Ice, a Leopard, and pure white (Antarctica Part IX)

[DaveB]

Some of my other posts have had groups of related images. This post is a bit more random.



Ice cloud
Grandidier Channel, Antarctica
EOS 40D, 24-105mm IS @ 105mm

A tiny piece of ice floating past the Zodiac caught my attention. A bit of judicious cropping simplified the composition after the fact.



Photographing the Arc de Triomphe
Fish Islands, Antarctica
EOS 5DmkII, 24-105mm @ 90mm

Here you can see the Zodiacs. The sound of clicking shutters went a long way in the still air. BTW, the "Iceberg Doorway" in Part 5 was taken looking through the arch.



Leopard Seal
Andvord Bay, Antarctica
EOS 5DmkII, 24-105mm @ 90mm

The Leopard Seal is one of the top predators down south.
This was taken from a Zodiac floating near this ice floe. He's displaying his teeth as a threat, probably because we were drifting too close.



Adelaide Island (?), Antarctica
EOS 5DmkII, 24-105mm @ 105mm

This island was a long way away, sunlit while we were under cloud cover.

Actually, the above image isn't as it came out of the camera. Here's the image with the default RAW conversion:

There's a lot of detail captured in the highlight pixels. Definitely an example of ETTR (ExposeToTheRight).

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11

[biggerry]

He's displaying his teeth as a threat, probably because we were drifting too close.

I reckon hes just seen all those photogs in funny yellow jackets float past and he is absolutely pissing himself laughing

I do like the one with the boats and photogs, really gives a sense of scale, the seal is quite good also - really good capture in terms of expression and body position

[muzz]

More beautiful images.

Wondering what your "keeper" rate is so far. I'd love to see some of the stuff you didn't think was good enough!

By the way, did you take any HD footage with the 5DMkII?

One last question, who is that guy in the yellow jacket in photo #2

[garyr]

Dave, the whole series has been extremely inspiring - thanks for sharing. The pic with the boats gives a sense of perspective - not only challenging subject matter (those whites must be sooo tricky) but also challenging situation bobbing around in little boats, weather, etc. You make it look too easy!

Cheers

[Glen]

Dave, this has been a great series to view. It must have been a truly amazing trip.

[DaveB]

Wondering what your "keeper" rate is so far. I'd love to see some of the stuff you didn't think was good enough!

Out of ~12000 photos, I've deleted many hundreds already (focus a bit off, someone's head in the way, etc). There are presumably more to go, but I haven't yet gone through the whole lot methodically. Actually, I sort of have: I've gone through and keyworded most images (mainly for things like people's names, animal species, icebergs, etc). So far I've picked out a couple of hundred photos, and keep finding more. Of the ones you've seen, there are many on either side which are OK technically, but fall down a bit on the composition side.

By the way, did you take any HD footage with the 5DMkII?

I did.
Got some good stuff, too. But now I'm in the nightmare of video editing...

One last question, who is that guy in the yellow jacket in photo #2

Which one? They're mostly facing away from the camera, but I can pick out a couple of names if you want.

[biggerry]

Out of ~12000 photos

holy sh*t thats more than I have taken in the last 18 months...

but I haven't yet gone through the whole lot methodically. Actually, I sort of have

I am always interested to hear about other peoples workflow, I have found it hard in the past when having to trawl through 1000 odd pictures - its always a mission to go through all of them rather than just skip to the ones that I remember being ok.

Do you primarily rely on the keywords to sort and rate your pictures? or do you organise them into a chronological folders ? or something else? With 12k of images you must have a fairy sensible solution .

[DaveB]

but I haven't yet gone through the whole lot methodically. Actually, I sort of have

I am always interested to hear about other peoples workflow, I have found it hard in the past when having to trawl through 1000 odd pictures - its always a mission to go through all of them rather than just skip to the ones that I remember being ok.

Agreed. This was just an extreme case.

Do you primarily rely on the keywords to sort and rate your pictures? or do you organise them into a chronological folders ? or something else? With 12k of images you must have a fairy sensible solution .

They ended up being split across two folder trees: "media-A" on my laptop's internal 250GB drive, and "media-E" on an external 320GB drive. I also had "media-B" on a 160GB Nexto unit, but ended up not having to use it. Each of these folder trees were backed up to external drives (yes, I had 5 external drives with me: 2x Firewire, and 3x USB - two of the USB drives were standalone Nexto/Vosonic units in case my laptop entirely died).
My import routine was usually importing to the "media-A" area, where I tried to keep enough free space (that way I didn't NEED to have the external drive connected when importing). Several times I moved chunks of files from A to E, but I'll come back to that. Within each media area I had the photos going to folders like img/YYYY/YYYYMM/DD (e.g. "img/2009/200901/21/"). So they were split up by day. I had a Lightroom catalog managing all the files under the "img" folders, so from within Lightroom I can search/sort by date/keyword/whatever without having to worry about exactly which folder had the files I was after. My import program put the photos under "img", and had equivalent folders for "aud"io, "vid"eo, and "gps" files (each with the same date structure underneath). I used Microsoft Expression Media (with its own catalog) to manage all the files under the "aud" and "vid" folders (Lightroom would ignore these files if they were in the "img" folders, and this way it's clear which program is managing which folders).

When I moved a bunch of folders from one media area to another, I then went into Lightroom and/or Expression Media and told them that the folders had moved. Nothing else required. I've got a bunch of tools (a program called PteroFile, which so far only runs on OS X - not Windows) which manages syncing the backups (including of the catalog files!), and handles moving files from one area to another while keeping the backups in sync (never going down to only one copy during the move, etc). So that was just mechanical: import a bunch of cards to disk, get Lightroom and Expression Media to import the new files into their catalogs, and move on.

From within the catalogs I could see all the images I'd taken. I could attach keywords, apply ratings, start Developing, etc. I did delete the really bad ones straight away. By the way, I was importing Jane's pictures (less than 900) as well as my own, and the Creator field made it easy to look at just mine, etc.
During downtime on the trip (e.g. boring bits waiting in airports) I tried to keep as up to date with keywords as possible. And other metadata such as location info, and applying ratings/etc to pick out ones I could share with my fellow travellers. I could do all that without the external drives connected, as I had Lightroom build 1:1 previews overnight for new photos so I could zoom in to photos to check focus, faces, etc. But I didn't keep up with everything through the entire trip: some of that got done once I got home (along with fixing the rest of the location info, when I had 'net access for Google Earth, and room to spread out the maps for place names, etc). Often I did skim through the images in Lightroom's loupe view (which is fast when you have all the previews built) just to pick out interesting images and apply ratings (and also so I could see if I was making obvious errors before I went out and kept making the same mistakes). I'm still working through the remaining images methodically. Because work keeps getting in the way I suspect I'll still be working on that for quite some time (as well as my ongoing task of weeding out older images from my master collection).

Towards the end of the Antarctic leg of the trip we had a slideshow which everyone submitted 6 images to, and I had enough rated images that it was easy to pick out some good ones (of mine and of Jane's) to submit. Actually, at that point Jane was mostly confined to bed again (rough sea crossing) and only had to pick some from the selection I presented to her.

Most of the image processing I did in the field was with Lightroom, and I only went into Photoshop, Photomatix, and/or PtGUI for things like HDR/blending and stitching composites (maybe a couple every day?). The results of those came back into Lightroom so I could keep track of them.

Once I got home, the files got also backed up to my normal backup drives (once I upgraded them: each set is now a 1TB plus a 500GB), and the trip's Lightroom catalog imported into my main catalog. I've gone through all the "worked" images again with my desktop monitor and tweaked some of them: although the laptop monitor was freshly profiled and reasonably trustworthy, it's not perfect.

I've actually done more-involved keywording on this trip than I've been doing for a while (based partly on some examples from Seth Resnick's work). I'd been thinking that that was an area I wasn't utilising fully, but now I've got a good start on a structured keyword library and I'm much happier.

[surenj]

Thanks for the info Dave! I think I need to establish a reasonable backup routine as well.. [.....Runs to find his 100gb backup which may or maynot be working since it hasn't been used in one year or so....] BTW I think the laughing seal is a kick-ass image! [Even by your high standards]

[surenj]

Also on that last example of ETTR, do you remember whether your histogram was blown or not?

Do you use another program to put those copyright notices on your pictures? I find photochop tedious for this purpose.

[DaveB]

Also on that last example of ETTR, do you remember whether your histogram was blown or not?

Not quite (I just copied the CR2 back to the camera to check). Many of my shots did have "blinking bits" according to the camera, but I only went over the top a couple of times. The camera's warnings are slightly conservative.

Do you use another program to put those copyright notices on your pictures? I find photochop tedious for this purpose.

That's just Lightroom using the copyright string from the metadata to watermark the corner. I'm starting to experiment with LR/Mogrify for fancier watermarking, as what you see here is the extent of what Lightroom can do by itself.

[Alex]

Another great series, Dave. Very impressive. I still can't get over the blue tint of the ice.

Alex

[biggerry]

Thanks for the comprehesive response dave, I appreciate the time taken to explain your workflow.
I have a similiar setup, but more often than not, I leave out the keywords and description bits, I regulary apply ratings which is a great way to drill down to just the good ones, but I can really see how filtering by keywords would be handy when processing 1000's of pictures..

again thanks for the response and I hope others can also learn from your methods!

[stubbsy]

Dave

Thanks for the great and interesting detail on your workflow.

do suggest you play with Mogrify for your watermarking. I've been using it for some time and find it (+Jeffrey Friedl's upload to smugmug) a time saving upload combo since I get a nice but not too obtrusive watermark on the fly (in my case I use the LR Caption field for titling the image as well in the same pass)