Join me the weekend of April 23rd and 24th at Aperture Studios with two professional local models to explore lighting with a purpose with special Early Bird pricing until April 4th!!

We will discuss many different lighting techniques with studio strobes, small strobes, natural light and even continuous lighting. There will be lots of shooting time over the two days with both of our models including group instruction and Q&A sessions with lots of experimenting and planned setups to begin your experimenting. (more…)

AKA – Archiving Your Valuable DAM … Photos 😉

Last week, we discussed organizing your images on both your HDDs and your Lightroom catalog in a way that makes it easy to maintain *and* find your images. Here is a link back to the original post.

To briefly recap, I recommend a folder structure based on dates. Starting with a folder (or an entire HDD in my case) for the year, with a sub folder for each photo shoot based on the month and day including a description of the shoot and *then* importing that folder into Lightroom. (more…)

AKA DAM the Lightroom Catalog!!

I recently hosted a mentoring session for the Sackville Photography Club at my home and was, once again, surprised by the number of people who tell me they struggle with managing their photography library. I had intended a session for a handful of people to share some of my own “Best Practices” that have developed over the years and was entirely surprised by the number of people who registered for the 6 available seats. Since only a few were able to actually sit with me to look at my practices and chat about what is currently known as DAM or Digital Asset Management, or DAM, I have decided to put some of those thoughts down in this blog post to share the information with everyone else. After all, my living room is only *so* big. 😉

So, whether you already have several external hard disk drives (HDDs) loaded with photos and don’t know where to start or are starting from scratch with a new computer, I’ll have some tips to help.

The first step in setting up or taming your Digital Asset Library is to set up a structure and force yourself to stick with it. Often setting up this structure will take several iterations and can take years to find what works best for you… (more…)