Climbing Mount Lightroom

[swan_tower]

I should mention that one of the reasons I’m doing the Year in Pictures project is to blackmail myself into finishing the task of processing all of my photos. After all, if I don’t get through Poland/last month’s Monterey trip/my eight million cemetery pictures from London, you all will never get to see the best of them! And that would be a tragedy.

So how many photos do I have, anyway?

Well. For various reasons, I have photos in my Lightroom catalogue that I didn’t take, which therefore will not be making it into the Year in Pictures set. (Though I’m having to edit some of those, too. And someday, when I’m done with my own stuff, my husband is probably going to make sad eyes at me to edit his pictures, and there are . . . quite a lot of those, let’s say. Some of which are in here already, some of which aren’t.) Stuff in Lightroom That Isn’t Mine = 2132 pictures.

Stuff in Lightroom That Is Mine = 7794 pictures.

Which is a fair-sized stack.

But! I have been working assiduously to get through these! I am pleased to say that after a recent push (in which I finished off my honeymoon, our visit to the Queen Mary down in L.A., and another day of Poland), I have reduced the number which still need editing to the low, low sum of 1361.

. . . this is about the point at which I say “oh god, I’m doomed.”

I’m making progress, really I am. In fact, I’ve done more than the 6433 photos it looks like, because part of the process involves deleting pictures that aren’t that good or duplicate other photos of better quality. I don’t know exactly how many I started with, but I’ve probably deleted two thousand, maybe even more. Certainly more, if I count my first-pass cull of the England/France trip last fall, since that whacked a good thousand out of the total on the spot. So while the current numbers say I’m about 83% done, I’m actually doing much better than that. Still and all: I have a long way to go before I’ll have finished climbing Mt. Lightroom. (And it doesn’t help that I keep taking more. bloody. photos.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[gelsey.livejournal.com]

You're basically doing a 365 project of past photos which is awesome. :D

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

It'll be 258 when I'm done, since I opted not to post on weekends. Not positive I'll have 365 that are rated five stars, and even if I do, it will involve a number of photos that are quite similar to one another; I figured it was better to avoid semi-duplicates.

[gelsey.livejournal.com]

Still a ton, and lots of work! I've not used light room by I have a basic Photoshop I use sometimes. I started the 365 project (you might be interested in the site, its that .org) while I'm finishing saving for a nice DSLR to try to upgrade my shooting (total amateur ha). Though I don't comment a lot I enjoy seeing all these pictures you're posting. You have some brilliant ones!

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'm really pleased by how much people seem to be liking them so far.

I need a better camera, myself; I have my mother's old Leica, and overall it's pretty good, but it's abysmal at high ISO -- where "high" = "anything above 400." I've gotten better at compensating for that, by pegging the ISO at 400 in low-ish light and then dropping the f-stop as low as it will go to keep the shutter speed from being slow enough to make trouble . . . but it only goes so far. I have a number of shots that would be substantially better if they were less grainy and/or blurry. (In related news, I need to remember to get my tripod back from my brother, to help with that whole "blurry" thing. :-P )

[gelsey.livejournal.com]

All I've had so far are decent point and shoots and I'm using my phone camera loads (there are apparently lenses for phone cameras! I am trying not to indulge myself). I'm going to have a steep learning curve once I get y camera especially since I'm still learning terminology. My tax returns this year are going to the purchase. Ha yes! Tripods help with that *grins* They're on my list of things to get along with the camera and at least one extra lens (probably telephoto. ..).

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

So what does editing consist of? Are you doing major adjustments to each picture, or eyeballing each one for need for any editing, or doing batch edits?

[squishymeister.livejournal.com]

yikes! Sometimes I miss the days of film cameras where we took far less pictures (cause you had to pay to develop each one, and you only had a limited number to last you the whole trip)... it made organising them so much easier! Not that I'd every *actually* go back :P

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are enough benefits to digital that I have zero desire to go back. :-P

(Especially since I took about four hundred photos in five days in Japan . . . on film. Not much of an improvement.)