light for shooting photos without bothering about camera shake, leave the polarizer on the lens.’
Photo taken at Central Park New York City
Both the above photos are taken with a Circular Polarizer on, and are good examples for the two different extremes of polarization. The only change between the two images is the alignment of the circular polarizer.
The photo on the left almost completely eliminates reflections from the horizontal plane (water). Here we can see the increase in contrast of the water lilies, but on the other hand we can observe that the sky is captured as it really appears.
The photo on the right does exactly the opposite, the reflections are left alone and the direct light from the sky is filtered as a result of which we can see a bluer sky.
Both the photos above are taken with the same camera settings and with the Polarizer mounted; the difference was just in the alignment of the filter’s outer ring. Rotating the outer ring controls the plane of polarization and lets in the light selectively.
Mounting the polarizer normally increases the contrast of the photographed object, as it almost always eliminate some percentage of reflections and reduces glare, and hence bringing out true colors of the object. Being so used to shooting with the polarizer on, I would consider it a sacrilege shooting in following conditions.
- photos having a lot of sky
- photos having reflections of water
- bright outdoor photography
There is one limitation I have encountered frequently while using a Polarizer – the Polarizer does reduce the amount of light coming into through the lens. While this is a hindrance in low light scenarios, it’s not a hassle for daylight outdoor photography.
Note from Arun. If you can see the example images, there is some compromise in either of the pictures. While the first one has a dull sky, the second one lacks the contrast and rich colors of the leaves on the water. Circular Polarizer has definitely helped get the best of the situation. But it can be further improved, if one can devote time and has patience to wait for a day with better lighting. Shooting in the morning or evening on a day when the sky is naturally blue would give the best result without any compromises. Patience has a lot of value in photography!
IMAGE REVIEW
The image below is posted for review by LeFlic17
Technically, I can’t find much fault in this image. The image is sharp and in focus. It is exposed properly, and eyes are not in shade as it often happens in outdoor images. It is framed well too, emphasizing the face properly and not having any distractions. But it seems more like a posed shot to me, void of any natural expressions. The man appears conscious of him being photographed. His face is stiff and has lost all the candidness. The picture would have had a lot more life, if some time was given to get him used to the camera, or if the image was made without keeping him aware. For more about this, read the earlier article in the travel photography series: dilemma of asking permission before taking pictures of people.
If you would like to have your images reviewed to know what worked well and how it could have been improved, choose some of your best images, post them on group pool of India Travel and Photography and tag them as itpcritique. Only tagged images are taken for reviewing. You can also post your questions related to photography as a comment to this post or in India Travel and Photography group discussion. I will answer them in next week’s article.