Tagging Photos

Jim Grey at Down the Road has a post up about problems he's encountered sorting, storing, and finding photos:

When I started making photos again in about 2006, I didn’t have any photo-editing tools beyond an ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro. But I didn’t have that many photos to store. I created a folder called Camera, created a folder for 2006, and created folders for each digital photo outing or roll of film. From the beginning I’ve named those folders with the date and often some information: “2006-08-15 Birthday” or “2007-10-11 Yashica MG-1 Kodak Tri-X.” I still do this.

He notes that, as the sheer number of photos he stores has grown, and as they cover a longer and longer period of time, he's having more difficulty finding older ones and wishes he'd been tagging them all along.

I feel his pain. Almost exactly.

I have two ways of sorting photos. Photos of a specific event or occasion, like a trip to the zoo or a museum visit or just a photo walk downtown, will get stored in a folder labeled "YYYY-MM-DD EVENT NAME".  Every January, I round up all the previous year's photo folders and move them into a "YYYY" folder and archive that inside my "Pictures" folder.

The random and incidental pictures, like ones of cars and dogs and squirrels and people that just get randomly shot during the course of a day get stored in a folder labeled with the camera that was used, e.g. "D700" or "1D Mark III".

Thus far this hasn't been much of a problem, but...

Yesterday I was looking at a photo I'd posted on Facebook and thought it might make a suitable subject for my car blog. I didn't note with which camera I'd shot it, but I did leave myself a clue in the caption: 

In the thirty seconds I had these open in Photoshop Bridge to convert them from NEF to JPEG, I grew a mullet and a flock of bald eagles landed on the front porch and started screeching the opening chords of Lee Greenwood's Greatest Hit.

So I knew it had been snapped with a Nikon, and I knew it had been taken in November of 2021 from the date on Facebook.

I spent probably thirty minutes scouring the following folders: Coolpis P7000, D2X, D3, D200, D300S, D700, D800, D3000, D5000, D7000, D7100, Nikon 1 J1, Nikon 1 J4, Nikon 1 V1, and Nikon 1V2 before finally looking in the folder of the one camera I was sure I hadn't used... and there it was, in the D1X folder.

I have really got to get better about tagging photos.

Baby Steps

Back in 2015, Bobbi and I went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art (I refuse to call it "Newfields", no matter what the current signage reads) to see the touring "Dream Cars" exhibit.

I brought along a few cameras. Two were SLRs, a Canon EOS 10S, wearing an EF 35-135mm f/3.5-4.5 zoom lens and loaded with Ilford Delta 3200, and the other was an EOS Rebel XTi wearing the EF 50mm f/1.8 "Nifty Fifty". There was also the Nikon Coolpix P7000 I carried in my pocket all the time.

Thing was, I still had a lot to learn (and also re-learn) about photography. For instance, all my SLR experience before I bought the Rebel had been back in the film days, so I didn't know anything about crop factor. I slapped the 50mm on there because of the fast aperture, but the APS-C sensor on the Rebel made it effectively an 80mm lens. It was unstabilized, the fairly primitive sensor in the XTi struggled in low light, and I had way too long of a lens for shooting in the tight indoor quarters of a museum.

Meanwhile, even with the high speed B&W Ilford film in the EOS 10S, the unstabilized kit lens really struggled with the lighting.

The only camera that I got any really decent results with was the Coolpix, which had a fast, stabilized zoom lens, and which I put in Program mode at ISO 400 and just let 'er rip.

Not only was the gear primitive and my lens choices questionable, but I was shooting SOOC jpegs and my metering bag of tricks had, like, only two tricks in it.

Given what I had available at the time, I'd have been better off with the unstabilized 50mm on the film camera and just going with the stabilized EF-S 18-135mm travel zoom on the Rebel.

I would love to go back in time with my Fuji X-T2 or Nikon D800...