JPG: Stories: Ten Tips: Making your Life Better (as a photographer, anyway)

Ten Tips

Making your Life Better (as a photographer, anyway)

By Lis Bokt

15 Mar 2008

I've been asked quite a bit lately what my process is with photography. I've put some careful consideration into it and I think I've found ten things that are relevant to many photographers.

1. Save things. - I don't delete ANYTHING. Not if it's a photo. EVER. I take more photos than almost anybody I know - save for the photojournalists - which amounts to over 200,000 a year. I have every single of them since I started using a digital camera. Hard drive space keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. CDs and DVDs are cheap nowadays too. Whatever method you use - keep them. You'd be amazed what you'll find years later.

2. Keep the ORIGINAL images - as well as the altered ones. Don't crop or web-size them and delete the big ones. Keep it all. In five years when you go back to that image you'll be amazed how much better you can develop it - as your skill advances and the technology available advances.

3. If possible, shoot RAW. - This takes up a lot of space, many cameras can't do it, and memory cards still aren't that big yet. But if you can manage it - shoot in RAW mode. It allows you SO MUCH more room in the editing phase of things because it isn't a compressed image. If you must shoot in JPG mode, switch to RAW for something you know will need heavy editing later. And then switch back.

4. Don't always use the auto-settings. Play around with ISO, speed, and aperture a little bit. You can cut your exposure time a lot by doing this - which is important if you are holding the camera by hand. Also, play around with your white balance. If the image is too blue, mess around until the white balance gets closer to yellow. It is easier to make a yellow picture blue than it is to make a blue picture yellow. (This has to do with how your camera interprets light; blue is the enemy. It tries to eat the other colours)

5. METADATA. - If you can use a workflow programme, like Mac's Aperture or Adobe Lightroom, USE IT. And use it to its fullest. Every image I import gets all the meta data filled out. This includes what's in the image, where I was, what was happening. Years later I can go back to my archives and search for images that include fire hydrants or my dog or were taken in the evening or... whatever. Because I'm super anal about metadata. Having this information embedded in your image also makes it easier should you have problems later with image theft. Occasionally I'll find myself out on location and need to remember something specific about the shoot so I'll write it on a post-it note and take a picture of that note in the same scene as the other images. I'll find this in my editing process and put it in the meta-data.

6. Learn to hold your camera. - I know it sounds silly, but really! Learn to have a steady hand. Tripods are great (And you should have one) but not every image can be taken with a tripod. Even if your camera has image-stabilising tech, you still want to learn. With the stable technology of my Sony Alpha and my steady hands of experience, I can reliably take a two-second exposure hand held and have it equally in focus with a tripod. That's not easy I promise, but all it took was practise. Practise, practise, practise.

7. Take a lot of pictures. - And learn to choose the best. One of the first things I was told about photography, many years ago when I was doing work for a newspaper on 35mm, was "The key to good photography is a lot of bad photography". They'd hand me a case of film and I was instructed to not come back with any of them unexposed. It was nerve-wracking at first, but eventually I became comfortable with it. As I learned what made a good image and what didn't, I learned to streamline how I shot images. I still take as many as I possibly can though, and that varies from one situation to another. In the end, I have plenty of hard drive space and I'd rather hunt through 200 images to find The One than lament later that the 40 I took weren't what I was looking for. This is particularly applicable if you are shooting fast-paced events or other situations where you can't go back later and try again.

8. Organise them! - My photography archives are painfully tidy. My system is to have a folder with a year - "2008" - and then inside of it three more folders: "Original", "Websafe", and "Prints". I import from the camera into the "Original" folder. Each day gets its own folder, and they're labelled by date (in a Year-Month-Day fashion to make them listed in chronological order). After I've gone through the images and picked out the winners, developed them, and tagged them inside of Lightroom, I export them. Each image gets two copies: "Websafe" (which for me is 500px wide, compressed to under 100kb, but everybody has their own needs) and "Prints" (which is the full size image, saved with any developing done to it and in a special filename structure for easy searching later). Both of those folders have twelve sub-folders, one for each month of the year. Considering the volume of images I take, I find it handy. Find what works for you - and stick with it. All of my photography since 2001 is in this system and it makes it stupidly easy to go back and find something.

9. Have everything you need. - I carry a camera bag with me almost everywhere. Mine is like a backpack, and can house either one of my DSLR cameras, and 90% of its equipment, or it can house both DSLRs and the basics (batteries, spare cards, four lenses total, etc.). I could get something bigger but I don't have a desire to lug all of that around all day. I keep a couple extra memory cards, a card reader (separate from the one I keep on my computer!), a mini tripod, my filters (which fit into a nice folding pouch), a light metre, three lenses, and a couple add-on lenses (wide angle adapter, macro adapter). Oh, and some pens, pencils, rubberbands, velcro strips and some post-it notes. I was a good Girl Scout and learned my lesson: Better to have it and not need it than wish you had it later.

10. Just take the picture already. - Really! Unless you are on a restriction (say, quantity of film) just start taking images. I usually find if I'm a little unsure about it, that after a few snaps and looking at the review screen, I've got a better idea of what I'm looking for. I have a light metre but I rarely use it - I prefer to get it "about right", try it, and then modify it on the spot. As I take a lot of images, I can sort it later. That sunset only lasts a few minutes and it won't be the same tomorrow.

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