Save your future self time, tag your photos now

It’s kind of embarrassing that I never thought of using this Lightroom’s feature until this week…

You might have noticed I have an archive here on my website. Sadly, it’s lagging behind what I share on the blog and on social media. Many of my best images aren’t there yet, and that’s a shame. Anyway, I finally got to upload some of the photos I made this year, so at least the archives for San Francisco, Southern California, and Yosemite are pretty much up to date.

I still have so much work to do to get the archive to be what is supposed to be: a truthful representation of my photography.

The process of updating my archive would’ve been much easier and faster if I had tagged my photos properly after making them. You see, I give every single one of my images a title, but I never wrote them down anywhere other than the blog or social media post where I shared them. So when the time comes to upload a photograph to the archive, I have to look it up. A waste of time.

Why would I care about the title? Well, it’s important to me to keep those titles consistent between platforms because I get many emails with references to some of my images by title. I also use them in books and prints.

Well, turns out, Lightroom has always had a useful field in the info tab appropriately called Title. I knew this, but for whatever reason, I never thought of using it. It is a lot of work, but it would have saved me so much time now. So little by little, photo by photo, I’m starting to populate that field.

I’ve been updating other fields with the location information as well because you never know when that is going to come in handy. Just trying to save some time for my future self.

An extra bonus I get from having the title in Lightroom: I can now look up a photograph by title and find it instantly!

How to pick your best photos

If you are like me, and like going out often and taking lots of pictures, you might have hundreds if not thousands of photographs sitting in your memory cards or in a hard drive. In this video, we'll see how we can go from hundreds of images to just a handful of ones, our very best photographs.

Working From the Car

I watched with interest the recent presentation of Apple's AR/VR headset, Vision Pro. I was hoping for a use case that wasn't playing games, watching TV, or pretending to be a legless avatar.

While Vision Pro seems to be a device geared towards consumption for the most part, I can see huge potential on the productive side of things as well.

I was very happy to see that the headset can work as a portable, private, and pretty big monitor to a Macbook. As someone who doesn't have a permanent home, much less an office, this can be a big deal for me. Especially when I'm on the road.

During photography road trips, I spend most nights in my car, where space is... well, very limited. I still haven't found a way to work on my computer for long periods of time that is comfortable and doesn't break my back.

An AR/VR headset could solve this problem. I can't wait for the day I can have a 27" virtual monitor (or two, or three) to work on Lightroom and Final Cut Pro in the back of my small SUV.

I'm still a bit skeptical (is the resolution of the headset going to be enough for this use case?), even more considering the price point of this thing, but I'm excited for a future where I could work from anywhere as comfortably as I would in a proper office.

Using Color in Black & White Photography

Black and White photography might lack colors, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use the colors of a scene to improve our images. In this video, I show you some examples of how tweaking with the colors made some of my photographs better.

My annual rant on post processing

This is a topic that keeps coming up. How far can we go with our editing? When does it stop being photography to become "digital art"? Is the digital darkroom different from the analog darkroom?

So many question, and so many different answers.

How I use masking tools in Lightroom to make better images

Editing is a very important step in the creative process. And masking tools are some of the most powerful instruments we have in our toolbox to improve our images and bring our vision to life.

Creative ways to use editing tools

Today, editing software offers us more tools than we'll ever need. Some of them can be used in ways they might have not been intended too, expanding even more the creative possibilities of today's photography.

On post-processing: photography or digital art?

How far can we go with photography? When does it stop being photography and start becoming something else, like digital art?

I discussed this topic in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it'd be interesting to make a video about it.

iPad only for photography and video work, 6 months later

For the last 6 months, I've been using nothing else but an iPad as my only computer to do all my photography and video work. The experience has been great so far, but there are some significant downsides you should be aware of, should you try to do the same.

How I edit my Black and White images in Adobe Lightroom CC

In this video, I edit one of my black and white image as I guide through some of the most important tools I use on a daily basis.

Editing 5 black and white images in Adobe Lightroom CC

A short video of me editing 5 of my most recent images in Adobe Lightroom CC.

Composition after the shot

I try not to think too much about composition when I shoot: I point the camera at whatever I saw, I move around, and press the button whenever it feels right.

It's when I'm back at home that I can see more clearly if the image works or not. Although rare, there are cases where I'll find an image I had not seen in the field, an image I can still make by "re-composing" the original negative or file.

Most of my images are square, as you know. If I'm shooting digital, that means I have to crop the files to that format. While I'd rather shoot square natively, having that extra room for editing has proven to be very useful.

One example is this image of a couple of swans I took in Lago di Garda, in Northern Italy, a few months ago. It was only when I looked at it on the computer that I saw how it could work with a heavy cropping.

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Original 3:2 raw file showing the crop.

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Final square image.

Another example is this image of the Badlands National Park, in South Dakota. I'd taken the original photo almost 2 years ago, but it wasn't until recently that I "saw" the panoramic image in it. It was not my intention when I took it, I wasn't thinking about a panorama, but it works.

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These are extreme examples, though. Most of the time, all I do is small adjustments to the composition I did manage to capture in the field. For example, take a look at this image of a tree in the italian Alps, and compare it to the original square crop. I decided to place the tree a little bit further to the left, giving the branch a bit more room to grow to the right of the frame.

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Original square crop.

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Adjusted square crop.

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There's no shame in creating a completely new image after the shot. As I said many times, photography is not a competition, there is no prize for those who get it right the first time. Legends of photography like Ansel Adams kept playing with old negatives for decades, coming up with new edits and interpretations.

Photography is a creative process, inspiration can hit you at any point in your workflow. Embrace it.

Editing 5 black and white images in Lightroom CC

On Editing

A few months ago, I decided to start calling myself an artist, instead of a photographer. After all, I create art. Or I try to.

Artists aren't trying to represent what I see in an accurate and truthfully way. We try to express ourselves.

Instead of capturing nature with proper exposure and focus so it resembles as much as possible the original, we try to use it to express an idea or emotion, to add our own character.

This approach to photography is less about what's in front of the lens, and more about who's behind it.

In order to make an image able to convey our message from a realistic representation, often times we have no choice but to edit, in software or the darkroom, our negatives, RAW files, whatever it is, so creation can happen.

Many dismiss this as unethical or unnecessary. I say, this is how art is done.

How I select my best images

I take a lot of pictures. A lot. That means I'll have to go through hundreds if not thousands of photographs after a trip, which can be overwhelming and take a lot of time.

I've developed a process over the years that is relatively fast and painless. This is how I select my best images.

Snow, faking film and why there are no rules in photography

Finally got to shoot in the snow this winter! I take you with me on a short trip to the mountains, and then we take one of the images I made there, we edit it and we talk about what we can and can't do with our photos in post.

There are no rules

"Photography is not a sport, there are no rules, everything must be tried and tested" - Bill Brandt

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Bill Brandt is one my greatest inspirations. I love his landscapes, portraits and even the nudes (not a big fan of the genre, but the way he did it was just genius).

I think what I like the most about him is his approach to photography. For him, it was all about creating something with the medium, avoiding silly self-imposed rules.

He died in 1983, 5 years before Photoshop was created. That didn't stop him from completely changing his images in the darkroom. Actually, he admittedly did most of his work in the darkroom.

The image of the seagull is a good example. He added the bird afterwards, and the morning Sun years later.

He was brilliant, and we'd be wise to follow his advice to experiment and try everything.

PS: If you want to know more about Bill Brandt, I strongly recommend watching this interview from 1983 for BBC's Master Photographers.