The challenge begins

My first photo opportunity for today came when I arrived at the park and walked over to the pedestrian bridge to see if there was any action on the river. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that the fisherman standing right beneath the bridge was wearing a bright red hat. How did he know I needed a little color on this very dull day? Serendipity! I’ll share a few more photos at the end of this post, but first I want to pick up the threads of the story I began yesterday…so this will be photographic challenge, part II. If you are not interested in reading about how I am getting control of my photo collection, just skip down to the pictures at the end of the post. Go ahead; I won’t mind if you do. I’m really only writing about it because it’s part of the process for me and maybe one or two readers out there might find it helpful. If that’s not you, and you could care less, just stop reading now and move on to the pictures. I won’t be offended…honest!

To recap, my challenge involves…

1.Purging my vast collecting so that what’s left on my computer is the stuff that really matters to me and/or the stuff that I consider portfolio quality.
2.Getting a grip on organization, i.e. collections and keywords
3.Setting a higher standard going forward

A simple list, but a massive task. Purging my thousands of worthless photo files had to be tackled, and it became (almost) a pleasure when my husband bought me a new iMac for Christmas and my daughter Becky, her husband, and our two oldest grandchildren gifted me with Lightroom 3. Downloading LR was easy; learning how to use it was fairly challenging, but definitely a lot of fun. I could not have made a dent in the purging process without these two gifts because my computer, nine years old with an outdated operating (windows XP) was incredibly slow and overflowing with picture files with little semblance of organization. To use an old expression, it was running as slow as molasses in January. I should have tackled the task before I lost control…at least a year or so ago. Procrastination doesn’t paint a pretty picture!

So far, I have culled my files from 2010 and 2011, deleting pictures I should never have kept in the first place (and, in many instances, should never have taken). That was step one in the right direction. I have also organized them in what Lightroom calls “collections” (Other programs might call them albums or galleries)…and that’s step two. The next thing to tackle, step three, is keywords, something I didn’t appreciate until I began this process, but I’m loving them now. Keeping track of my pictures has been transformed from impossible to possible, all because of collections and keywords.

That’s it for tonight. I am beginning to ramble, so it’s time to say goodnight from my corner of Ohio. In a future post, I will share some thoughts on how I plan to set higher standards going forward, including switching the image quality setting on my camera from jpeg to raw. In the meantime, here are a few more pictures taken on today’s photowalk.

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