I’m not here.

Throughout high school I worked for the city in the landscape crew fixing front lawns ruined by snow plows or sewer renovations. One of the primary, and more memorable, experiences from that job was walking the streets behind a chipper and loading all the residents’ brush through rotating drums ready to suck in your arm as easily as the maple branches ripping at your legs — it was stressful and exhausting.

Funny thing, I still like the sites, sounds and smells of a chipper and I indulged again Saturday during the TWL work party. A group of 8-10 volunteers arrived at the old M & E (I heard at least three different explanations for “M&E”) tree farm to clear the invasives which included some monstrous scotch broom.

I arrived a bit late and the chipping and clearing had already started.

As we hauled pile after pile of debris over the growing field of stumps I stumbled more than once but never once went down.

Finally, after four hours of work we cleared a fraction of the property — and before the snow too — look at how good it looks!

That’s some quality mulch.

We’ll be back M & E — we’re not done.

We finally received our promised snow.

It was a perfect day in my book: a roaring fire all day at home, snowmen in the yard with my daughter in the morning and a farm walk with TWL in the afternoon — more to come on an active TWL weekend.

I took these photos a day early because the weather forecasts called for cloudy skies this evening and I wanted to capture the largest full moon of the year.

I had some difficulty with exposures because the moon was so bright that it blew out any of the trees or surrounding scenery.

I thought I’d play a bit and set the camera for a ten-second exposure and then slowly panned the tripod head — I’m not sure what to make of this, perhaps we’ll call it “art”.

We did get some elevated winds today on the ride home but nothing like the blizzard of snow I keep hearing about — being from the Midwest I find it humorous when people here complain about the cold-and-snow. We’ll see if the snow yet arrives.

A couple of people have asked about my photograpy & blogging workflow so I thought I’d offer a brief overview.

On the hardware side, I shoot mainly with my Nikon D40 but will occasionally use my iPhone or point-and-shoot Canon. I have a Garmin 60CSx GPS — powerful enough to get a signal even in the deepest woods — for recording track logs. In addition to the 60CSx I also have a Garmin Forerunner 305 which I use on occasion, mainly for running and cycling. I write and manage the photos on a MacBook Pro.

I do all my photo editing with Adobe’s awesome Lightroom. For a year or so iView (later Microsoft’s Expression Media) managed my photos but Lr can handle both non-destructive editing and photo cataloging. I make heavy use of keywords and other metadata so I can find photos easily later.

To aid in geo-metadata management I use Ascent for syncing my GPS with the computer — it manages my racing and training data too. GPSPhotoLinker marries the photos downloaded in Lr with the gpx data from Ascent.

Finally, when I put together a post I use MarsEdit for the editing and my own SmugNDrag for creating the photo links.

Workflow

If you’re still with me, here’s a more detailed timeline of my workflow.

In the field

1. Turn on the GPS and establish a strong signal. Sync the clock on the camera with the GPS to make the linking of the tracks and photographs more accurate. I find the D40 clock runs quite fast and so I re-sync just about every time I shoot.
2. Make sure the memory card has been re-formatted. I reformat before every session.
3. Shoot. I try to carry a tripod but it doesn’t always happen and I have no VR lens so I often will shoot 4-5 photographs in sequence — one or more of which is usually sharp enough.
4. Have fun. I most enjoy capturing my daughter as she grows up but I like to lay stomach-to-the-ground in the mud to photograph a mushroom too!

Archiving & Tagging

Most people seem to dislike the process of meta-tagging and editing but I enjoy it.

1. • Download the GPS tracks to the computer using Ascent and export the tracks to a gpx file. Sometimes I don’t have a GPS track log so I skip this step but more and more frequently I do.

     

   • Download the photographs from the camera using Lr. I download all new photographs into an Incoming directory separate from the tagged and archived structure in which they will eventually be placed. Lr doesn’t delete the photos from the card so I now have two copies of the photos: one on the computer, one on the card (that’s why I reformat before every shoot).

     

2. Drag the gpx file and the files from Lr into GPSPhotoLinker, map a few photos to make sure the time and place agree and batch tag the photos.

   

3. Reload the metadata from the photos in Lr and continue tagging with keywords. I use the hierarchical keyword feature of Lr to tag People, Event and other keyword metadata extensively.
4. Run through the photos in Lr and remove all the rejects and duplicates. On a typical weekend outing to the beach I’ll shoot about 400 photographs but keep around 150-200. I don’t know if this is typical but I’m getting faster and faster at culling so this often means I’ll get a few photos I really like.
5. Now the time consuming part, for all the photos I want to keep, begin making adjustments to color, exposure, crop, whatever.

   

   Sometimes I’ll make a black-and-white or other more drastic color alterations.

   
   
   

   Some photos require more work such as this photo in the farm stand under really bizarre lighting. I also took the liberty to crop out some needless components (mouse-over to see the changes).

6. All of the keepers are moved within Lr to a directory matching their Year/Month and renamed accordingly in sequence. Since I make extensive use of metatags the actual directory structure is less important than other workflow schemes I’ve seen.
7. Export to SmugMug the best of the keepers, or if of my daughter everything I have — sometimes with jfriedl’s plugin, other times with pysmug.
8. Backup. At this point I have a copy on the card, computer, SmugMug and external hard drive.

Blogging

After all the photographic bits are done I will occasionally blog about where we went and what we did.

Then I post, then you enjoy … I hope. Thanks for reading.

We love the sunset and have been seeing plenty of really striking ones recently. Yesterday we viewed the show at Fort Ward State Park and while the sky was decent I think the next set of photos work because of the bird flying through the frame — scroll quickly to make it all movie-like.

We have some beautiful farmland on the island and enjoy walking it off-season — today we went to Johnson Farm, home of the Harvest Fair.

The colors in this photo came out but the moon is not nearly as dramatic as in person — quite a difference in the trees from summer.