Snow in Abilene
March 3, 2008
On Sunday, the high was around 80 degrees. Warm, sunny, if a little windy. Then, this morning, we woke up to about 38 degrees, and were told that was the high for today, and to expect snow and rain. Quite a swing for a 24-hour period! But, the snow and clouds made for some interesting light, so I grabbed my cameras and headed out of town (in a new direction…part photo safari and part exploration). These are a few of the sights I saw…
Prickly Pear & Snow
No Trespassing Sign & Snow
Winter Barn & Snow
Posted in Abilene, Life, Photo Safari, Random, Texas
March 7th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I love your photography. I am a professional “my own family” photographer and your skill leaves me in awe. I have a Nikon D70s with a Tamaron 20-200mm lens. It takes great pictures and would probably do a lot better if I really knew how to use it.
Anyway, my question has to do with storage. I would love a post on how you manage, label, and store all the digital photos you take. Right now I use iPhoto (which works fairly well). But I am approaching 7,500 pics with all the stuff I do for the church and for home.
Also, can you recommend a great all purpose flash that you would never be without?
March 12th, 2008 at 10:25 am
J-Wild,
Sorry it took me so long to reply…I’ll try my best to answer your questions…
As far as managing my images, I use Adobe Lightroom, which is incredible. Much better than iPhoto as far as the tools available, and since it’s designed for pros, you won’t find some of the problems iPhoto has with larger libraries. It’s about $199, but well worth the investment if you’re serious. I store the copies on my laptop harddrive, an external firewire drive, my Leopard TimeMachine backup drive, and if they’re really important, I burn a DVD backup of the original digital negatives. But, there’s different strokes for different folks, so check out all the options and find one that works for you. (But you can’t go wrong with Lightroom! :))
And, for the flash, it all depends. I used a Canon 430EX for a long time, and it suited me, but I recently upgraded to the 580 EX II, which is pretty much fantastic. Those won’t help a Nikon shooter, but check around for a decent $200 hot-shoe mount flash. It can make all the difference in your shots, but it takes a LOT of work to master. Heck, the manual for my flash was thicker than the manual for my camera. There may be some third party things out there (Alien Bees, for instance), but you’ll pay a lot more, so I would just stay in the Nikon family…
I hope this helps,
GKB