Photography – Page 12 – A Darker View

Maintaining the Archive

How do you organize your photos? The answer to that is critical. Anyone who generates a lot of images, and that is just about everyone these days needs to answer that question.

XKCD Photo Library Management — Photo Library Management from XKCD (Randall Munroe, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.)

Keeping my photo archive organized is a bit of a chore. But skip on the effort and it simply gets worse, to the point of being unusable. If you can not find the photos you need why take photos at all?

The trick is to develop a process and to use it… Religiously. I can not tell you how to do it, I can just tell you how I do it and offer a few suggestions.

There are two basic approaches, simply come up with a way to organize the images into a directory using nothing more than your operating system. The other approach is to use some form of photo organizing software to aid in the task. I do make a large assumption here, that the images are in digital format, not negatives and slides. For that you will have to look elsewhere for answers.

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Shrimp

Shrimp Gallery

Banded Coral Shrimp (Stenopus hispidus) on the reef at Puako

Marbled Shrimp — A marbled shrimp (Saron marmoratus) between boulders in a cave floor, 40ft depth

Lottin's Snapping Shrimp — Lottin’s Snapping Shrimp (Alpheus lottini) deep in a califlower coral head (Pocillopora meandrina)

Flamebacked Coral Shrimp (Stenopus pyrsonotus) under a boulder at ʻAuʻau Crater

Diving Gallery

Red Swimming Crab — Red swimming crab (Gonioinfradens paucidentata) in a reef ledge at Pentagon

Gold Lace Nudibranch — Gold lace nudibranch (Halgerda terramtuentis) in a cave at 25ft depth at The Pentagon

A Fellows Nudibranch (Hiatodoris fellowsi) in a cave at 35ft depth

Redbarred Hawkfish — Redbarred hawkfish (Cirrhitops fasciatus) perched in a reef crevice

Bluestripe Squirrelfish — Bluestripe squirrelfish (Sargocentron tiere) in a small cave at Pentagon

Diver Down — Diver Mark Devenot cruising the reef at Hoover’s Towers north of Honokohau

Cleaning Station — A group whitebar surgeonfish (Acanthurus leucopareius) of clean algae and parasites off a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas)

A Snowflake Moray (Echidna nebulosa) in the reef at Three Tables, Oahu

A pair of White-margin Nudibranch (Glossodoris rufomarginata), 25ft depth at O’oma

Pete on the Reef — Pete looking for subjects to photograph on a Kona reef

Andrew Shooting — The author, Andrew Cooper, doing the usual… Photographing the reef life. Photo by Pete Tucker

A Whitemouth Moray (Gymnothorax meleagris) in the reef at Mahukona

Longnose Butterflyfish — A longnose butterflyfish (Forcipiger flavissimus) in nighttime coloration during a night dive at Puakō

Facing the Deep — Pete attempting to photograph garden eels at the base of the reef at Eel Cove

Snow Goddess Nudibranch — Snow goddess nudibranch (Ardeadoris poliahu) in a cave at 25ft depth

Dascylus Reef — A Hawaiian Dascyllus (Dascyllus albisella) hovers over the reef

Racoon Butterflyfish — Racoon butterflyfish (Chaetodon lunula) at 25ft depth, Hoover’s Tower

Exploring the Reef — Kirk and Deb explore the reef at Mahukona

Lantern Toby — A lantern toby (Canthigaster epilampra) hiding in a reef crevice

Red Reef Lobster — A red reef lobster (Enoplometopus occidentalis) in a cave at The Hive

Flowery Flounder (Bothus mancus) on the reef at O’oma

Fourspot Butterflyfish (Chaetodon quadrimaculatus) under a coral head at O’oma

Commerson's Frogfish — Commerson’s Frogfish (Antennarius commerson) at 25′ depth

Neewer NWA01 Powered Panoramic Tripod Head

Giving motion to timelapse photography adds a dynamic element that is visually interesting. There are a few ways of doing this. Adding some motion in production with keyframes and panning, or using some sort of device to physically move the camera slowly during the time lapse sequence.

Pano Head and GoPro — The Neewer panoramic head and the GoPro Hero 4

Up to now I have generally added this sort of motion in post-processing or production, moving and zooming through a frame that was shot with static camera. If the frame is oversized, often the case with time-lapse shot on a multi megapixel camera, there is plenty of resolution for motion inside the otherwise static frame.

Note: This article was edited after I figured out where the manual was wrong, see below.

Still, the effect of actually moving the camera during the sequence is often more versatile and can produce a more dramatic effect. Not wanting to lug a large rail slider system around I have opted for a slightly easier solution, a powered panoramic head. This allows a panning a time-lapse sequence to give that extra degree of motion in the resulting video while keeping the gear portable.

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The Canon EF-M 28mm f/3.5 Macro IS STM lens

There are not a lot of native lenses found in the Canon EF-M series, but this is changing with a number of new offerings. There is a new 18-150mm general purpose zoom that looks pretty good. The new lenses include a rather specialized lens, the EF-M 28mm f/3.5 Macro IS STM, a purpose built macro lens.

This lens is different. The lens is designed from the start to be a macro lens, not a general purpose lens that also does a little macro as a secondary feature. There are a number of features that are quite unusual found on this macro lens.

The first, and most obvious feature is the built-in ring light, a rather useful feature in very close macro photography where light is everything. A set of bright white LEDs is arranged on the front of the lens behind a diffuser. The LED’s are powered by the camera, no separate battery is necessary.

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Observatory Still Life Gallery

Often you just need to take note of the small scenes that make up daily life. Over the years I have made an effort to photograph these scenes, there is so much richness in our everyday existence that too many do not notice…