Organizing Your Photography Part I

Please accept my apologies for the longer than normal lapse since my last post…you are not likely interested in my excuses, so I won’t waste the energy typing them.
This entry will focus on some specific questions posted by friends of the blog.  Specifically, I will talk about some thoughts on how to organize your photography.
This is not an easy subject because there are a lot of variable to consider, such as:

• What type of photography are you doing?  (A wedding photographer is likely to organize quite differently than a landscape photographer)
• How are you displaying your photography?  (people are printing less and less…more photography is finding a home in electronic display only)
• How important is it to quickly retrieve older or archived photography?
• If you were to search for archived photography, how would you do that and what structure makes most sense to you?
• How do you think?  (Some people do best with data such as dates, and others with images).
• Do you shoot for different purposes (i.e. personal vs. professional, documentary vs. artistic)

There are plenty of other factors, but this list is sufficient to demonstrate that organizing your photography is not necessarily a straightforward task and there is not a single solution best matched to each individual.  After hiding behind this lengthy disclaimer, I will now explain my process.  I offer this not as a model for you to duplicate, but rather as an example to consider when contemplating what system might work best for you.
First, we need to think of organizing and archiving photography as a process.  For me, this process begins when I import the photographs from the camera and ends when…well, it doesn’t really end.  I hope this will become clear shortly.  In summary the steps include:

1. Import photos through lightroom to the current year catalog.
2. Process Photos and mark the “select” photographs.
3. Export and copy select photographs to the gallery
4. At year’s end, close out a calendar year and export to a collection of current year selects:  (e.g. 2009 Select Photos).
5. At year’s end, copy both the closed year catalog (e.g. 2008 Catalog) and the select collection (e.g. 2008 Sele Photos) to a secure storage device.
6. Revise you gallery structure to be consistent with how you think.

Don’t worry if this does not seem to make a great deal of sense.  This is just an overview of the process.  In the next posting or two, I will cover each of the steps in more detail.

Finally, a note about the photographs featured on this post.  They are both the same shot…processed differently.  The photograph comes from the 2005 steel band competition in Trinidad and Tobago.  The competition took place in the Port of Spain, the capitol of Trinidad and Tobago.
Now to the difference in processing.  The second shot represents my normal processing in Lightroom.  The first shot incorporates the normal Lightroom processing, plus single shot high dynamic range (HDR) processing in Photomatix (www.hdrsoft.com).  I will leave this as a tease and a promise to write about HDR photography in the future.  In the mean time, if you can’t wait and want to learn more about HDR photography, I recommend both the Photomatix website and even more so, the absolutely terrific material posted by Trey Ratcliff at www.stuckincustoms.com.
Go make some great photography!
Craig

Hurricane Ivan Devastation of Grenada in 2004

On September 7, 2004 Hurricane Ivan rolled over the Eastern Caribbean island of Grenada leaving devastation in it’s wake.  Ivan left Grenada in shambles with 39 dead and over $1 Billion U.S. dollars in damage.
I featured a few shots from Grenada In a prior post with a promise to return with additional shots.  In this entry I will live up to that promise.

Hurricane Ivan was the strongest hurricane of the 2004 hurricane season.  Ivan carried sufficient energy and caused enough damage to earn the nickname of “Ivan the Terrible” amongst the media.  With respect to strength, Ivan reached the devastating “Category 5” classification and was the sixth most intense Atlantic Hurricane on record.

I arrived in Grenada just four days after Ivan passed departed for further mischief in Jamaica, Cuba, and the United States.  The estimated damage in Grenada was valued at $1.1 Billion.  By the time Ivan was done an additional $13 Billion in damage was recorded in the U.S. alone.  When Ivan hit Gulf Shores Alabama, it was a strong category three hurricane about the size of the state of Texas.

In addition to the damage (total estimated at $18.1 Billion), Ivan was also a deadly hurricane.  39 dead were recorded in Grenada, 54 in the U.S. and a total of 121 deaths for all countries in Ivan’s path (92 deaths were attributed directly to Ivan, and an additional 29 were categorized as indirect deaths).

When I arrived in Grenada, the airport was still closed.  I was able to make my way to Grenada via a military charter flight from Trinidad and Tobago.  Knowing that water and food were likely to be very limited, and not wanting to be an additional burden, my kit was comprised of a couple pair of jeans, several t-shirts, and a lot of pre-cooked rice and beans, and water.  I packed enough to survive for two weeks.  I literally mean survive…I could not pack enough to satisfy my typically generous appetite.  In the end it worked out well.  I lost nearly 15 pounds on my hurricane Ivan diet.

In addition to the minimalist diet, I also spent most of the two weeks sleeping under a desk in the U.S. Consulate using my spare pare of jeans for a pillow.  By the end of my time in Grenada, the floor did not seem so bad.  However, returning to my bed at home was a welcome change.  I had not latitude for complaint given the great number of people left homeless by the storm.

As you can see from the previous shot and the one following, included in the chaos left by hurricane Ivan, a number of houses were simply pushed into the street.  In many ways, these were the lucky ones; large numbers of homes simply disappeared or were reorganized by Ivan as little more than an unrecognizable pile of rubble.

The next photograph is emblematic of a segment of Grenada that sustained a great deal of damage – boats – both pleasure and fishing.  This boat is several hundred yards inland, and across a major road, from it’s moorings.  Had it not been for the hillside just beyond the road (off frame on the right side of the photograph), it is hard to tell where this boat might have ended.

One of the challenges associated with any catastrophe such as this is access to fresh water.  Inevitably some portion of the population has it better in this regard than others.  Living next to a stream can range from being a convenience to literally being the difference between life and death. 
One of the things that always intrigues me is the ability of children to find a way to have fun regardless of how gloomy the circumstances might be.  The children in Grenada were no exception.

The next series of pictures show another particularly hard hit segment of Grenada – the churches.  In many cases, buildings around the churches were barely damaged while the church was left with a couple of standing walls.  This could beg some metaphysical questioning, or one might simply conclude…hey, the churches were just old.




I will complete this entry with two pictures that do a very nice job of summing up hurricane Ivan.  Out of context, they are likely just mildly interesting.  However, viewed in context of the hurricane Ivan storyline, they are much more telling.


Before bringing this post to an end, I will talk briefly about the look and feel I was trying to achieve in making these photographs.  Most obvious is the avoidance of color.  I believe that b/w, sepia, selenium toning and strong desaturation are the appropriate approaches to reflect a mood consistent with the catastrophe experienced by the people of Grenada. 
Many of the shots are “busy.”  In other words with debris strewn in all directions, the compositions are terribly disorderly in comparison to one’s normal expectations.  This chaos is even more difficult visually when viewed in color.  I believe the black and white/muted tones help the eye make greater sense of the scene.
The second aspect of this collection is the absence of people (with a couple exceptions).  As a group of photographs I believe the absence of people punctuates the level of destruction.  You may have wondered as you looked through the photographs…”where are the people…did the storm take them away?”  With the dark mood of the photographs coupled with the description of the storm, it is easy to imagine a devastated landscape completely stripped and devoid of life.
Until next time, go make some great photography!
Craig