Online photography lessons & affordable photograhpy seminars for photographers of all skill levels

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