13,000 photos in a little metal box
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This week was all about manual control and repeating motifs. Then we've got a review of my first week with the Monument 2, the backup device I (finally) set up for managing my photographs.
Manual control
I took a lot of blurry and poorly exposed photographs this week because I've been setting my exposures manually a lot, and hand focusing rather than relying on the camera's auto-focus.
This is a little bit about pushing my technical skills but it's mostly about understanding how changing the interface with the camera changes my photographs. I have a book of portrait exercises, People Pictures, and a lot of the exercises involve manual focusing. I was a little bit surprised by that but I tried it recently and found that it did bring me more into the moment. The portraits I take manually focusing are technically worse than the ones where I use autofocus, but I like them better, and I like the experience of taking them more.
I've found it changes how I engage with things like flowers, too. In my macro shots especially, I've found myself setting the focus first, then moving the camera around to control what tiny slice of the flower is in focus. I had a moment while doing this where I thought, "hmm, I really wish I had a tripod" which normally almost never occurs to me -- I'm super impatient, and prefer hand-held shooting because it's so easy to repositioning.
Fully manual exposures are more for consistency across shots. Especially in the park with the dogs, the automatic exposure will change pretty radically depending on, basically, how much sky is in the frame, and that changes how the dogs get exposed. This became really noticeable as a problem as I started trying to edit these photos as sets for this newsletter. Setting the "correct" exposure for the amount of light that's available gives me much more consistent results for each "shoot," as long as I periodically readjust as the sun goes down.
Repeating motifs
I've been spending more time looking at my photos, and thinking about putting together another photo book. (My first was really more of a zine -- if you like small weird art projects you can get a copy in my small, weird online store.) That has me thinking about the value of repetition in photography -- and about what I want to take more photos of.
I'm especially interested in the things that photographs can communicate that language struggles with. I'm both a writer and a photographer, so, maybe naturally, I'm interested in what photography can do that my other skills can't. And language can't do a lot.
"Showing what things look like," obviously, but there are some other things that are a little more subtle.
Changes over time, both short and long. Alec Soth's video about photographic time picked up my whole way of thinking about photos and kind of shook it out. I'm still reorganizing.
Things that, with our eyes, we "see" our mental models of rather than the light and shapes in front of us -- like people! Writing relies on these models to work, but photography (can, when it's successful) pierce them and reorient us in them
Sets of things, and the ways that they are similar and different
So I'm trying to rephotograph more things. I have a list on my phone now of the images I'm trying to take.
More on why those particular things and how that list is evolving in the coming weeks, because we've still got a lot more technical nonsense to talk about.
Stats and whatnot
Last week I took a total of 227 photographic impressions across all devices.
Last weeks goals were:
Sync my Lightroom account to my iPad
Ask for a portrait from someone other than Jesse
I did ask a friend for a portrait! This was surprisingly hard but-- I did it. There were a bunch of things technically wrong with the photo but I was really happy with the concept, so, that's a win.
I did not manage to sync my existing Lightroom account to my iPad. (I tried! But failed for reasons that are entirely Adobe's fault and too boring to get into here.) I did, however, accomplish something better, which was to set up a real network accessible backup drive -- the Monument 2. (More on that in a moment.)
This week, I'm going to
Spend at least 20 minutes reviewing my photos and extracting more motifs/potential tags
Ask someone for their portrait
Break out the tripod and take another go at that macro orchid shot
A brief review of the Monument 2
A while ago my partner backed the Monument 2 with SSD 1TB on Indiegogo for me. It arrived, I said, "oh yeah I should set that up," and then did not do that for months, because I thought it was going to be hard and fiddly.
And then this week I just did it, and discovered it was reasonably straightforward. I now have all 13,000-plus photographs I've taken in the last 2 years on an external drive that's network accessible -- in fact, it's on the internet, and accessible through a phone app, so I have access to my entire photo collection at any time. It automatically tags the photographs with image recognition, too, so while the search isn't quite as good as in Google Photos I can search "dog" or "[person's name]" and get a reasonably good result.
Actually setting up the Monument is easy. Install the phone app, plug the Monument in, they'll find each other and the app will walk you through the process of connecting the Monument to your network.
Then there's getting the photos in. There are three ways to get photographs onto the Monument.
Upload from the phone app. This is the easiest way and clearly what the Monument is built to do -- by default when you connect the application it'll upload all the photos on your phone into it, and upload any new photos whenever you return home. If the phone is your main camera the Monument requires zero work once it's set up.
Upload from your computer by dragging folders into the Monument app's. This is where the bulk of my photo collection is and was the only really fussy part of the process, but only because getting the photos out of my Lightroom catalogue was tricky. Once I figured out where those were (see the last section of this newsletter for instructions) it was simple, though it did take a few tries to get all the way through all my thousands of photos.
Upload from an SD card. The device has an SD card slot, so once you have it set up you can pop an SD card in and it will slurp up any new photos for you. This will probably be my main way of uploading photos going forward. My main complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a way to get the Monument to clear the card after it's finished the upload, and uploads off of large cards take a long time to go through images the device already have.
The only complaint that I have so far is that the desktop app -- which is, admittedly, in Beta -- is kind of buggy. No serious issues so far, but sometimes operations will just... fail. It has that "this software is not quiiiite finished" feel.
I'll probably have more to say once I've lived with it for a few months but so far I'm quite pleased. No longer have to worry (as much) about losing photos, and now I can keep my actual photo workspaces pretty clean -- I can, for example, import just the photographs I know I want to work on into Lightroom, rather than importing everything and having to sort through a bunch of images I should probably just cull but am afraid to every time I want to work on an album.
The other feature it has that I personally really like is the ability to take backups-of-your-backup. You can plug in an external hard drive and it will clone itself to that.
Basically, if you like local physical storage and $300 is within the range of what you spend on photography anyway, you'll love Monument, and you'll be much happier to have it than $300 worth of gear.
If you don't care about the "physical device in your house" angle, or you'd prefer to spend $7 per month than a one-time $300, the other service I hear good things about is Backblaze. I will probably check that out myself at some point but honestly I work on Cloud Stuff all day at work and I am tired. Just let me have a box.
Uploading images to Monument 2 from Lightroom on a Mac
I wasn't able to find any instructions for how to do this exact workflow on the internet, so: here it is, step-by-step instructions for moving images from a Lightroom catalogue into a Monument. (And, really, any external network backup drive type thing.)
If you're a normal human you can get there with Spotlight Search: Hold down the cmd key and then press the space key, then type "Pictures" into the search box. One of the results will be "Folders" and then under that will be "Pictures." Double click to open.
Right-click on the Lightroom Library.lrlibrary file and click "Show Package Contents." Open the directory that's a long string of numbers and letters. (This is what we call in the biz a "GUID" -- a globally unique identifier.) Your photos will be in the "originals" directory, organized by year.
If you're a command-line junky, or want to become one, you can get there with:
```
cd ~"/Pictures/Lightroom Library.lrlibrary/"**"/originals"
```
(There's probably a more elegant way to handle the shell expansion/globs, but that command will get the job done. The quotes there are important and this won't work if you don't include them, because Bash/Zsh doesn't expand ~ into your home directory or ** into a wildcard if they're inside quotes, but if you don't put that quotes around the space in "Lightroom Library" it will ignore anything after the space.)
(Oh, and, if you're command-line curious, or just interested in getting more done with your computer faster, I highly recommend iTerm 2. E-mail me if you have any trouble with it and I'll help you out, I love this stuff.)