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Lightroom – Information is everything
One of the most common things I come across when I first see my client’s Lightroom catalog is this generic display on their thumbnails, displaying absolutely nothing of importance. So one of the first things I do when helping to set up a catalog for a client is to show them how to display important and helpful information in the Grid view of their catalog
Read MorePhoto editing is story-telling. When we edit our photos, whether it’s for a photo album or just our general library, we are telling stories of an event, a trip, a person’s life or even just a great day we had.
As part of Save your Photos Month, I will be giving a free 20 minute webinar on how to become a better photo editor. I have over 20 years as a professional photo editor and will talk about the editing methods I have found to be the most effective, ways to train your eye and mind to work efficiently, and utilizing best practices to achieve consistent results with all your projects.
Read MoreWhat you'll learn in this apple training: Apple Photos and iCloud is an easy to use and maintenance-free photo-system for your iPhone and Mac computer, but if it isn’t set up correctly from the beginning you can end up with a real mess and even risk losing photos. It would be nice if Apple did a better job of explaining how it works and how to set it up, but they don’t…
I have been working with my personal clients over the
I work with many clients, and as one might expect the collections I am seeing are getting bigger and bigger. I am currently working on two personal photo collections over 100k images and that is not uncommon.
The question then becomes, where is this going and do we really want to go there?
Read MoreI recently became a regular contributor to the popular website Sixty and me.
Read my latest article here - Have you become the designated family photo historian?
Read MoreI recently placed a post-it note on my computer screen that asks – What do you want your photo collection to look like in ten years?
Although it was meant mostly as a reminder to me, it's now a question I ask my clients as well when starting a new project with them.
In this age of massive digital accumulation, it is something worth thinking about, especially if we believe a family photo archive has value to us, not only in our lifetime, but to those we might consider passing it down to in the future.
Apple Photos has a trifecta of features – Live Photos, Burst Mode and HDR, that while offering some convenience and perks, really are part of a strategy that long-term results in massive subscription fees from ever-expanding iCloud accounts. OK, that sounds pretty paranoid, but it’s essentially true.
Apple has released these cool features over the years, which can unquestionably elicit a few oohs and aahs, but ultimately eats up enormous amounts of storage space while the unaware user has no idea why it’s happening. When you think about the relatively short period of time that iPhones, and in particular these features, have been around, it is staggering to think what 10 years, 20 years and more will bring in terms of these growing storage eating features that keep getting rolled out.
Read MoreFor years my mother had old photos of myself and other family members and friends thumbtacked to a corkboard in her kitchen. When I moved my mother out of her home a few years ago I had to remove these up to 40-year-old photos that were now faded and yellow and had multiple tiny holes in them from the repeated thumbtacking. If one didn’t know better you might have thought that I and my other family members were victims of some terrible voodoo ritual. Maybe Mom did have some unresolved feelings she was expressing, but more likely they just kept falling down.
Read MoreMy family and I visited the museum the other day here in LA to see the renowned King Tut exhibit. It will be the last time much of the collection will be able to be seen outside of Egypt, ever! The key word here is “seen”, as in looking at something and experiencing the use of our sensory ability called sight. If I am starting to sound sarcastic it is because as I wandered around the exhibit looking at all these ancient marvels, I also started to notice that many of those around me were not actually looking at the relics, but walking around and taking photo after photos of them with their mobile phones.
Read MoreIn 1974 my brothers Tim and Nico took a trip out the Midwest to visit their grandparents. My stepmother Susan was originally from Minnesota but her parents had relocated to Missouri and so the family took off for the heartland. Along the way they stopped for a visit to Mount Rushmore.
I love this shot that my father took. The quintessential snapshot would have typically had my brothers facing the camera, framed from head to toe (because we all know how important it is to include footwear in meaningful family portraits), with the four presidents shrunk to minuscule versions of themselves in the background.
Read MoreI am always telling my clients that we all need to become the editors of our own life story, but sometimes figuring out what makes a photo worth keeping and adding to our story isn’t so easy. I’ve been a photo editor for years, but the criteria I used for professional editing and what I might consider for editing family photos isn’t necessarily the same.
What they both have in common is story telling, that’s what editing is. But while a professional edit requires a certain level of technical quality, family photos are more about emotional connections to people, places and things, the stuff memories are made of.
Read More“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” ~ Susan Sontag. Funny, when I read that, I totally related to it, as someone who was a professional travel photographer for over 20 years, that sentiment was right on. But if you read the rest of the passage in Sontag’s On Photography, the collections of writings she did about photography, well it turns out she did not really intend it in a positive way. She was essentially saying that when we travel, we can often use the camera and the act of photographing as a way of limiting our experience of traveling.
Read MoreSounds like the diagnosis of a patient, right? Well like the human body, a photo collection is really a system of connections, and if all is not well with that system, it doesn’t work quite the way it should.
As a professional photo organizer, when I see a client for the first time, I actually do a diagnosis of their photo collection to see how healthy it is. I’ve seen some pretty sick photo libraries in my time, but thankfully no terminal cases so far.
So the question becomes, what makes up a healthy photo collection? Basically I am looking to see how it works in these six areas:
Is it organized?
Are images findable?
Are images accessible?
Is the collection safe?
Can images be shared?
Is it endurable?
The Holidays are upon us and that means we are going to be taking a lot more pictures than usual. All good, except when the storage on our phones or laptops starts to max out and we have to scramble to free up space. Here are some Apple Photos settings that can help you avoid that mess and get you set up the right way.
Read MoreI came across Lyn on a website listing alternative photo cataloging apps. I had been looking for a simple, desktop-based photo management program to offer as an option to my clients. Aside from Apple Photos, there is a trend towards cloud based image platforms such as Google Photos that offer no desktop management at all. Lots of my clients like working on their desktop and don’t like being forced to do all their work on the web. Also, with so much hacking going on, I think it’s asking for trouble to be completely reliant on web based platforms. Read whole article...
Read MoreI used to do freelance photo editing and it was not uncommon to be given up to 20,000 images from a photo agency and asked to edit it down to about 20-30 pictures for a story. Now it is highly unlikely you will ever deal with those kind of quantities, but the same editing process I used for that will also work just as well for an edit of 500 photos.
Read Moreemail - peter(at)fotoflowsolutions.com phone - (three one zero) - 312-6640 All photos ©Peter Bennett - All Rights Reserved
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