Posts Tagged ‘backup’
What to do when there’s no time to shoot…
Lately I’ve been swamped with work. Exam time’s creeping up so my focus was there and this created a whole lot of downtime when it comes to my photography. I had very little time to go out and take pictures, and those pictures are still littering my Lightroom catalog waiting to be processed. Nevertheless, downtime doesn’t necessarily need to be time wasted. There are loads of ways to turn downtime into time invested in collecting ideas for new shoots, for the website and the blog.
First of all, I know twitter hasn’t really taken off in Sweden, but it’s an amazing tool for photographers. People see twitter as a way to keep up with friends rather than an incredible up to date news source and an informational tool and as such they ask themselves “Should I really have to deal with one more social network?” while refusing to create an account. The flow of information on twitter is insane and the best thing is that instead of actively searching for ideas, links, tutorials and reviews they come to you! So when you know that editing an image will take you a few hours, save that for later and indulge yourself in 15 minutes of typing hashtags into twitter search. Then save those searches and go back to them later for inspiration.
Subscribe to a podcast about photography
Your commute is going to be a whole lot less tedious if you do this. Just like twitter this is a way to let information come to you instead of you spending time to search for it. A lot of photography podcasts are community-based and supply information both from the hosts and the listeners, so that’s a great way to get other people’s opinions and learn about their experiences. Most of them have a website where you can find galleries of user-submitted images and other info. A few also have Flickr groups associated with them so check those out too. All I will say here is Itunes and an Ipod make things like podcast way simpler.
Backup, Backup, Backup
Having a working backup solution is something a lot of people see the importance of, but don’t really get around to doing. With storage costs/MB these day hitting rock bottom there’s very little excuse for not having a mini server farm at home. The minimum is one external hdd that’s kept synced with the internal one you keep your images on. And just because Lightroom does an automatic library backup it still does it on the same drive, so keep a backup of that too on your external hdd. Just to be safe it’s good to have an offsite backup, so dropping off a copy of what you have at home once a months at your aunt’s house (especially if she has a fireproof safe) is a way to go. Alternatively there are various online backup services, which I’m looking forward to trying out.
Setting up a backup disk does not take much time, it’s the initial backup that does, so plug a disk in, set up something like MS SyncToy and go do whatever is on the top of your priorities list.
Organise your LR catalog
This should really be done on import, but if you’re like me and you got into photography before you started using software like LR, then it might be a good time to look through your old work and keyword it properly. Always add at least 3-4 keywords so that you not only get the subject of each photo but also the context or location in which it was taken in every search. Starring and flagging images is also useful. One of the main strengths of software like LR or Aperture is the ability to search by pretty much anything.
Register for competitions
There’s a recent twitter trend that photo competitions get tagged with the hashtag #togcomp. Now there’s one of those ideas where I go “Why have I not thought of that???”. Fire up twitter, search for a competition and submit your best work. If you’ve keyworded/starred/flagged your images it should be easy to find the one you’re looking for. Looking through the submitted images is a great way to get inspired and see how you stack up creatively.
Look into stock photography
Not everyone is of the opinion that stock photography is good for already established photographers or photography as a business. I think that it’s a great tool for improvement and source of inspiration for advanced amateurs. It’s not in any way a get rich quick scheme; for stock photography to be a profitable business you do need to put a lot of time and effort into it, but there’s nothing wrong with getting paid a little for your work. And again, if you keyworded your images right it’s easier to find themed shots to upload.
