photography | At Home with Tech

June 12, 2016

How to Convert Your Camera into a Time Machine

I’ve got an amazing photo project for you, but it’s going to take you years… even decades to complete. You might even have to pass it on to your children to finish. Are you ready…?

I’ve got an amazing photo project for you, but it’s going to take years… even decades to complete. You might even have to pass it on to your children to finish. Are you ready…?

I’ve been talking a lot lately about my quest to take better photographs. Pictures that are sharp and capture the moment… or an expression on someone’s face. Part of this equation (for better or for worse) is to take the same shot multiple times in the hope that I’ll capture that magic moment I see or something shortly after… which approximates it.
(Or at least try to get everyone with open eyes open)

Sure, that recipe creates twice to five times the number of photos you’ve got to manage, but I must admit, it’s a helpful insurance tactic to increase the odds you’ll actually get the shot you want.
(It’s also quite useful to remember when you ask a stranger to take a snapshot of you and your family. Believe me…)

Capturing Time
But the concept of taking the same picture over and over again can serve another goal. It can create a time machine of sorts for you…

If you purposefully remember to snap a picture of someone or something in the same place… every year… then, think about the mind-bending results.

Now, you’re capturing the passage of time.

You’re no longer trying to be a good photographer. Now, you’re stepping into the role of photo historian.
(How cool is that?!)

Granted, this type of project is not for those with short attention spans. You’ve got to put years into it. Even decades.

It’s not difficult to do. You’ve just got to remember a few shots and keep repeating them.

I’ve been snapping my time-machine photos around family events and vacations. These are the moments in my life that have returned me to the same physical spaces year after year.

I’ve found it’s better to go with posed shots that are easier to replicate over the course of time.

But certain action shots can also be predictable. (Like blowing out birthday candles) And it’s always great to collect them together across the years.

To this last point, you might already be collecting certain repeated photo moments. You’ve just got to find them… and then let the magic unveil itself!
(They don’t always have to be taken in the exact same space.)

For example, here’s pumpkin-picking sequence covering the past few years…Pretty cool, right?

It’s All about the Journey
The truth is… this type of archival photo documentation never really ends. Assuming you’re printing these photos on quality photo paper, or you’ve figured out a way to ensure your JPEG files survive the passage of time, you should eventually hand off your project to ‘the next generation.’

At some point, we all think about our legacy. That you can hand off those series of images that succinctly represent the journey through life.
…Whoah!

What a concept.

And it’s never too late to start.

It’s time to start building your ‘Guardian of Forever.’

May 22, 2016

Six Tips to Help You Find Your Best Photos Faster

What are you supposed to do with all those birthday party photos you shot once you download them? A good start is to pick a few and simply share them. But that can be harder than it sounds when you’ve got hundreds. So you’re going to need a few shortcuts…

I took my family to New York City recently to visit my father for lunch. My six-year-old son doesn’t get to spend a lot of time with Grandpa… so I always view these get-togethers as something of an ‘event.’ And as with any family gathering I attend, I typically bring a camera along to snap a few photos.

I should stop right here and admit that my definition of a ‘few photos’ is likely to differ with that of most members of my family… including my dad.

My 83-year-old father is always one to tell it like it is, and as we were wrapping up our visit, he turned to me and whispered with a touch of sarcasm, “Are you sure you took enough pictures?”

He chuckled.
(I smiled.)

I couldn’t really succinctly respond to his comment.
So I let it go…

Why So Many Pictures?
The truth is I do take a lot of photos.

And why is that?

I think the simple answer is I find it difficult to get the shots I’m looking for. So I take multiple versions, hoping to capture ‘that moment.’

Now, this may be because I’m just not that good a photographer, and I can’t get what I want on the first try. Or perhaps the cameras or lenses I’m using aren’t up to snuff.

Sure, someone else with better gear and experience is going to have leg up on me.
But perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on myself…

In Search of the Perfect Photo
I think I’m looking for specific shots that are actually tough for anyone to get.
Having to deal with low light and trying to freeze the action with a six year old running about… That’s ambitious!

Plus, I often turn off the camera’s flash, because of the harsh look that can create. And of course, many of the resulting shots have too much blur. Then, I get so frustrated when I take a look at my camera’s playback screen, and I realize I missed ‘the shot!’

So taking multiple consecutive shots in the hopes of successfully freezing the action is something of a necessity… Isn’t it?
(And it doesn’t cost anymore… other than to fill up your camera’s media card faster.)

Even if you’re taking an easy-peasy, everyone “say cheese’” shot, if there’s more than one person in it… chances are someone’s blinking.

So again, you’ve got to try several times to nail the one with everyone looking at the camera.

Overwhelmed with Too Many Pictures
Let’s agree for the moment that it’s okay to take lots of shots.

What exactly are you supposed to do with all of them?

Well, there’s the problem of having to spend all that extra time to review all of the pictures to figure out which are the best.

And believe me… I can tell you from personal experience that snapping lots of photos and then going through all of them can really delay sharing your favorite photos with family and friends.

So I’ve found you need to employ some brutal selection practices to find your top photos.

Time to Walk the Walk
Recently, I had to go through over 300 photos I took during my son’s sixth birthday weekend. To be fair, there were multiple events that contributed to such a high photo count.

But when my wife asked if I could get her four or five pictures to share around online, I realized I had my work cut out for me to figure out the essence of all those wonderful moments in five images.

To get the job done, I created a workflow that follows six steps…

The Six Tips

Here are my six tips to help you get hundreds of photos down to a handful:

#1
First, review all of your photos and assign a number to them.
(Both Lightroom and the old Aperture let you do that.)

5 = Great
4 = Good
3 = Okay
2 = Not good
1 = Useless

You should delete your 1’s and 2’s immediately. If you have some backbone, you should consider getting rid of the 3’s too.
(I usually can’t do that.)

#2
Go through your 5’s again and eliminate the multiples.

What I mean by that is if you took a particular shot three or four times, there should be only one best version. Sometimes this can be hard to figure out, but you need to spend the time here to choose your champion.

Once you’ve selected the winner, change all the others to 4’s.

#3
Edit, color balance and tweak all of your 5’s as needed.
This step is really a time suck. So the fewer fives you have at this point the better.

#4
I bet you probably still have too many 5’s than you know what to do with.

Review all of your 5’s again and pick out the best of the best. You’re going to have to deal with the fact that certain strong shots just aren’t going to make it to the finish line.
(Lightroom lets you ‘flag’ your picks, which is essentially giving them a ‘6’ rating. Alternately, you can create a separate folder of the best of the best.)

#5
So out of my 300 shots, I came away with about twenty 6’s.
How are you supposed to get that down further?

This is the stage where you’ve got figure out the ‘visual story’ you want to share. Do you want to forward on just the posed shots? The action shots? A combination?

I don’t think there’s only one answer here. You’ve just got to pick five to get to the essence of what happened. So just do it.

The good news is you’ve still got your twenty best pics. You can still use them in a photo album/book… or digital photo frame… or on your smartphone to swipe through.

#6
You’re not done yet…
Remember all those 3’s and 4’s? Go through them again.
What?

That’s right.
I’ve found that going through your losers one last time can occasionally unearth a winner.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of perspective what constitutes a great photo. An unconventional ‘miss’ may actually be something of great value if you look at it the right way. And honestly, when you’re zooming through hundreds of family photos to eliminate as many as you can, you can easily miss something that’s priceless, especially if it doesn’t fit your predetermined criteria of what you’re looking for.

If this final step unearths one or two more photos, add them to your 5’s or 6’s and thank the photo gods for your good fortune.
(It’s also a good reason not to get rid of your 3’s until you’ve gone through them this second time.)

When I was a Kid…
Of course, another way to get to your five photos is to only take five pictures.

That’s what my parents did at my birthday parties when I was growing up.
(All right… maybe six.)

And those few pictures from my own sixth birthday did a perfectly fine job capturing the moment.
(…It certainly took a lot less effort.)

The Need for Speed
I think another reality is any photo you share from your child’s sixth birthday party is a winning shot. As long as the picture is in focus, everyone is going to love it.
(Really)

If you wait until his seventh birthday to figure out which is the best photo to share from his sixth birthday… it’s obviously too late.
(Delaying to find and share your 6’s clearly has its drawbacks.)

So move quickly. Be brutal. Find those best few birthday shots. Then enjoy them with others.

And don’t forget to eat some birthday cake…

March 6, 2016

You’re Taking Way Too Many Pictures

Does your picture-taking style resemble throwing lots of pasta at the wall to see what sticks? That can help you nail the perfect photo, but what about the mess you’ve also created?

Last week, I asked someone to take a couple of pictures for me on his iPhone for a project. It was something of a spontaneous moment… But everyone’s got a smartphone these days, right?
So no biggie…

Later that afternoon, he walked over and offered to AirDrop “the bunch” to me between our iPhones.
(And that was so much faster than receiving an email with the photos attached and then having to save the pics to my iPhone.)

So I stare at my iPhone’s screen. A message popped up that asked if I wanted to accept the incoming photos.
(They would get immediately stored in the native Photos app.)

I clicked “Yes” and voila, my iPhone ingested… 81 photos.

81 what?!
You read correctly.

Yes, the ‘few’ images I had requested ended up being a photo essay of 81 images.

I thanked him, but really… I didn’t want that many photos.
(I secretly grumbled about much time it would take me to go through all of them to find the best one or two.)

Tick Tock
Now, I’m sure he was just trying to be helpful by capturing a whole lot of photos to ensure he nailed some good ones for me.
(And now I’m feeling a little guilty being so ungrateful.)

But there’s a fundamental problem at play here that this kind of moment demonstrates.
And I think we’re all guilty of this when we start snapping photos…

We act like digital photography is essentially free.

And to a certain extent, that’s true. The only noticeable cost is the gradual filling up of your smartphone’s memory or your camera’s media card.

But trust me, this way of thinking is certain to create a time bomb down the road.
‘Cause you’re going to wake up a few years later and realize you’ve got 12,000 photos in your phone.

And what are you supposed to do with all of those photos?!
Are you spending the necessary time to separate the wheat from the chaff?
And more importantly, what have you been doing with your thousands of pictures along the way?

Overwhelmed
Here’s your true cost to taking thousands of your free photos every year:
You’re going to need huge chunks of time to manage your growing photo archive.
or
You will give up trying and figure you’ll deal with the problem another day.

And you know what that means…

You didn’t print them.
You didn’t share them.
You didn’t enjoy them.
And nobody else did either.

Whoa… that’s a bummer.

And you know how I feel about waiting too long…
Yes, I say that lots of your pictures actually have expiration dates!
Because beyond your immediate family unit, nobody really wants to see a three-year-old photo of your six year old.

People want to see fresh photos.

Sure, there are always archival benefits to your pictures, but they’re much more valuable in the here and the now!

Less is More
Remember the old days of film photography just before the turn of the century?
(Ahem… the 21st century)
Come on… it wasn’t that long ago when we used rolls of physical film in our cameras. There were only 24 or 36 pictures per roll, and it cost you about twenty bucks to develop each roll.

Trust me, you probably weren’t taking 81 pictures of anything back then.
I know I wasn’t.

The beauty from that pre-digital age was you’d take two… maybe three photos of something… to be sure you got the photo just the way you wanted.
(There was no way to know, because there was no screen in the back. How did we ever survive…?!)

You’d maintain a few family photo albums and probably a couple of shoeboxes with some disorganized pics, and that would be it.

Okay, let’s fast forward to the present….
How much physical space would it take to house… say… twenty thousand physical photos?

Well, of course the answer is zero, because most of these photos would either live on your hard drive, which will eventually go caput, or in the Cloud somewhere.

What happens if one day you forget to pay for your Cloud account? Then, you’ll lose access to those photos.

And then where will you be?
You’ll have no photos of your life… at all.
(You’ve got a stronger back up plan, you say? Well, bravo for you. You can skip to the end of this post.)

Okay, I know I’m being a little apocalyptic.
Perhaps, I exaggerate. But only slightly.

Your Sock Drawer is a Mess
I really feel we’re losing control of all the photos we’re taking.

(I know I’m having a hard time keeping up.)

Sure, many of us effortlessly post dozens or even hundreds of photos online to share our lives in the moment, but I believe this apparent fluidity masks the larger problem of what’s happening to the others 19,000 photos.

Imagine a giant sock drawer you haven’t opened in twenty years with thousands of unmatched socks.
Do you feel the problem now?

If you don’t pay attention to your digital photo library and to the volume of photo files you’re feeding it, you’re going be in a world of hurt down the line.

Magical Sequences
Of course, there’s often an exception to any rule….
And that’s when you’re capturing a series of related moments via rapid-fire picture taking. My wife has done this a bunch of times with me and my son using her iPhone 6 Plus.
(This art form is very intuitive for her.)

These magical photo sequences can represent a few seconds to up to a minute. You’d never be able to capture these wonderful connected images unless you simply snap away… as if the price per photo were free.

How Many Photos Do You Need?
So no, don’t take lots of pictures all of the time.
Except when sometimes you should.

Got that?

All right, so you’ve got to be a little flexible when confronting how to capture your family’s lives through digital photography.

Just always ask yourself this question-
How many photos do you really need to take to get what you want?

If you decide to take 81, that’s okay.
Just don’t leave it for another day (decade) to figure out which two or three you should keep.

And remember, nobody really needs to hold onto 20,000 pictures to tell their life story.

Sometimes, it only takes one.

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