The days end in sunsets and my trip to Brazil ended with a long airplane flight back to the USA. If you think that flying internationally could not get any worse, think again, with a mask on.
On a previous post, Sunset, Pedra de Itaipava, I shared a sunset photograph from a hike. I took the photo above from the same place, on the same day, a few minutes later, also handheld. If you want to learn more about how I took the photo, please refer to the post linked above.
I came back home with a little under 3,000 photos. I am beginning to process them and think that this is a good opportunity to talk about my workflow.
- I always take my photos in raw format and also small jpgs;
- When I arrive home after a trip or an outing, I transfer all my files to two external drives: one I keep at home and one I keep at work, about 30 miles from here. Why two locations? Well, let’s suppose something happens to my home … its reassuring to know that I have a second copy somewhere else;
- I also keep the original memory cards from important trips and photoshoots for a few years;
- In my external drives, I organize my files by year and, within each year, by location or subject: the travel photographs are stored in folders named after the location and the still life photos are stored according to subject;
- I use Adobe Bridge to index, keyword, and browse my files. For an example, see the folder below, named “2021.” All my files from my last trip are stored in a subfolder named “Brazil;”
- Directly from Adobe Bridge, I can open each file into Photoshop. I do NOT use Lightroom. I hate lightroom;
- In Adobe Bridge, I delete all technically unacceptable files first. Unacceptable files are out of focus, extremely over or underexposed, have resulted from accidents like clicking the shutter when moving the camera, or a combination of those;
- I then inspect my series of similar photographs and chose one that I like and delete the others. For example, if I took three pictures of a flower in the wind, I choose the best one and discharge the others;
- After this stage, I delete all my jpg files from the travel folder. That reduces the number of files to store to one half;
- I then keyword the pictures using Adobe Bridge. My files from Brazil all got the labels “Brazil”, “Petropolis”, then general keywords like “landscape”, “botanical”, “person” etc;
- I continue to work on it for as many days as it takes to find and to process those award-winning photographs 😁;
The entire process may take weeks or even months to complete. Some of my trips don’t get processed until a few years later, as I am often pressed for time. Sometimes, digging into old folders that were not completely processed using the newest versions of raw processing programs will reveal long forgotten treasures.
It is all about the light 
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