Tuesday, June 12, 2007

How to categorize photographs

I've been wondering for a long time how to categorize and organize my pictures online and I was never very satisfied.
Last week I think I finally got it.
First of all, I thought about what are the elements that make a good photograph; I think they are the following:


  • The light
  • The colors
  • The mood
  • The subject

I then went through all of my pictures (about 11,000) trying to decide which element was most prominent in each photograph. Obviously some pictures excel in more than one aspect, and the best pictures you hope to take would excel in all of them, but it's fairly easy to look at any given picture and see which element is more prominent.

After that I tried to describe more in detail the quality of the element in each picture; this is what I came up with:

Light:

Color:

Mood:

  • Cold
  • I should find a lot more, but this is much more subjective and more difficult to recognize; it will take me more time

Subject:

This is it, and this is how I finally categorized my new galleries.

I'm pretty happy with the way it worked out and I think this will help me focus my photographic efforts in the future, because I think it will make it easier to understand ahead of time which photographic opportunities can turn out well. So far it was always a hit or miss.

PS: In case you are interested, I made the navigation pages in Adobe Photoshop and converted them in html using the Photoshop add-on ImageReady.
I made the galleries with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: it's a great tool for organizing pictures, doing quick edits and corrections, and to create slideshows and web galleries. You should check it out. If you prefer free software, Google's Picasa is also a good bet.

Monday, June 11, 2007

New Gallery

I'm back after a pretty long pause.
In the meanwhile I have taken a few new pictures and updated my galleries:

In the next few days I'll post some new pictures and explain how I decided to organize my galleries.