January 24th, 2007
sorting out the photo closet
Now that temperatures have dropped and there’s a bit of snow on the ground, I finally seem to be in the mood to work on some of the projects I had planned for this winter. By far, the most daunting is sorting and editing the past couple of years of photos – and then getting the best of them up in my online gallery. That might not sound too imposing, but it’s actually a frightening job as there are many thousands of photos to go through each year. The scary truth is that I have a mountainous backlog of months of shooting in which I barely even looked at the photos after downloading my cameras. During summer, my usual modus operandi is to fill a flashcard, or maybe even two flashcards, with images during my twice or even three times daily insect walks here at the farm. I watch the images as they flash by on the computer screen during the card download, and make a mental note to myself of which 3 or 4 shots to pull out to use for a blog post, or put into my nature photo galleries. I quickly edit those shots and stick them into an appropriate spot in my online gallery, and that’s it! Back outdoors to fill a couple of more cards!
As you might well image, this system (and I use the term loosely) results in a huge backlog of mothballed photos that should be sorted and posted into my nature photo galleries, but who has time for that when there are more insects waiting to be photographed out in the garden, fields and woods?! I leave that task for some boring winter day when I haven’t got much else to do. However, with this winter not bothering to materialize, it almost seemed that I wouldn’t get around to sorting out the photo closet before springtime rolled around once more. So, here I am, finally getting down to work now that the snow is on the ground.
The task can be interesting and even fun, but it’s also time-consuming and even boring — especially while waiting for images to upload into the galleries (and yes, I still have my crappy old dial-up connection). To further complicate matters, the online galleries are in need of some serious sorting, but with this slower-than-molasses connection, that could take years to accomplish. I’ve actually contemplated camping out for a day in some place where I can hook up to a high-speed wireless connection to speed up the process.
However, despite the obstacles, I did manage to get my Spider galleries all sorted out this week! The spider photos are now sorted into subgalleries by family. I know this might not sound like such a big deal, but believe me when I tell you that it is!
So, why keep these photo galleries at all if they’re so much work?
First and foremost, I like to keep a good selection of nature photos in a place where I can share them with others. As of this morning, I have about 4,300 photos of various creatures, habitats and other related things online. It seems that the photos do interest some people. This morning when I checked, the number of page views of photos was at 723,699 – since I first began to use the gallery in October 2002. Most days, there are about 750 to 1,000 page views, but sometimes 2 or 3 thousand a day.
After that, there is the business side of things. I do make occasional sales of my photos, and to do so, I have to have the photos stored in a place where they can be easily found by photo researchers. That means not just storing the photos in an online location, but trying to keep as many as possible properly captioned with their species names as that makes them easy to locate using search engines. For example, there’s no point in putting up photos of an unusual species of Lady Beetle if you just stick the caption “Lady Beetle” on it, as there are quite literally thousands of photos captioned as such on the net. However, there may only be a dozen or so of some particular species. You want to be sure the photo researcher can find yours right away when they begin searching for that species. However, identifying insects is time-consuming, so that’s why it’s quite a bit of work to do things right. The sad truth is that unsorted, unidentified photos stored away in drives don’t do any photographer a heck of a lot of good as far as potential sales. That said, even unsorted and unseen, I do feel that my photo archives provide a wonderful record of what I’ve seen and studied here at the farm (and elsewhere) in the course of a year, so they’re certainly valuable enough on that count. I like to think that, some day, my collection might be useful as an archive to study the biodiversity in this region of Ontario as it existed at this time, and perhaps even in the few other places that I’ve visited and done a lot of shooting.
Well, now that I’ve bored the heck out of everyone with a description of what I’ve been up to this week, I should get back to work. I have actually got a couple of other things to post about, but may not get to that until later today or tomorrow.
Tags: photo archives
January 25th, 2007 at 12:19 am
I struggle with the same kind of problem, though perhaps not in quite the volume as you do. After well over a year of being weeks to months behind, I finally caught up the first weekend of last November. Since then, I have promptly fallen behind again. One of the things I do manage to accomplish by being so far behind is a little tighter editing of my photos. Sometimes I am loathe to delete a photograph for the first week or four after I take it, but as I slowly get farther removed from the day it was created, it’s a little easier to let some of them go. For the most part, I think this is a good thing.
Processing for me involves renaming, giving titles (including species identifications, if I can figure them out) and sometimes descriptions. For many years I have put everything up on my photojournal. That is nice for some things, but as I’ve learned more about my place, I have started reorganizing things on a second site, Sitka Nature, where I am trying to document as much as I can of the place that I live. I do it mostly to aide my own learning process, but I am certainly not immune to the pleasure that comes from having other people get interested/excited in the things I have seen and done (either photographically or in writing).
January 25th, 2007 at 1:26 am
Matt – Thanks for posting the info on how to process your photos and what you do with them. It’s always interesting to hear how other photographers deal with their photos – what kind of software they use to track their photos and so on. Also, where and how they like to display their stuff. I used to post my photos on my website, but then started using Pbase and found that I liked the format for creating galleries and sorting photos, etc… I’ve tried some other sites as well. I too toss out quite a few photos when I get time to edit them later on. You’re quite right about it being easier to trash them later on. I’m pretty ruthless about trashing anything that isn’t clear or a pretty good shot unless it’s of some creature I haven’t got other photos of — then I would keep it just for the record.
January 25th, 2007 at 2:52 am
You have an amazing photo archive. Biological inventorying is thankless but very important work. I hope you’re also keeping careful records of where and when you “collected” each specimen.
January 25th, 2007 at 3:20 am
One of the main reasons I don’t use the on-line places is I have a copy of my website on my harddrive. I actually use it as a photo organizer. When I don’t have access to the internet (which actualy still does happen from time to time), I can still look through old photos fairly quickly. I suppose I could get all fancy with a database archival system, but I haven’t gone there yet.
That reminds of something else that I’m curious about. What other natural history record keeping do you do? The vast majority of what I record tends to be through photography, though it does have its limitations. I’ve done some sound recording (mostly of birds) but would like to do more.
I’ve also become aware of the power of simple written daily observations in a format that is easy to summarize/compile.
There are a couple of local ladies who have been recording what birds they have observed for many years. The approach is simple, a checkmark if a species was observed on a given day. Records are kept 5×8 cards with a week per card (sometimes it takes more cards per week, if there are more species than lines on the card). They also included daily weather observations and some other notes about observations of interest. They have been doing this since 1980, and the result is pretty amazing. I wrote a little about some of the things I was able to discover from the subset of the data that has been converted to a digital format. I’m continuing to work with the data and will be using it to create an updated bird checklist for my area. It’s pretty inspiring to me.
January 25th, 2007 at 4:01 am
Dave – Yes, I file my photos by place, and the date and time is part of each image as well. However, we also carry a field note book with us when we’re hiking anywhere and geo-reference our sightings using a GPS unit. We write notes for various observations along with or in addition to the photos. We’ve been doing that for several years now. I also used post natural history observations to our local nature listserve several times a week, but got away from that last year when I was ill. I’ve since started to get back into that. The observations are archived by a local natural history center, so that’s a plus. There’s nothing too fancy about what we do – we use small pocket note books that fit in a pocket of a small bag that we use to carry our day-hiking stuff. I’ve tried keeping more detailed notes, but can’t seem to manage the photograph and meticulous note-taking. It would be nice, but in recent years, I’ve become more of a visual person and put so much energy into that side of things that there seems to be not much left for the writing side.
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Matt – That’s a great system using your website stored locally on your drive. I’ve done similar things to that, but not recently. You were asking about the kind of natural history record-keeping we do. My answer to Dave pretty much sums it up. I used to write up very meticulous accounts of our hikes each week, and then post them to the local nature listserv. I’m just starting to get back into that again this year after taking a year off from my usual routine. Because I’m interested in phenology, I try to watch for certain things to happen each year – the appearance of the Brown Mantidflies on the milkweed, the Spur-throated Pine grasshoppers laying their eggs on the wood of our porch each September, and things like that. For example, at this time of the year, I’m watching for snow surface invertebrates such as snow scorpions, harvestmen, spiders, and caterpillars. In summer, I would typically photograph female spiders engaged in nest guarding activity and check on them as often as I can to see what they’re doing. When possible, I submit records to those who can make use of them. For example, this year, I started submitting spider observations to the Nearctic Arachnology database species pages maintained by David Shorthouse. Antoher thing I try to keep track of is water levels in local creeks by photographing them from the same vantage points each time I pass by that spot. That’s information that could be very useful over time. I find the camera very valuable for recording data and have devised various ways of improving what it records – shooting in ways that record the most amount of information about an object. One thing to add – I do have a DVcam and shoot video of certain things – especially behaviour of insects and spiders. However, I’m starting to do more with the “movie” function of my still camera as I always have it with me. I’ll take a look at the page you’ve linked to as I’m always interested in nature record systems, etc..