Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibit, Houston

The Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year roaming exhibit is coming to Houston, and will be on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science from January 19 until May 6, 2007. More information on this exhibit can be found here. I am planning on heading over there at some point with another local photographer, Lazslo Perlaky, who also has an image in this year's exhibit.

My 2007 Resolutions

I have a long list of items that I either need to get done or desire to get done. Some are professional growing opportunities in my safari business, some are opportunities for me to grow in my creative photography, and others are just plain silly goals. So here are some of my 2007 resolutions, better thought of as goals.

At the top of my list is the management of my stock library. I have roughly 30,000 photographs taken in Africa, and they need to be organized, tagged, rated and edited. I suspect the tagging will be the most difficult part, as each and every image will need to have some fields attributed. Country, location and species are essential for each image. Once all of my images are tagged, I will go through and rate the images from 1 star to 5 stars, and then I will spend some time editing the raw images. The edits will range from simple exposure/white balance/contrast edits to more complex masking techniques in Photoshop. This will take a ton of time. I am thinking of only spending a few minutes per image if it has 5 stars, and much less if 4 stars or less. Keep in mind that I can have a range of 10 images that all have 5 stars, and they might be in a series, which means I can make nearly the same changes to all 10 images with the click of a button.

The purpose of organizing my images is primarily for easy retrieval by me or my stock buyers. I am now a member of Photoshelter.com, and will be uploading a massive amount of images to their servers in the coming months. My image archive will be available 24/7 for anybody who wishes to license an image of mine, and will be able to download a full resolution file quickly and easily. Photoshelter will also enable my print sales, and I will do the printing/signing/shipping from my studio. They do allow me to outsource the printing of my images, but I am never comfortable with anybody printing my images, as I need to be able to inspect each and every print that has my name on it.

Another goal for 2007 is much less cerebral. I have been working on a black and white look to my African safari images, and I need to get it to a point where I am happy with it. I am 80% there, but I just need some more time on it. I cannot wait for this to be completed.

I would also like to visit more locations in Africa in 2007, but this might not happen. My safari schedule is very full for 2007, as I am leading 5 safaris already. I might spend some time wandering around Tanzania for a week, photographing everyday life in rural communities.

What are *your* 2007 resolutions?

My digital filing system

I often get questions related to how I store my digital images on my hard drive, and why I do it the way that I do it. Keep in mind that this is my system, and not necessarily something that will work for other people. In the absensce of database driven applications such as Aperture or Lightroom, using a physical file structure has been a necessity for me.

First off, my folder structure:

_Photos\year\yymmdd 'job'\filename.xxx

All of my digital photos are stored underneath a folder called '_Photos'. I put an underline before the word Photos because it will sort to the top if there are other folders near it. After that I have all of my photos separated into different folders by year (4 digits, such as 2004, 2005 or 2006). Then I have a folder for each day or each job in a given day (if I happen to have more than 1 job or separate shoot in that day, they will be separated). For example: '06.22.02 Serengeti'. If this folder somehow gets separated from my '2006' folder, I know where it should go. I guess I could put in MMDDYY format, but this is how I started off organizing my images way back in 1999 with my first digital camera.

Then my file naming logic:

yymmdd_hhmmss_job_imagenumber.xxx

So, the year at the front of the filename, then the hours, minutes and seconds, then the job name, and then a 3-digit image number for that day, starting with 001. Why do I put the hours, minutes and seconds into the file? Simple. I often shoot with more than 1 camera, and this allows me to have all of my images in chronological order, even if I am sorting by filename in either OSX or Windows XP.I do have separate folders called 'Portfolio - Africa' and 'Portfolio - Africa Misc' that I place all of my converted raw files into. These are mostly layered Photoshop files in 16 bit, converted by whatever raw conversion application I was using at the time. This approach is going away, as I adopt a more database-driven approach, where it is not necessary to always export an image to be worked on in Photoshop.Well, there you have it. A simple, well defined structure on my hard drive for all of my images.

"Which Way?", Cape of Good Hope, Africa, April 2006
Canon EOS 5D + 24-105mm f/4 L IS

Namibia Portfolio

I am offering a portfolio of my 25 most popular images from Namibia, Africa. These photographs were all taken on a recent safari this past April. This portfolio has been in the works for a few months now, and just in time for the holidays.

The images selected are from four different locations in Namibia: Kolmanskop ghost town, the Namib Rand Reserve, the red dunes of Sosussvlei, and Serra Cafema along the Angola border. All twenty five of these images are printed on 11x17" Moab Entrada Bright White 190gsm paper with Epson Ultrachrome inks on my Epson Pro 4000 printer. Each image is signed underneath the image area on the lower righthand side. The printed photographs are presented in Moab Economy Folio portfolios to make the final price attractive.

The price of my Nambia portfolio is $495 for all 25 images at once. My last portfolio, 'Africa', was three times as expensive as this Namibia portfolio, which makes this a much better value. On a cost per print basis, each print is only $20.

Here is a link to the entire portfolio of Namibia photographs.

To order your portfolio, please send me an email. Each portfolio is printed and assembled on an as-needed basis. This portfolio will make a perfect Christmas gift for you or somebody you love that enjoys fine art landscape photography. If you order by December 15, you will have the portfolio by Christmas day. International shipping might affect this, however.

Upgrading the Macbook Hard Drive

So when I purchased my MacBook in a hurry, I neglected to ask for the hard drive upgrade to a larger drive. Not that big of a deal, since I am more technically inclined than not.

For anybody considering a hard drive upgrade on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, here are some quick pointers. First of all, the process is very simple. I am used to using Ghost or Partition Magic on the PC to make such a process work, but on the Mac it is atrociously simple. Here is what you will need:

• Super Duper software for copying your data.


• Torx T9 size screwdriver


• external USB SATA150 laptop hard drive enclosure


• New hard drive. I chose a Seagate 120GB 5400rpm drive (5 year warranty)

First off, you need to put your new hard drive into the external enclosure. I had a difficult time locating an external enclosure that works with SATA 150 hard drives, as opposed to the older PATA, or IDE drives. Once inside the enclosure, all you need to do is launch the OSX Disk Utility to Erase (format in the pc world) the new drive. **Warning** do not erase your internal hard drive, or you will lose all of your data.

Once Erased, launch Super Duper (Thanks, Josh for the heads up) to copy all of your data over from your original internal hard drive. Pretty easy. The software works without purchasing a license, but if you want to schedule your backups or access a few more features, you will need to purchase the software. This is a good idea for me, as this will enable me to create a bootable backup drive that I can take with me while on workshops or safaris. Remember: whatever can happen, will.

Once the copying process is complete (mine took about 2 hours for a 50% filled up 80GB drive), you will need to remove the internal drive and replace it with your new one. First take off the laptop batter, then there are 3 screws to unscrew. You then pull the white tab that is connected to the hard drive, and pull the hard drive slowly out.

The original drive is attached to a caddy, which you will need to transfer to your new drive. A Torx T9 screwdriver will do the trick. Voila. Swap them out, and pull your machine back together.

You should be good to go. I now have a 120GB drive with roughly 80GB of unused space.

Here is another great resource