Check out: 7 Bad Habits of Digital Photographers
Over on Epic Edit, Brian has a guest post about the 7 bad habits of Digital Photographers. How many of these bad habits do you have?
Bad habit #1, not checking your gear bag. I can tell you I actually forgot my camera bag completely once when I raced out of my house. Luckily it wasn't for a paying client - just my sister. Now I'm extra vigilent to make sure have my bag and that it includes, at the minimum, a camera with lens, a battery, and a cf card. And now my nanny asks me if I have my camera when I'm heading out the door for a shoot. How embarassing.
Bad Habit #2, not checking ISO settings. I've done this one too. One time I jacked up my ISO to take some night time pictures, and then when I took pictures at my next shoot I was like "what's up with this - why are they so blown out" and then I remembered the last use of my camera and quickly adjusted. At least I check the back of the camera often to see how things look so I didn't go through an entire portrait session at ISO 1600. Ick!
Bad Habit #5, deleting pictures too fast. I have the opposite problem. I don't delete anything and therefore my hard drive is now as cluttered as my home office (I don't throw anything away either). However, I'm deep into a two week life reorganizational effort that includes getting both my hard drive and office cleaned up and ready for a busy 2008!
can you recommend a good online hosting place for storing pics as a backup?
Tonya
Posted by: Tonya | January 07, 2008 at 02:22 PM
#8 has to be “chimping instead of looking at the subject.” See page 68 of Joe McNally’s book, The Moment it Clicks. As Joe says, “You can miss a lot of moments with your head stuck in your LCD. Checking what just went on is a surefire ticket to missing what’s about to go on.”
Posted by: BillRogers | February 18, 2008 at 09:24 AM
Re: bad habit #5 - you might want to look at some kind of Digital Asset Management solution. Personally I love Lightroom to pieces, but there are plenty of other options to try. It's an additional expense at the outset, but I've found that it really pays for itself pretty quickly in terms of time saved organizing all my files. Now I can let the software take care of organizing everything in a tidy and logical manner at import time, and I can spend my time on the more productive aspects of editing, processing and exporting to customers.
Plus, Lightroom does a much better job of keeping things organized than I ever would, even if I had the time to do it. ;)
I found this book to be highly enlightening on the whole asset management front:
The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers
Posted by: Phil | February 19, 2008 at 03:09 PM
... and then I read some more, and discover you're already using Lightroom. Never mind then!
Still, that is a DAM good book...
Posted by: Phil | February 19, 2008 at 03:12 PM
Actually, that was one of the first books I bought when I decided to go pro!!! Thanks for the recommendation and even with Lightroom it is good to have some organizational foundations.
Posted by: Jessica | February 19, 2008 at 09:35 PM