My Output Flow

It took me a few days to get all the photos from Kyoto sorted out and uploaded to my server, Flickr and Facebook. I was yet to blog about them though. That would be another week. I would need to do a bit of reading for that. Otherwise, I was pretty happy with the snaps. Happy that I stuck with the X100 rather than a bigger camera. The low-light performance form the camera was fantastic especially during the night walk capturing the sakura at the of Gion district.

So, what did I do with the snaps from the camera? I captured jpg on my X100. The on camera processing on a Fuji is excellent and I don't think that I would be able to get any better result tweaking a RAW file, not to mention the time saved. I then uploaded them onto my Mac, ran a program called Photolinker which would geotag the photos as well as keyword insertion. A straightforward but powerful program which I had been using for the past 5 years.

Once that was done, the photos were transferred onto Aperture for sorting and selection, followed by post-editing. Once the colors were tweaked, the files were exported into the final jpg via module called Border FX. This was how the frame was inserted as well as the final resolution of the images as well as the watermarks, both in prints and the metadata. The captions were also inserted before the export within Aperture. As a result, I was able to maintain the same captions no matter which service I uploaded the photographs to.

The first thing I did once the final jpeg were produced was to upload the photos onto my SmugMug server. For this, I used MacDaddy, another simple program which did the job very well. For Flickr, I used Flickery, and Facebook just the plain old web uploaded. No hassle there. This had been my method for the last few years. Simple, but effective. And if I had the time, I could breeze through all the photos within a few hours. But not this time. Work was in the way.

And the Editing

On my count, I snapped around 800 frames during the four days I was in Kyoto. I decided to only bring the X100, and I think it was the better choice.

Before anybody argue that the level of the snaps won't be of dSLR quality, you'd better think again. The jpg coming out of the camera were things of beauty, and combined that with the size of the body, it made for a great little travel camera.

Good thing that I brought the charger along since I had to charge the batteries twice. Reaching home, there was the little matter of sifting through the whole collection and doing some post-editing. I only managed to rummage through half of them so far. I've already geotagged and added the keywords onto the metadata. Next would be the grading and selecting which ones should be picked for post-editing, the actual editing itself, captioning then exporting into jpg with watermarking. Then came the uploading to my SmugMug server and Flickr. And of course at some stage, Facebook.

That would take me to the weekend I thought at the rate I was going. So, for the moment, Happy Editing!

One Album at A Time

Now, after the dust settled, it was time to start uploading the photos from the Singapore trip. The SmugMug and Flickr migration was already done last week. I had started uploading to Facebook since yesterday, and I preferred to upload them one album at a time, since there were so much interaction.

All together, there would be about 300 photos in all. Five albums, so, it would be 5 days. I would also be updating a segment on the blog about the trip as well, and put it on the drop down menu up top. That would take at least a couple of hours!

At least, I should have some free time after work today …. looking forward to that …..

p/s - by the way, I use Aperture as part of my digital workflow as you can see ....

Now Uploading

All together, it was close to 600 snaps. Went through everything and almost half of them made the cut. All edited by this evening and ready for upload.

As per usual, I tended to put the metadata, and GPS coordinate pre-processing. An extra step but it would be worth it as by the time my photos exited Aperture, they had their borders and watermarks sorted out as well as tags, GPS locations and caption.

I would then be free to upload them anywhere and all the data would be attached. Uploading to Flickr for example, would just be a quick step through Flickery, and the locations, captions etc would already be attached. Walla!

Even though I use most of the social media as far as photography is concerned, I still use SmugMug as my main hub. It was easier for me to keep every photo in their place as well as exporting them from there using a flash slideshow. The slides could then be customized to the size I wanted.

What's next? An early night followed by an early morning to sort out some presentation slides for this weekend as next week. Good night .....