Tag Archives: photograph

Commentary, Site News

A Little Story About Posting Daily Photographs

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First, why the heck do I post a new photograph every day?! I have been doing this now for more than five  years, believe it or not. (I don’t know for certain when I started, but by dividing the number of photographs in my online gallery by 365, it looks like it may have been almost seven years now!) I have no illusions that it is possible for me to post something close to an incredible photograph 365 times each year, so for this purpose I’ll settle for merely credible! One impetus for this project probably comes from my background in music, where practice is regarded as central to developing and maintaining the ability to function artistically – and a goal is to do the thing so regularly and so often that the doing becomes almost intuitive and the technical stuff becomes less and less daunting – though it never quite disappears. So my daily photographs are essentially the part of my “practice” that I’ve chosen to make public.

Since I’m almost continually producing new photographs – continuing down familiar paths and trying to improve the results or trying things that are new to me – I generate a lot of photographs. My primary goal is to line them up for posting at the blog on that new-photo-per-day basis. I often have at least some photographs ready to go and queued up for posting well ahead of time.

Typically, I might have a week’s worth or so in the pipeline, though there is some variation. On a few occasions I have had nothing ready and I actually had to go out and make a photograph for posting on the day it was posted! On other occasions I’ve had a much bigger line-up of photos ready to go. (Right now my “problem” is that I have too many in the pipeline! I’ve already selected and lined up photographs through the end of March! This makes it hard to post work that I’m doing right now that I would like to share. For example, I have more work from a recent shoot at Point Lobos, some long-exposure work from early January,  and there are still photographs from my extensive photography in Utah last fall. (I’m also working on a long term project to photograph musicians, and none of that work has appeared here yet.)

When a new photograph is ready, it becomes part of a “sharing workflow” that accomplishes the following:

  1. I queue the photograph up at my blog, scheduling its appearance there weeks or even months in advance. I write the descriptive text at the time I put the image in the queue.
  2. Out of habit, I also post the image to my old Flickr account as part of the process to queue it at my blog. (Hint: you can often see my photographs at Flickr before they show up elsewhere, since I have no way to delay the posting there.)
  3. On the day when the photo finally shows up at my blog, I do a quick bit of copying and pasting to create the daily posts at Facebook and Google Plus. The Facebook posts are rather minimal, usually containing little more than the image and the title and basic description, along with a link to the blog. I incorporate more information with the Google Plus posts, including an excerpt from the full post at my blog along with a link back to the blog post. A blog plugin also automatically shares a message on Twitter and a very brief one at Facebook.
  4. From time to time I may also share some photographs at 500px or Pinterest, though that is not a regular part of my workflow.

There are a few variations on this process. At times I’m in places where I simply cannot go online and post – perhaps I’m backpacking or just too busy. When this happens, Facebook may only show the tiny thumbnail image that is automatically posted from the blog, and I may have to forego the usual larger image. I can use a Chrome browser plugin to pre-schedule new Google Plus posts on those days.

Sometimes people wonder how it is possible to find time to do all of this and whether it is worthwhile. The first question is easier to answer. At this point, I have the whole process simplified to the point that it actually takes me very little time. The second question is a bit trickier, but on balance it is worthwhile – though there are days when I think about how it might be a bit easier to simply not post every day… but then I do it anyway! :-)

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Commentary, Ideas

Photographing Icons – Or Not

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Yesterday I shared elsewhere a photograph that someone had posted featuring a line-up of scores of photographers, arrayed tripod-to-tripod, ready to photograph one of those iconic views that we all know so well. I suspect that we have all been to such places and either found the experience of seeing and photographing them to be powerful… or we might have been repulsed by the crowds of people all apparently trying to “capture” the same thing, among them perhaps a number of folks who might be trying to almost literally recreate versions of the scene that they had seen elsewhere.

The point of the share (seen here and here) was not complimentary. My reaction to the photograph was to wonder, even more than usual, why people would want to make photographs that way. I phrased it as, more or less, “yet another reason to avoid photographing icons.”

However, a person wrote to me after I posted and pointed out, with a bit of anger and with some justification I think, that complaining about and putting down those who want to photograph a beautiful place might seem a bit pretentious and self-righteous.

She has a point.

While there is something a bit troubling about seeing dozens of people lined up to make the very same photograph, some of us might be a bit too quick to jump to overly negative conclusions. Perhaps there is a way to cast this as a positive lesson, rather than ridicule. So let me engage in a bit of reflection and honesty. Continue reading Photographing Icons – Or Not →

Commentary, Site News

Interested in Purchasing a Print?

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Since the question comes up frequently and because it is Small Business Saturday, let me answer the question: “Do you sell prints of your photographs?”

Yes, I do. Virtually every photograph that appears at this web site is available as a print. I’ve been told they make nice gifts! :-) There is more information about print sales (and licensing) at the Sales page on this web site. Please contact me if you have additional questions or would like to order a print for the holidays. Thanks!

Commentary, Ideas

RAW File Review – Rediscovering the Past

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After returning from New York City last week, I took on the daunting task of reviewing about eight years worth of raw files. (Anyone who has tried probably just exclaimed, “yikes!,” or something much less polite… :-)

I’m _very_ conservative when it comes to deleting raw files, figuring that it is better to end up keeping files I don’t need than to find out that I trashed something that could have been useful. In addition, as I do an annual review of the previous year’s raw files every winter, I invariably discover a few good photographs that I had somehow passed over or failed to notice at the time I made them.

As non-fun as the process of reviewing tens of thousands of files can be, there are some worthwhile results, including:

  1. I do delete a fair number of just plain useless files that have been cluttering up my hard drive. I figure that if it wasn’t interesting a the time I took it, wasn’t interesting during my annual raw file review, and still isn’t interesting a few years later… it may be time to get rid of it.
  2. I find some (to me, anyway) real treasures that I had overlooked to misunderstood or simply forgotten at the time. At some point I’ll write more about why this happens, but it is not unusual to fail to understand how a photograph works right after making it. But when viewed with some temporal distance, some photographs turn out to surprise me by how successful they might be. So one of the pleasures of this otherwise daunting task is the discovery of such images.
  3. I relive experiences related to the making the photographs. When I view my own photographs, the visual imagery is always associated with non-visual experiences that were part of the process of making the photo. When I “rediscover” some of these older image – even some that turn out not to be photographically worthy of sharing – I also rediscover those experiences that I had forgotten and all sorts of memories return. (Among those in this batch are many of my family – especially fun during the week when our youngest son moved off to a different city of get his first job.)
  4. I learn things about my own photographic growth that might not be apparent when only considering the most current work. For example, I’m often struck by how certain themes and ways of seeing that I’ve come to recognize more recently were already present in work done quite a while ago. Understanding this is important, I think, to developing self-awareness as a photographer.