Once you have more than a handful of images it's going to be very important to use a systematic naming scheme. Having an organized system for numbering your files will allow you and your clients to identify images precisely. Instead of a client asking for a picture of that "prison cell in Alcatraz" (I have about 160 images of Alcatraz and most contain prison cells), the client can just look at my website and say I want to license image #22140. Given the ID number, I can quickly find the file in my Lightroom ...
Baby Sea Turtle Struggles to Reach the Ocean
Went I went to Costa Rica, one of the events I was very lucky to witness was the hatching of baby sea turtles on Tortuguero Beach and watching them make the long crawl from their nest to the ocean. Tortuguero is the largest Atlantic nesting site of the endangered green turtle. Green sea turtles nest from July to October. The mother turtle will crawl up the beach during the night to dig a nest in the sand with her hind flippers. She will lay from 100-200 eggs which are each about the size of a golf ball. ...
An Edible and Very Delicious Camera Cake
The cake my wife got me for my birthday: It's all edible including the camera body, lens, and even the book covers (I think these were made with some type of edible ink). ...
Silverfast Resolution Target for Measuring Scanner Performance
I recently borrowed a Silverfast resolution target to measure the performance of my scanners. The target is a slide that is printed with a series of black bars which get progressively smaller and closer together (the pattern is based on the USAF-1951 test pattern). The slide costs approximately $60 at B&H Photo. You scan the target and read off the group and element number where the gap between the bars is just discernable. Based on the group/element you look up the resolution from a chart. My ...
A Lightroom plugin for verifying images with hashes
For the past two months, I've been working on a plug-in to verify image files in Lightroom. The plugin works by computing a hash for each file which can be thought of as a digital fingerprint. As long as the image is unchanged (i.e., the file is still ok) the hash value will also remain the same. If the image file becomes damaged or corrupted, the fingerprint will change and plugin can identify this by comparing the hash to a previously stored value. The plugin is now available as a beta and you learn ...
Numbers behind a stock photo and print business
In the spirit of Harper's Index here are some random facts about my photo business: Largest number of prints in a single order: 11 Largest number of images licensed in a single transaction: 12 Biggest reproduction made from my work: 8'x25' (400 sq. feet) Biggest license: $5,840 Biggest license for a single image: $1,400 Smallest sale by a distributor: $27 Largest sale by a distributor: $350 Number of images on my website: 6,890 Number of images in my library: 32,097 Lines of Perl code to ...
Creating Photo Books in iBooks Author
Last fall I visited the city of Prague in the Czech Republic and spent a week photographing historical and cultural sites. With several thousand pictures’ worth of raw material, my wife and I decided to co-author a coffee table-type book that showcased the city through photographs. I previously authored a photographic book of Los Angeles with a traditional print publisher, so I was familiar with the complexity of a book project. I considered taking this route again by searching for a publisher, but ...
Swimming with Crocodiles in Tortuguero
During my trip to Costa Rica, I visited Tortuguero village, a very small community in the park that survives on eco-tourism. The entire area is undeveloped (there are no roads) and I traveled to the village by boat with our local guide. To my great surprise, as we pulled into the docks we saw many children swimming and playing in the water. Normally I wouldn't think anything of this, especially on a hot day. However, just downstream from the village we saw this fellow in the ...
Shooting Handheld Panoramas
I love to take panoramic images and when I've planned a specific shot I will carry all of the gear: a heavy tripod, leveling base, panorama head with nodal slide, etc. However, many times, especially when traveling in foreign countries, bringing all of this equipment is infeasible because it weighs too much or takes up too much space (or you left it at your place of lodging). If you are caught without your panning gear, it's still possible to create high quality panoramas if the conditions are good. For ...