I have always been challenged to find a way to easily share my photographs in an appealing format. Over the course of the last year I have begun watching Scott Kelby's Lightroom Show and his The Grid. While some of the information has been skewed toward professional photographers, I have learned a bit and liked his website/photo critiques.
So I have begun revamping my approach to managing and sharing my photos. Some of the changes include (but are not limited to):
Culling photos: Do I really want to see 7 or 8 year old photos from homework assignments of photo classes I have taken in the past? How many unintentionally out of focus macro shots of a flower do I need? Do I really need to see 5 or 6 shots of someone throwing the ball as their arm position changes? Or what about duplicates? I was able to thin things out and get down to about 6500 photos.
Keywording: Having a collection of several thousand photos may be nice, but how do I find the one(s) I want? Arranging by date helps but what if I want to find a particular photo of my wife? How in the heck do I determine which year it MIGHT have been taken? Assigning a keyword lets me filter my photos and at least get down to a manageable number. While the first pass is complete, I am now going through and assigning multiple keywords to photos. For example - I can give a photo a keyword of "Family". But who is IN that photo?
Collections: OK - now I have a number of photos from some place or time. How do I easily get the ones I like best and want to share with others? While Lightroom lets me rank my photos, that is still a bit of work. Especially when trying to remember what keyword I used at the time! I also found myself taking a number of shots and then sharing only a select number. The Wake County Senior Games were a great example. I am not going to submit several hundred to the board to decide which ones they want. So I pared them down to a representative number. The rest I want to keep and post in the event someone actually wants to drop 99¢ to get a photo of themselves!
Website: This is where I try to show off a bit. I have invested a few dollars (well perhaps more than a few! LOL!) and a LOT of time trying to take photographs that both I and my audience of friends, family and participants would enjoy. How best to do that? Listening to the website critiques provided some good information and examples some of which I COULD adapt.
Who took that shot?: I have wavered on this a bit. If you come to my website you pretty much can figure out on your own who took the shot! So do you really need to see my name and a copyright symbol in the corner? I have it embedded within the metadata plus from what I learned unless you have actually gone through the steps to formally copyright your work, you don't have much of a leg to stand on. So with those things in mind, I have quit adding that information. Old shots - well as time allows I will remove the information.
Do you like it enough to want a copy?: I have also decided to expand downloading permissions for a number of my shots to make it easier for friends and family to download a copy without having to ask me for one. Print requests are something different though!
Enough about the journey! Now take a few moments and check out the updates!
-Rick