Sunday, March 6, 2011

Ten Biggest Safari Mistakes and Lessons...Number 1

Work flow... Okay, not the most important lesson, nor the least. No chronological order. This is trial and error. I think everyone has their own system and that's okay. I don't believe there is a right or wrong way. It is more what works best for you. When I go on safari, I typically take between 6,000 to 20,000 pictures per safari, so I really need a good way of organizing my images, so I can easily and quickly find any pictures that I am looking for at a later date. In this blog, I am going to share how I organize my work flow.

For my work flow I like to make a folder, title it according to the subject and date it was shot. I do this between each safari drive or at the end of each day. I Copy the pictures to that folder on the first hard drive, then copy it again to a second hard drive. Sometimes the computer gets interrupted copying the files somehow. Be careful because if this happens, not all of your pictures will be copied to your hard drive. Make sure that the number of pictures on your card corresponds with the number of files in each folder before you delete the camera card.

A lot of photographers catalogue with lightroom. It is convenient and you can edit them from there, but I don't like that work flow for my own reasons, so I guess I am a rebel. I just don't like it. Don't get me wrong, I love lightroom. I just don't like to use it for cataloguing my photos. Instead, my pictures are all in a folder and I open them in bridge within photoshop. Likely not the most common way, but at the end of the day, I think you have to do what works best for you.

My next issue with workflow is organizing your pictures from good and bad.  I go through all of the pictures and pick out my favourites and make a copy of each picture in a favourites folder. Over the next year, I will likely go through all of the pictures once or twice more. Each time I go through them I tend to find another couple images that I missed the first time.

Not the most exciting blog, but believe it or not, I did go through quite a bit of trial and error before I figured out a system that I like.

Tuesday I fly out to Wapusk National Park to photograph polar bear mom's and cubs. I will try to blog daily over my safari as a diary. The sightings aren't guaranteed. Some days you have great sightings, some times we blank and sometimes the storms and weather prevent us from going out at all. So if you are curious about what a wildlife safari in the arctic is like, follow my next week of blogging from March 9th to 17th.

Polar bears starting Wednesday. Until then...

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