Getting close to sorting out the Lightroom catalogue to a point where I can reliably use it to create the galleries for the web site. It has been a learning experience, not least about why it pays to have a process in place from the moment the shutter closes. In Antarctica I started keywording the shots at the end of the daily shoot, if only becuase there was so much to take in. I now realise that this needs to be a general thing, irrespective of the length of the shoot. Looking at my work from 2009 and it is coming back to bite me hard.

The aim, currently, is to have a reasonable ‘showcase’ gallery up-and-running by the end of January; then start populating the gallery views from there. The travel blogs are quite easy as they’ll just be the old Picasa galleries, albeit taken directly from the now updated Lightroom catalogue.

Now I understand why many professionals have managers for this part of their business.

Oh! Lots of posts planned on stuff like backups, advice on destination preparation and the like.

mtc…

Work continues apace on the site. I was secretly hoping to have the showcase gallery up-and-running by now, but shortly after beginning to work through my Lightroom catalogue I realised that it was in a pretty horrific state. So, I’ve been spending my free time simply working my way through the catalogue and cleaning it up. For example, every trip I make has two collections; an ‘All Images’ and a ‘Selected’. However, what finally appears in the finished photoblog is usually a subset of the ‘selected’ collections and usually includes at least one images that  has had additional work on it, such as selective colour, removal of something I didn’t spot, or even Imagenomic’s Noiseware filter applied.None of this was reflected in the catalogue and that’s now coming back to haunt me. Another example of the issues I’m facing is that the whole point of the photoblog series I started back in 2007 was to allow the viewer to not only see some images from a destination but to also understand from the associated comments a little about the image. This really is the nexus of The Veiled World, after all. The problem is that all my comments have been added after-the-fact in Google’s Picasa and as such are attached to the final JPEG images, not the Lightroom RAW files and the post-processed TIF files. So, they’ve all got to be added.

In short, a lot of housekeeping is going on behind the scenes., but I think I have decided on the categories I’m going to have. More on that in a future post.

The current plan is to have the showcase gallery up by the end of the month. Hopefully 🙂