Battling Lightroom to a truce….

I haven’t talked about photography much recently, mostly because I really didn’t have much to talk about (not that this ever seems to stop me).

Truth be told, my photography’s been “in between”. I’d shifted from using Photoshop/Bridge to Lightroom 2, but I only had my new photos in Lightroom, not my entire library, and while I was using Lightroom, I wasn’t really comfortable or felt I was using it effectively — to call what I was doing a workflow would be an exaggeration. I was in that “dating but no committed” phase, and stayed there for an extended period of time because I just didn’t have the time and energy to dig in and study the tool and make decisions on how I wanted to use it. It also didn’t help that work and other things were keeping me busy enough that I wasn’t doing much with the camera, so there was little new photography in forcing me to figure it out.

I finally decided to get serious about this, so I spent a couple of evenings importing my library. The import was painless, but — of course — created a couple of problems, the most serious one being that the keywording on my old photos and the keywording I was using weren’t the same. This led to two days of intermittently rearranging, merging and rethinking — I’ve come out of it with a singe hierarchy of keywords I (mostly) like that have (mostly) been reconciled and is finally (mostly) unambiguous and without duplicated functionality in different places (mostly). Another day or so of refining will resolve most of the (mostly) remains, but that can wait (famous last words).

I also realized I needed to change how I was handling exported images. In Bridge when I generated an image for, say, Flickr, I ended up importing it back into Bridge and pulling all of the versions of an image together into sets. In Lightroom, you can’t use sets with collections, which initially seemed like a real annoyance, but I later realized that between using snapshots to generate master images in the appropriate formats (8×10, 11×17, etc) and export presets to automate the image creation that storing the final image isn’t necessary in most cases; instead, regenerate it if you need it (duh). throw in a few lightroom plugins, and suddenly the workflow works pretty well.

I’ve adopted in a few Lightroom plugins to make this happen, the major one being LR2-Mogrify from Jeffrey Friedl. the other ones I’ve started using are his Geolocating plugin (which allows me to add location data within Lightroom using Google Earth), his plugin for finding photos near a given geolocation (so I can find all of the other images from that spot — once I get them all geolocated), and his flickr uploader.

Using LR2-Mogrify I’ve created some export scripts to do my framing and watermarking, and for flickr, I now upload them directly from Lightroom, which has simplified things massively for me. Now that I have this basic workflow done, I can adapt it for other formats that I plan on supporting (such as creating wallpapers in various sizes, more on that later).And I finally feel like I understand how to work the way Lightroom expects me to work; things are finally clicking, so I feel comfortable that what I’m doing is going to scale. I still have some work to do on the workflow, but at least it’s — flowing.

Along the way I made a couple of other changes; I changed the frame I use on flickr (again); I’ve shifted to a transparent watermark that I think will work better but be less obtrusive.

And maybe most significant, I’ve shifted photos posted to flickr back to a Creative Commons licenseon imagesI publish onto the net. Those images will continnue to be smaller images (1024 pixels max on the longest side), watermarked and with embedded information. I’ll continue to reserve non-watermarked images for license, and I will continue my policy of licensing them to non-profit and other worthy (as I define it!) organizations at no charge on request.

I’ll be updating my web site’s policy pages on this over the next few days. For now, I’ve left existing images under the old license for now. I haven’t decided what I will do there, whether I’ll change them all to CC or do it on a case by case basis. As I start gearing up for creating an updated web site with a portfolio and real licensing options, I’ll be re-processing and re-uploading my best images anyway, so I tend to think the status quo is less confusing than shifting things around…

I am in fact getting back on the planning process towards what I need to do to upgrade my web site to support my goal of moving from amateur photography to semi-pro (and from there to pro); I have a business model worked out and a strategy to implement it, and over the next few months, I hope to get it going and see what happens. After a lot of thought and research I’m comfortable with the idea that even though thousands of others are all buying digital SLRs and hanging out shingles as “pro photographers” during a time when many tradition revenue streams for existing pro photographers are either going away (newspaper photojournalism) or being significantly disrupted (stock photography) there are still options and opportunities to succeed.

So we’re going to go for it. Unlike most of those other photographers, I think I can succeed; for one thing, I know it won’t be easy and I know it’s a long-term investment. For another, I’ve put a lot of time and energy into technique (especially post processing) the last couple of years, and I think my imagery is now pretty good (but can still get better) — I look back on older stuff and wince a lot, which is a good thing. And I thnk I understand how to leverage the new technologies and marketing opportunities and my lack of dependence on the old days” of photography business models to my benefit.

We’ll see. I could also prove myself to be a blithering idiot. Wouldn’t be the first time. But heck, it’ll be a fun hack.

what’s my plan? That’s another blog entry on another day…

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