So what better to do than head out and grab some photos?
Below-zero temperatures and a hazy cloud cover made for some lovely light, especially around sunset. During the day, I had to head out and shovel my driveway, and grabbed some images while knee-deep in snow.
To cool off (ha!), I took a walk down the road to see what the rest of the neighborhood looked like. Luckily most of my neighborhood roads were plowed, but some areas were still untouched.
I didn’t get very far down the road before the conditions turned me back home. But weather like this doesn’t happen like it used to, even here in Michigan.
I often tell people that I get to Chicago at least once a year.
This year? It’s more like five or six.
A fun trip. Another fun trip. A business trip. A work trip. A conference. It seems I’m heading to the Windy City, on average, every other month.
And boy, I don’t mind. Every time I head to Chicago, whether for personal trips or business, it feels like a getaway.
I’ve said it before: I feel like I know Chicago better than I do my nearby metro area. That goes mainly for the downtown areas, because once I get out of the main hub of Chicago I’m not so confident – whereas in Detroit, I know the surrounding areas fairly well.
But since taking up photography as a hobby, Chicago has been one of my favorite subjects. The people, the architecture, the city life – it’s a smorgasbord of photo opps.
For a work trip back in October, I hit the streets to specifically grab more street photos than anything else.
(Most photos taken with Canon EOS M and EF-M 22mm f/2, edited in Lightroom with VSCO Film 03)
Images are never final; they’re always a work in progress, subject to the possibility of a different interpretation. They’re constantly in a state of flux, alive with the potential of change.
Back then, it was merely a repository of my photos: goofy self portraits, vacation pics, even stuff with my friends. This was before I got “serious” with photography. It was my digital photo album.
Now, it’s a carefully-crafted showcase for my artsy side. No more mass uploading dozens of photos at once, no more being careless with my tagging system.
Most days I post three or four photos that I’ve worked on, and I carefully cultivate my tags. I tend to upload from Aperture, because I like its uploading interface better (even if it does have an issue with multi-word keywords/tags) than Lightroom’s.
Once in a while I’ll post an entire set all at once, just to get it out of the way. A lot of those photos will never be seen because of Flickr’s you-only-see-five-photos-at-once-on-the-following-page rule. But some of my sets would take forever to upload at five photos a day.
I keep a folder in Aperture of stuff to upload, and every day I grab a random five images and post those to Flickr. When I add new photos to my Aperture library, I’ll grab a few and queue them for uploading, too.
On and on it goes.
ORGANIZING PHOTOS
Tags. Sets. Galleries. Tons of ways to organize images on Flickr. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. I feel like I don’t have my own digital asset management house in order at home, and that often translates into sloppy organization on the Flickr end of things.
But thankfully Flickr makes it easy to correct all that. In the Organize tab, I often grab a batch of images and add more metadata to them.
For Sets, too often I feel like I could have a million variations based on location, color, style, subject, etc. Some photographers do a great job, but I tend to stick to a smaller number of sets until I find an image that doesn’t fit into a category.
Is it a vacation spot? Is it a specific project? Does it fit into a set that already exists? Do I want this group of photos to stand out on their own?
I know myself well enough to know that my lazy organization habits will opt for tucking photos into a group that already exists, so I try to make them as broad as ever. Sometimes, I’ll go back through and add photos to new sets I’ve developed, like my new season-based sets.
Every photo I post here to the blog is actually a link back to the Flickr image. That way I don’t have to worry about uploading images, or people grabbing them willy-nilly. Photos live in one place. Period.
And every Friday I do a #FlickrFriday post on Twitter with a link back to (you guessed it) an image on my Flickr account.
The one exception is Facebook. There, I do upload specific albums of family and friends photos that might not be appropriate for Flickr. But often there’s some cross-posting to both, especially in the case of vacation photos.
Also, Flickr’s Group system is a great way to share like-minded photos. I don’t always remember to do so, but there are a few active groups I dip in and out of, adding my images to the mix.
STORING PHOTOS
To be honest, I still use Flickr as a backup mechanism.
I’m grandfathered in under the old membership rules and am exempt from the terabyte limit (although I only use, according to Flickr, “0.025 TB of unlimited”). It’s nice not to worry about archive space like I am at home – I can upload to my heart’s content.
It’s peace of mind knowing that most of my best photos are archived up there at Yahoo! HQ. I’m not super clear on if Flickr compresses the photos after you upload them (like Facebook shamefully does), but something is better than nothing.
LEARNING FROM OTHERS
You know what’s super helpful? EXIF data.
I’m appreciative of the photographers who include it in their photos, because it’s a great educational tool. Not to copy, but to simply learn.
I’m also a big believer in absorbing good photography so you know what to look for in your own images. “If you can see it, you can do it,” my college professor said. Meaning: if you can see the logic and skill applied in making good art, you can apply similar strategies.
So, like 500px, Flickr is a great learning space – for what’s new, for techniques, for upcoming styles, and sometimes for what not to do. Especially for when you find good photographers to follow on Flickr. With “Following,” you always have a good stream of quality stuff coming through.
So I’ll stick with Flickr for the foreseeable future, past the changes and updates and whatnot, until something happens that’s unforgivable. I get a lot of use out of it. I enjoy using it. The $25/year for a Pro membership has always been worth it.
To this day I still get excited when I feed a card into the computer and begin to play with the images; it’s like painting or sculpting, getting my hands dirty. It’s a step of the process I thoroughly enjoy, however time consuming it may be.
Indeed. I like playing around with a few images, just to get the look and style down, and then going to town on the rest.
What else I’ve found helpful: not touching the photos for a while – like a month or longer. It makes editing/culling easier, because there’s no longer an emotional attachment.
It’s really winter now. The high temperatures have been in the 15-20 F range, and the snow and ice are starting to stick around.
Nothing will grow until March. There will be nothing on the trees until April. Any sunny day is the best Michigan will look for a few months now.
Despite the bitter cold, I do enjoy getting out when it’s sunny and taking photos. The slants of light, the position of the sun – everything is different this time of year. It looks like winter.
So it was with these faded milkweed plants. The sun was setting and lighting the cotton in a wonderful way. It was one of those pull-the-car-over moments.
Even though the wind chill is about zero, and the snow is starting to blow, there’s still beauty out there.
Oh, you know. Just a Pentax K1000 hanging out on the beach.
Just about done with this roll of black and white film, finally. It’s getting to the point where I hardly remember what’s on it. But on this day, Labor Day, it was on the beach.
