How I'm Using Social/Online Services

Recently, I rejoined the land of Flickr and have started posting images again. Then, I joined another site, 500px.com at the recommendation of a fellow photographer. Right now, I'm looking into a couple more online sites. Also recently heard about OpenPhoto.me, so guess I'll check that out as well.

This leads me to this post: How I'm using these sites and what I'm posting to each, since it would kind of be pointless to post all to all.

Quick Rundown...

What follows is a sort of rough timeline and account of what goes where:

1. The Photoshoot

   This is where the "magic" happens. Me, my subject, and my camera. *snap* *snap* *snap* Depending on the shoot, I'll have a few dozen to a few hundred images to work from. In this example, we will go with having 100 shots from the photoshoot, good/bad/etc.
   

   The images are all imported into Adobe Lightroom 3 on my macbook pro, to an external hard drive, previews are generated, images are tagged, then I go through the first culling.
   

   Basically, shots that work, get flagged as such, being given a rating from 3-5 stars. Great shots are flagged as picks.
   

   All rated and picked images are put into a collection and are given some post processing love, before being exported as full sized JPEG(s).
   

   Generally, the cull results in 20-30 images out of an original 100 images. Partly due to double-shooting/safety-shooting(event, vacation, etc). For shots involving an off camera flash and composed shots, it's more like 50-60 images out of 100 images. But we'll go with the 20-30 image number here.
   

2. To The Vault

   The first destination for the images, other than my external hard drive and the fileserver, is to upload to Smugmug and SmugVault. I have the system setup to do watermarking, and they generate variously sized thumbnails and galleries for me. Woot.
   

   Once the images are up and online, I check the tagging information, captions, titles, etc.
   

   Anything that doesn't look right after upload, I hide or remove, and maybe cull a bit more.
   

   At this point, I might post a link to my gallery to FaceBook. I should still have around 20 or so images at this point. :)
   

3. Flickr

   At this point, I want to share some of the images with the Flickr pool, and will look through my images once again, and choose a select few to post to Flickr. This could be another 40-50% cull, bringing down the 20 from the SmugMug posting to maybe 10 images in the Flickr pool posting.
   

4. 500px

   500px.com is a new site a fellow photographer recommended to me. The bar is pretty high here, so I've elected to only post images that I'm honestly happy about and have no qualms about. So, from the 10 or so images from the Flickr pool, I'll choose maybe 2-3 images. Sometimes, just one.
   

Why?

I actually arrived at this model after attending Zack's workshop and attending a few CreativeLive workshops. Basically, you want your best work out there... and that is not every image that you produce. For the longest time, SmugMug has been the dumping ground for just about every image I've shot and processed. It has alot of legacy stuff in there. :) So I'll leave it be. However, the new presence on Flickr and 500px, I want them to be more representative of my online portfolio, and for that, I want what is displayed there to be the best that I can produce. This tiered approach makes it easier for me to cull, as I don't feel like I'm throwing anything away, just filtering and letting each tier of images go to where they will.

David Hobby's Strobist Boot Camp III Has Started!

Wow, it's been a while since I last posted. Things have been hectic, some good, some bad. But that's not what this post is about.

David Hobby, of Strobist fame, has begun the third installment in his BootCamp series. The Bootcamps are his special way of creating assignments for people to work on, submit, and the winner gets a prize. It's motivation for those photographers who would otherwise sit on their butts and read about photography vs actually going out and shooting. (This actually sounds alot like me of late! ^_^;;)

The first assignment is a portrait of someone important in the community, shot simply and lit with 1 or 2 speedlights.

The deadline is Saturday, July 9th, 1700 hours GMT. (That's noon Eastern in the US.)

I'm pretty excited. Last time, I only got through a few assignments in BootCamp II before I ran out of juice, with work and school/etc. So this time around, hoping to do better. :)

The resulting images are being posted in the Strobist flickr pool, tagged with "bc31".