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There's a Dinosaur In My Bathtub
July 2009
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Take Better Photographs Today!
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Dear :
Did you get it? I sent the first featured client newsletter a couple of weeks ago. That newsletter will come out in the middle of each month and will feature clients and their photos. This one will continue to arrive at the beginning of each month, as it has for the last couple of years.
If you'd like daily photo tips, I send them on Twitter daily @dawnmphoto. Also, I've set up a Dawn Michelle Photography fan page on Facebook. I will post portraits and other business news there. Would love to "see" you on both.
So if you want me to keep in touch but you aren't interested in photography, you can opt out of this newsletter and will automatically stay on the other one. If I have news I think everyone needs to know, I'll most likely send a separate e-mail and post on Facebook; however, please trust that my goal is to keep non e-newsletter e-mail to a minimum.
Have a wonderful July!
Dawn Attebery
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There's a Dinosaur In My Bathtub
Like many of you, I love a nice, hot bath after a long day. One night, I was about to start running the
water and looked down to see that my bathtub was full of kids' toys, including
several dinosaurs. Seems my boys enjoy
the bigger tub as much as I do. I
proceeded to pick up all the toys and put them on the ledge of the tub because
we don't really have a good place to put soggy-caped Superman and other
drenched adored playthings. And that is
the trouble.
I'm not the most organized person in the world, as my
husband and children can attest. And
little makes me as anxious and angry as not being able to find something so
you'd think I'd be better at it. But I
am very organized about my pictures and I think it would be worth your while to
get organized about it, too, so I have a few pointers:
When
you download images off your camera's memory cards, put the images into
separate folders. In other words,
don't dump everything from the card into one folder if the pictures were
taken on different days or at different events.
Name
your file folders in a meaningful, specific, consistent ways. Or, better yet, you could keep a
directory in a word processing program to list any details of what is in
the folder in case you go looking (and you will someday). Naming a folder just by date won't be
very helpful in three years when you are looking for that picture of your
child with spaghetti all over his face.
Be as specific as possible.
Buy a
backup drive. I just bought a
terabyte hard drive for about $130.
Yes, a terabyte. A megabyte
is a thousand bytes, a gigabyte is a million bytes, and a terabyte is a
billion bytes. Seems like a lot but
you'd be surprised how much space those RAW and photoshop files take
up. I have at least two copies of
each file at all times.
You
can back up to CDs, but know these will not last forever (and, of course,
drives fail, too). Better to use both
CDs and a backup drive just in case.
Before
I went all digital, I organized all my film negatives and old prints. I used a Ziploc bag for each set of
prints and wrote a label spelling out the general contents and a roll
number, placing the label on the bag.
The bags are lined up in order in photo boxes. The outsides of the boxes show the roll
numbers which are in the box
Next, I bought some holders for the
negatives. These negative sleeves have 3
holes in them and are meant to be placed in a binder. I then labeled the binder pages in accordance
with the label on the Ziploc bag it went with.
Finally, I created a master directory which has more details about what
was on each roll of film.
Some of this may seem overwhelming. The film roll part was the most difficult but
it is great to have it done. You could
just start today getting your photos better organized from this point forward. You (and maybe your relatives some day) will
be happy you took the time to do it.
Now, I really need to find a better place for those dinosaurs.
Dawn
  
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