The Three Little Bears

Three Little Bears (1/320 at 7.1, 280mm at ISO 160)

It’s Q&A Friday….

First off let me say thanks for all the emails and comments about my True Americana post…it was much appreciated. I mentioned earlier in the week I would follow up and tell you my bear debacle. I was driving into Yellowstone with a Jeep loaded to the brim with dogs, people and gear when we passed a large group of people and park rangers out in the field, all looking towards the stream. I suspected a bear, given the crowd and the number of rangers, and sure enough I was right. Except it wasn’t just a bear. It was a mother and her three cubs, all feeding off a bison carcass in the stream. Folks, I have to tell you I wanted to grab a chair, a long lens, and a tripod and line up with all the rest of the photographers; but I simply didn’t’ have time. I ended up using my 70-200 with a 1.4 extension to get this shot, but to truly do the image justice you would need a much longer lens. I ended up free handing the shot because as luck would have it my tripod was at the bottom of my gear sack—lesson learned again! But, walking away and saying I’m not going to take the shot because I didn’t  have the right gear just wouldn’t fit with my personality. No regrets means making the decisions you know you can live with….for me it was leaving with some photography versus none at all.

Now for the Q&A:

Q—Amanda—Whenever I shoot with a longer lens my images tend to be blurry.

A—Camera shake is more likely with a longer lens. Small movements are increased due to the sheer length of the lens, combined with the fact that the lens is generally heavier, therefore harder to stabilize with handholding. Camera shake can be reduced by using a tripod, or monopod for sports. If you’re shooting stills, a cable release combined with a tripod is always handy; another option, albeit one that takes more time, is to use the camera’s self timer. If you’re shooting freehand, make sure you’re using image stabilization and your speed is set as fast as your focal length.

Q—Aaron— I have a question about file management. It turns out that I am roughly the digital equivalent of a hoarder and probably need an intervention before my files come crashing down on me (or my hard drive finally refuses to store anything else). My problem is that I can’t decide what to keep, how long to keep it, and what to do with things that need to be archived. How do you manage your files? Do you keep all your raw files as well as any tiffs or jpegs you create from them? How long do you keep files before you archive them? What do you use to archive them? Help!!!

A— I think you’re probably not alone here. The short answer to this question is that I use a Drobo, so storage is never a real issue. I should note here that I don’t store anything on my local/internal hard drive. However, I recognize that this system is not cheap, so there are alternatives. Hard drive space in the form of external drives is cheap…I mean it’s crazy cheap by today’s standards. If you are using your local drive currently, you can purchase a 500GB external drive, such as the Western Digital Passport, and use that to catalog your older photos that you just aren’t using currently. A couple times a month I go back to my image library (usually a few years back) and clean house. It’s easier for me to go back two years and look at images and say “man this just doesn’t work nor will it ever work” then look at an image I took just yesterday and say the same thing. At this point, after some clean up, you could transfer some catalogs to the external drive (make sure it exports out the actual photos, and all the file formats), and make sure to label the drives, so that you have a working system.
As far as my workflow, I use Lightroom to manage my entire library. Upon importing my photos I convert everything to DNG. I generally keep all the files, tiffs and DNG’s. My first step when uploading is to weed through my photos by deleting blurry shots, test shots, etc from the drive. The images I plan on working on I simply assign a 5 stars rating. I work only on those images, and once I’ve finished my editing I assign them a Green label, which for me means “good to go.” Keep in mind, the 5 stars and green labeled images represent a small fraction of my entire library, but that doesn’t mean I throw everything else out. I rarely delete photos of my friends and family (unless they’re just too blurry)….like I said hard drive space is cheap. Another option is to keep only your 5 star images on your local hard drive. You never know when you’ll need to enter your best photo into a contest! You can then make a monthly practice of archiving the unrated images to your external drive. There’s nothing wrong with being an image hoarder providing you have a method to your madness. Keep in mind, organizational tasks such as keywording, ratings systems, folder organization and healthy back-ups will make you sleep better at night

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. I’m heading into Yellowstone today to visit Old Faithful and talk to some rangers about my upcoming Photowalk. If you’re interested in joining me on Scott Kelby’s Third Annual Photowalk then click HERE to learn more. If you have questions, or  follow-up questions, please submit them, I’d love to answer them.

Very best, John

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 at 3:25 pm. It is filed under General, National Parks, Q&A and tagged with Q&A, yellowstone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.