Image filing system and some Portraits

I have recently gotten a request from a magazine about images from a certain place here in Egypt. No problem I have plenty of images to send to the magazine to choose from. My biggest issue was to find the images on all my several external hard drives. I thought I had a good system but it turns out it is not so good so it took me a lot longer to find all the images that I knew that I had. So I have this morning started to make up a new system my issue that I am facing now is if I am going to continue my old system parallel to this new one which then means that I will have duplicates all over the place that will take up space that are quite precious to me… I am leaning towards to only use my new system. I hope it will work. The system I have now is according to year and month of when I have taken a picture but then you need to remember when you took an image. My new system that are far from all implemented or completely thought through, it will probably take me months to get it all done anyway it is based on categories. Such as a folder for; food and vegetables, Stockholm, Golf course names etc. so all images that have anything to do with the categories goes into that folder no matter when the image was taken so Stockholm for instance will have plenty of images from several different years since I go to Stockholm about once a year and take pictures every time. What do you think will this system work? I guess most of the time a client do not need an image from a certain year they just want an image of the place they are requesting.

Some images will of course be trickier to place in just one category and there is no point having duplicates (unless it is your back up of course!) Maybe that is when sub categories come in? You know when a picture can be thought of as fitting in two or more different categories such as an image of a date palm tree with dates on, it could be in the fruit or tree folder or in a golf folder since it is taken on a golf course. I will have to think about that one! I do think it would be good with subcategories though to make it easier and maybe fewer folders to see as a start. If I do folders per country but then I will have it tricky when it comes to golf courses since I have so many images of them from different countries. If I make a folder of golf courses then I can put it all in their but if I do countries then I will have to have a golf course folder as a sub category in all country folders which I guess there is nothing wrong with either… Let me know if you have any great insight into my new filing system or if you have another one that is idiot proof. I spoke to another photographer about how de does his filing; he had a system that he thought was very good well at least worked for him. I just thought that it was the most complicated one I had heard of so I will definitively not do what he does. I guess it is all down to making one that works for you personally and sticking to it.

I am already quite good at deleting images but I think I need to up my game a bit and become even better at it to save space. I save almost no images on my hard drive on the computer itself but still I got a worrying message the other day when I opened Aperture; that I had too little memory for it to work properly and that I was risking loosing images! Wow that was a wake up call so I straight away frantically tried to move images from the computer to different external hard drives. I did peek at the utilities on the computer and I was scarily low on memory not sure how that happened. I need to be better at keeping an eye on it that is for sure.

I recently helped a friend take some avatar images of her for an article that have been written about her for Living Abroad Magazine. So we both ventured out to take some lovely images of her for the editors to choose from here are a few of the ones we came up with.

Portraits.

As I have mentioned to you before I bought some photography equipment on my recent trip to England.
I am so happy with my new setup, remember I asked for a model in my last post well no one came on their free will and asked me so I had to go out and get myself a model :-) I asked one of my friends the other day if she could model for me so that I could try out my new gear. 
We planed the shoot to be straight after her work so that we could get the photo shoot under way and then afterwards meet up with some other friends for dinner.
I had in my head a photo shoot plan of what kinds of shots I wanted to do. I needed a chair as a prop and since I don't have one (I know it sounds silly but I do not have a chair in my house, I have bar stools but not a normal chair) anyway my model does so I thought, great I will come to your house then. In hind sight it probably would have been better if she would have brought the chair to my house. I have more plain walls than she did...as well as her ceiling is not white! I had planned to bounce one of my flashes against the ceiling and I think it got drowned due to that the ceiling was not white but peach.... ha ha but in the end we managed to get some great shots. The chair did not play a large role in our photo shoot as I had originally planned. I wanted to make very bright portraits so that the face is almost washed away only leaving some contours. That is not what I did not in camera at least I did more of that in Photoshop afterwards. I learned a lot by looking at the images afterwards of what I would like to do different next time with the light set up. So I would like to make another photo shoot and make some changes. My model is soon going away on holiday unfortunately so either I hurry up and get this next photo shoot underway or I will have to change model. I luckily have another model coming in a few weeks time. That I can use as well. I'll keep you guys posted :-)

I have for a few weeks now been waiting for a sunset with no wind you know when the water reflects everything like a mirror. I have another shoot planned in my head that I would like to do and it would be ideal to do during those circumstances but I am thinking I might be waiting in wain it being winter soon and all and more wind in the afternoon to come. Should have done this shoot during the summer! The greatness of  hindsight again. So I might just have to try and do the shoot now and see how it goes with wind. I will let you know how I get along.