Professional Resources for Photographers

For those who shoot in RAW mode, you will want to utilize a program such as Lightroom or Apple Aperture to ensure that you can catalog your images. There are other amazing apps out there like Bridge, Capture One and or Photo Mechanic to name a few but the global favorite is Lightroom. Any program that enables cataloging and, more importantly utilize the “meta tag” feature is okay in my book. You know the saying, “different strokes for different folks”.

Meta tags essentially add text data to each of your images. Say you took a trip to Alaska. You can batch tag all the images from that trip using special keywords from which you can search upon later. Typical keywords I would use would be : Alaska, Vacation, Landscape, and so on. If I took pictures of moose, bear or waterfalls then I would tag those appropriately. You may think that this is a very cumbersome process but there is a handy “batch” feature that enables you to type something once and then it applies to all your selected images; A VERY handy feature.

Now I do a lot of speaking engagements and workshops so I need to have all my images at my finger tips. If I am doing a speech or article on off-camera lighting for example then I can do a quick search and all images that I tagged as such and they will all show up for me. That really makes it easy for me to compile some favorite images that I can use for my workshop. For those who focus more on shooting, I cannot imagine having a lifetime of work that gets lost on a hard drive. For that reason alone, I cannot think of any better way than to catalog your work so that you can access your images when needed.
If you would like to see all your vacation photos then all you have to do is type “vacation” and they will appear. To be more specific you can type “Alaska” Now this only really works if you have one uber-catalog and then a bunch of sub-folders containing each day’s shoot.

For those who have a photography business, I would also suggest tagging your client’s names and photo shoot date as well. This makes things really handy if you ever need to access them.
Another awesome feature that these apps have is rating your images. You can flag images as well as give them a star rating (typically 0 to 5 stars). In my case, I tend to flag images that are my oh la la shots and are ones that I will most likely find myself displaying on my blog, website and so on. If I have client images from a portrait session or wedding then I give the images a star rating. My rating is really based upon keepers or tossers so all I need to do is give my images zero or one star. Now It isn’t uncommon for me to shoot over 15gb of images during a wedding so those zero star images that will NEVER get used are just taking up space on my hard drive. These crappy images can add up over a year or more so I make sure to delete these images after a 6 month grace period. To do this, all I do is search a particular sub-folder in my main catalog and do a global delete to the images that have zero stars and “poof” all gone.

That about does it for today’s tip. Enjoy and be inLIGHTin’ed.

Hello fellow inLIGHTin’ed Ones!

Long time no see. How has everyone been lately?

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am always thinking and brainstorming… For example, I should be editing a wedding right now. Instead, I have finally came up with where I want to direct my inLIGHTin Workshops. Before I get going, these are all good things! I am in no way, shape or form stopping these workshops so you can let out that sigh of relief now haha ;P

Now in my head I always seen a ‘loop-hole’ in my workshops so to speak… I basically held up a sign that said, “come to me if you want to know anything and everything about photography…” That was ideally what my one-on-one workshops did. You came to me with what you wanted to learn and I taught it. However, in my 5 year plan, I planned on doing more speaking engagements, group workshops and team learning (both locally and on a national level)… How can I get to that point when I only affect one photographer at a time? Also, do I want to be known as the guy who is like the Bob Villa of photography or do I want to be known for being an expert in my strengths and passions? Why give you an overall general knowledge base of things when I can hone into the nitty gritty and provide you with more concentrated content. These are the questions that I have been racking my brain on and here is my answer!

I have a new direction for the inLIGHTin Workshops which will be effective immediately:
All future inLIGHTin Workshops will be conducted in a group environment and the topics of these workshops are now divided into four categories: Lighting, Post-Processing/Workflow, Photography 101 and Nature/Landscape Photography. These are the disciplines that I am most passionate about and love to teach. My lighting workshops cater to my passion for portrait photography. The nature/landscape workshops combine my love for traveling, sight seeing and fine art landscapes. Post-processing and workflow lets out the inner geek in myself and the photography 101 courses will be my way of giving back to the industry. We all started off somewhere so these Photography 101 workshops will get my students more comfortable with their cameras and hopefully help them to acquire a new found love and passion for photography.

Take a look at the following link for more information on what these workshops entail: http://www.inlightinworkshop.com/about/

I will most definitely still offer one-on-one workshops but they will come at a premium and on a more limited basis. Please contact me at Mike(at)inLIGHTinWorkshop dot com for more information.

I also hope to start taping these workshops and am looking to partner up with a videographer to help this vision become a reality. If you miss the workshop then you can always have access to it via these videos.

All in all, I have big, big plans for The inLIGHTin Workshop and I thank you for being on-board! If you are interested in hosting an inLIGHTin Workshop in your neck of the woods then please email me at Mike(at)inLIGHTinWorkshop dot com .

These workshops have always and will still be 110% about YOU. Therefore, I would love to hear your thoughts and comments so please comment on the blog below and let me know your feedback.

Thanks for reading and for all your support!
Michael

I have a video talking about the benefits of Lightroom’s Develop Presets. They are helpful to anyone’s workflow whether you use mine or even just make your own. Check it out:

You can pick them up over at the inLIGHTin’ed Storefront: HERE

Or you can try a couple out in the Freebies section: HERE

Wow, day two and I am sticking to my guns about daily blog posts… Not bad.

Today’s Workflow Wednesday post is a YouTube video that I did to inform you all about batch processing. Batch processing can be done with various photo editing programs, from Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw or even Capture One and so on. The list goes on and on. Heck even photoshop has an Automate feature that will batch process an action for every photo that you selected.

So why batch process? What is batch processing even? Batch processing is a real perk and time saving tool. After all, we are calling this workflow and not work-slow… Right? So you just shot a wedding in RAW. You have like 1,500 or more images to go through and edit. Aw man, your white balance was off for a ton of these… Maybe you even under exposed every single shot by half a stop. Batch processing allows you to select one file that is messed up and ten you go ahead and do the necessary edits to pretty up the photo. From there, you can select as many of the other images that are equally messed up and Sync them all so they can have the same settings across the board. That means you could have just potentially have edited 1,500 images in seconds! Wow! Now you still should batch process your images with something if you shoot RAW… Why is that? Well, RAW files do not contain any of the in-camera settings (like sharpness, contrast, saturation and so on) like an equivalent JPEG does. RAW basically gives you a blank canvas where you have to pretty up the file and give the file some pizazz. Usually, this just means some contrast and sharpening. Once you get the feel for what you like in your files, you can just edit one and batch process the other ones so they are all on the same page. OR you could even create a Lightroom Develop Preset and save all the edits that you find yourself doing time and time again. Instead of memorizing everything you do time and time again, you assign them to a Preset and whola… It is right there for you whenever you need it. Making your own Lightroom Presets will be a good topic down the road don’t you think?

So without further ado, here is the video on batch processing in Lightroom:

Mind you, most all other RAW conversion software also have this feature. Just crack open the manual and find out exactly how it is done with your desired RAW converting software.

I was introduced to photography in High School, around 1997. Immediately fell in love with it. I rolled my own film, worked in the darkroom and did all that fun stuff. I made the switch to digital around late 2001 and that really appealed to me as well. I was majoring in computer science so digital made the inner-geek in me absolutely ecstatic. I have learned A LOT through these 12 or so years of being a photographer. There are so many things that, for lack of a better word, were revelations. I mean these things could have made my photos so much better, cut my workflow in half or even could have just made things so much easier. Want me to share my top 5 with you?

Haha I thought you would never ask…

1.) Your Light Meter Measures Everything as 18% Gray: I was fooled for the longest time on this one. I have no idea why I never read it anywhere or figured it out on my own. This was a huge “A-Ha” moment for me. Handheld and in-camera camera light meters are made to read 18% gray at the center. I always thought that the center line in the camera’s viewfinder was the perfect exposure but that isn’t the case. The result was me always tweaking my photos plus or minus a stop or so. If I photographed something that was bright then my photos would be under exposed and vice versa for dark scenes. So I figured out that 18% gray is meant to be the middle ground and it is up to the photographer to take that data and make good use of it. So a bride in a white dress along a white wall needs MORE light to turn that middle gray into about +1 eV on the light meter. If you have a groom in a black tux along a black wall then you need to let LESS light in so that light meter better be about -1 eV.

Digital is a beautiful thing so you can enable highlight warnings in camera and see if you are overexposing any part of the scene. If you see those “blinkies” all over your subject then that should tell you to calm your exposure down a bit…

2.) Lenses Matter: I didn’t invest into good glass until about 2006. I was using kit lenses which were often very slow and had variable apertures. Slow lenses are ones that are in the f/4-5.6 f-stop range and variable aperture lenses are cheaper zoom lenses and the f-stop changes when you zoom in and out. For example, if you have an 18-200mm lens then you may be at f/4 at 18mm but when you zoom up to 200mm then you will see your minimum aperture change as well up to f/5.6… I was a Nikon shooter from 2001 to 2006. I wasn’t happy with what I had and made the switch to Canon for a year. I HATED the quality control issues Canon had and made the switch back to Nikon a year or so ago. Now I am super happy with my camera equipment… What changed since going from Nikon to Canon and back? My lenses. I didn’t have expensive glass the first time but did when I moved to Canon. After selling that stuff off, I bought expensive glass from Nikon and boy what a difference! My photos were sharper, my color accuracy was better out of camera and the faster lenses (some with VR or “vibration reduction” / IS or “image stabilization” for Canon shooters) made it so I could take pictures relatively anywhere. Before I had the faster lenses, it seemed like I was always somewhere that didn’t have enough light to shoot at shutter speeds faster than 1/60″. Anything in that range or slower means camera shake or motion blur. Not always ideal for photos! Once I got lenses in the f/1.2 to f/2.8 range then that all went out the door. Suddenly I had new shutter speeds available to me that were faster than 1/60″ shutter speeds. Some fast prime lenses can get you in this ballpark with ease. A 50mm Nikon or Canon f/1.8 lens can be as cheap as $100. Check out Amazon.com for that kind of stuff because they have great deals on camera equipment. Won’t break the bank and it will get you some real nice results. Makes a great birthday gift too ;)

3.) Make Backups and Backups of your Backups: I had a great time at Myrtle Beach in 2004. Took lots of killer pictures and great memories of my girlfriend (now my wife) and I. It was also a bittersweet time because my wife, Rebecca, found out that her Great Grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. I managed to get some real nice pictures of her and her great grandmother before she got real sick. Sure enough, I made only one copy of the above mentioned photos and had them on an external hard drive. Formatted my cards and went about my business shooting everything else. Well, a month later, guess what decided to become a fireball and blow up on me? THAT hard drive. Bye bye photos, bye bye memories. What did I learn? Make backups of your backups!

4.) Shoot RAW: I know there are some JPEG blow hards out there where it is all JPEG or nothing. Good for you. If you don’t want to sit behind a computer after a shoot then no problem. That is about the only reason I would ever even consider shooting exclusively JPEG in this day and age. Memory cards are cheap (I remember paying $200+ for a 512mb card in 2002!), RAW converters are cheap and fast and they do the job. Even my snap shots are done in RAW. WHY? I love the flexibility and love the fact that I can apply the necessary white balance, contrast, saturation and sharpness after the shoot depending on my needs. If I shot JPEG then I would be limited to what my settings were at time of capture. Last time I checked, Photoshop has a hard time of getting a correct white balance after the fact and sharpening can always be added but rarely removed! RAW also has more flexibility. In the heat of the moment, maybe you took a beautiful picture but your settings may have been off. If you shoot in RAW and your goof ups are suddenly not throw outs. I have pulled a couple stops back from a file and made it a keeper. If I shot JPEG then it would have been off to the trash can.

5.) It’s Called Workflow not “work-slow”: I remember editing a wedding in 2006 using Adobe Camera Raw. I was editing every photo one by one. I knew nothing about “batch processing” That wedding took me a week and now I can get one fully edited, make a blog post about it AND push it to Pictage within 2 hours tops. RAW converters like Adobe Lightroom are great tools and should be used to their fullest. Use Lightroom Presets, Photoshop Actions and Batch Processing and watch your calendar free up in no time.

There you have it, my top 5 revelations that I know I would have liked to have learned when I started off. Hopefully these can come in handy for you and you can be off to an even better start then when I did.

Thanks for reading!