No nouns.

Whirlwind.

I’ve been attending meetings for a different kind of photography club, the Round Rock Image Creators. It’s run by Gary Hook and Bill Ledbetter.

What’s unique about this club is the meeting centers around conversation and friendly critique (instead of a judged competition, like NAPƒS) so folks submit an image or two for the monthly meetings and 10 minutes are devoted to talking about each image chosen. Again, it’s friendly. Helpful suggestion is preferred.

The meetings are well organized and lively. Gary and Bill are really good at making people feel comfortable enough to share their opinions. I’ve learned quite a bit from the meetings I’ve attended thus far.

It’s a young club with a diverse age range and attendance has varied from 8-12 people.

An recent example of useful info learned…

At May’s Monday meeting after looking at about a half-dozen images, Gary brought up titles, or the art of giving photographs titles.

I thought I was pretty good at it, but when he and Bill started talking about how most folks use nouns for titles I found that I was guilty as charged.

It made me rethink at least one of the titles I’d given an image I made for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day.

Originally titled “Kinetic Sculpture,” I changed the name of the above image to “Whirlwind,” creating a much better visual connection.

You can find the Round Rock Image Creators group on Facebook.

The meetings – FREE – are normally on 2nd Mondays, but for June it’ll be on the 3rd Monday – June 17.

I think it’s important to see things from a different perspective.

 

Know the rules.

Next year, for sure.

I should’ve gone to the Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day web site and read the submission page, then I would’ve know that images must have been taken on Sunday April 28.

I was out on Saturday the 27th and had my GX1/Thingyfy combo with me, so I shot a bunch.

Now I know.

Here are nine shots I made…

Kinetic sculpture

Three white chairs

Mailbox

Castle

Five eleven

Gate

Two stops

Legs

Stairway

‘Roid Week Spring 2019

Instant fun, revisited.

Torri and me have been adding a lot of color to the backyard this Spring, so it made sense that a majority of my shots for ‘Roid Week would end up being botanical in nature.

I even managed to get in a few shots from one of the local nurseries we visited.

I’ve gotta’ use up some of the Fuji peel-apart film in my stash next time around.

Here are my 12 contributions for ‘Roid Week Spring 2019, April 21-26…

Reddish

Pink gerber

Rose (finale)

Petunia

prfct strm

Ranunculus

Sharp

Directions

Dandelion

Peachy

Shapes

Garden King

Back-up Strategy.

Avoiding a lose-lose situation.

When it comes to photography, I like taking pictures first, processing pictures second, and doing back-ups last. Well, that’s not entirely true… hunting for new gear is probably pretty high on my list of photographic priorities.

So, yeah, one of my least favorite parts of photography is doing back-ups. And I’m a tightwad, and I really don’t want to spend a bunch of money on annual cloud storage subscriptions. Instead I’ve invested in a series of external hard drives for mirroring my back-up system.

I also have a disaster recovery system in place with 3 bare hard drives that involves moving 2 off site on a quarterly basis.

The main part of the scheme is how I organize the files.

I create a separate folder for each batch of photos based on camera and date. Each batch folder contains 4 subfolders, one for the original files, another folder for processed files, one for images sized for web use, and one for images sized for web use that are watermarked.

As I mentioned above, the top level folder is named using date and camera, and to make the folders easy to sort numerically I start with the year, then the month, then the day, with a dot between. Like so > 2017.06.04

The camera used, again separated by a dot, follows > 2017.06.04.lx100

The four folders within this main folder are named originals, processed, sized, and branded.

The original files I leave untouched.

The processed files have been opened in Photoshop, tweaked to taste, then titled.

The sized files are knocked down to 72 ppi and roughly 900 to 1200 pixels in width, depending on orientation.

The branded images are just sized files with an added watermark, placed 20 pixels from the bottom of the image and centered.

At least once a month I copy files to the other hard drives. Once a quarter I swap the off-site drives.

I also do complete card dumps on 5 external hard drives. I often go back and look through those archives to see if I missed any gems, like the Fucshia at the top of this post, originally posted in July of 2006. It’s one of my most popular shots on Flickr and a shot that I initially passed on, only to go back a few weeks later and rediscover. You never know what gems you may have overlooked.