Nontrivial Exercises

What Is Your Photography Workflow?

As I’ve spent more time on my growing passion / hobby of photography over the past year, the way I process and store my photos has changed.

When I started with digital photography, I just had my digital camera and my PC. Then, I found out about Picasa and began to use it to process my photos. I then learned about Paint.net and started to use it from time to time for the more detailed adjustments that required layers. Then I found out about Photoshop, but couldn’t (and still can’t) afford it. Fortunately, there’s Gimp, which is open source (free) and does many, if not most, of the functions Photoshop can do.

After switching to a Mac 4 months ago (135 days to be exact) I began to use iPhoto as a central processing and organizing function. I can do many basic color and exposure adjustments in iPhoto, and then I use Gimp for the more creative and advanced work.

Along the way I discovered Flickr as well and began to use it as the way to share and display my photos.

However, now I’m starting to use a few other services - Tabblo, Zooomr and Riya to store and share my photos, and I need to decide which pics go where. Each of these photo sharing services has a different way to upload, and only Flickr and Tabblo can export directly from iPhoto.

I also need to figure out a more consistent approach to how I rename and store edited photos outside of iPhoto (i.e. in Gimp). In other words, I need to define how & where within my folder structure I’m going to store my edited photos and what I’m going to name them.

I don’t have much money to put into photography right now, so buying Photoshop or Aperture isn’t an option for me. I have a decent camera, but it’s not a DSLR, which is what I’m saving my pennies for, and it therefore limits some of what I can do. So, I’m not a pro or even a high level amateur, but I’d like to be one someday.

If you have any recommendations on a digital photography workflow or thoughts on how I could better define mine, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll write more as I figure out what works best.