My recent blogging has been on subjects that involve mind mapping and digital photography workflow, two subjects that have occupied a good bit of my thoughts lately. The mind mapping has been associated with my efforts to define personal preferences in regards to efforts seeking new employment and the digital photography workflow interest is the direct results of having free time to pursue a love from long ago.
Mind mapping is a skill you get better at with practice. The more you do it the easier your mind free associates ideas with the central concept or theme. With first couple of mind maps it was a matter of pausing between capturing each idea. Now it’s being barely able to capture the ideas fast enough to keep up. I think mind mapping fits my own personal productivity style more closely then many other tools I have tried and I’m interested in expanding it in other areas of my life.
With some careful shopping around and bargain hunting I’ve been able to get a very good digital SLR camera, a Nikon D200 and a couple of lenses. This has inspired me to get back to photography. I took several film photography courses when I was in the military, but then marriage and children came along and there just didn’t seem to be time or money to pursue it. I’m looking forward to recapturing the love of the art that I use to have.
Since it’s digital I’ll be taking a lots of photos and I want to have a reasonable method to handle and manage them so that they’re easy to find, review, and save. Most of all I don’t want it to become something I hate to do! Therefore, I’ve been looking at Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom for their take on the suggested professional workflow.
Technorati Tags: blogging, digital+photography+workflow, mind+mapping
Woohoo Earl! Congrats on what is supposed to be an awesome camera (from what I’ve read).
You’re definitely right about finding a decent workflow. I’m just about satisfied with my workflow setup right now. It’s not painful for me to do it, but my problem is just finding the time to do it.
If you’re going to go heavy on the tagging, describing and indexing of your images (something that isn’t a primary goal for me – but is for many others), make sure whatever product you choose either lets you get at that database directly or else plan on sticking with that line of products for a long time.
Myself, I’ve resigned myself to doing most of my tagging, indexing and metadata stuff on Flickr (I actually wish they made an identical system that I could run on my desktop). Locally, I don’t use anything more than dated folders. It makes it easy for me to backup and that way I don’t waste any time entering metadata that I might not be able to transfer later if I want to switch products.
Even in the free/open-source realm, I only use F-Spot to import the pictures (I like the way it makes the dated folders) but I don’t use it for indexing/tagging my local images. I found it was creating duplicates and other odd things I didn’t like.
Whatever you choose, make sure you have fun doing it. The forums and podcast over at TipsFromTheTopFloor.com is an awesome resource. Really helpful friendly people over there and a good podcast (both audio and now video) to boot.
Let’s see some photos soon!
Phew.. now there’s a long comment for ya. ;)
Hi Earl,
I left a comment to this post yesterday, but it seems to have vanished into the ether… The salient points were:
– Congrats on the new camera! I’ve read and heard nothing but good things about the D200.
– The importance of tagging and indexing your photos may dictate your workflow. Myself, I tend to use Flickr for this (I wish there was a local Flickr backend I could run on my desktop here for tagging etc..). I use a straight up dated folder arrangement for my photos on my hard drive. I don’t like entering tagging and indexing locally simply because I’m afraid I’ll be locked into one product line or else lose all the work I did entering that data. Also, even with F-Spot, I use it only for importing the photos into dated folders. I found when I imported them into the F-Spot database, I was getting duplicates and other weird behaviour.
I wish there was a completely open and simple photo management utility for the desktop (maybe there is one). I’d like to be able to enter all that data and not worry about transferring it with the photos to some other product or application down the road.
– The tipsfromthetopfloor.com forum and podcast (video and audio) are a great source for inspiration and help. I highly recommend them.
– Let’s see some photos with that new toy! :)
Let’s hope this comment makes it through.
-> Btw, I like the header font.
Richard,
I found your comments. For some reason the Akismet comment anti-spam plugin I’m running thinks you’re a spammer?
Is there something you’re not telling me? :)
I marked them as not spam and Akismet is suppose to learn from that.
Sorry for the problems and thanks for the comment(s).