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A Most Stupendous & Audacious Undertaking

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Photo project update
Yesterday I blew through another 800 photos.  My plan is to process a few hundred from each part of the world instead of the entire set.  That way, I can more quickly get a sense for the feasibility of the photo-pairing program I'm considering creating. 

I'm getting faster but not nearly fast enough.  Yesterday's first 400 (India) took 280 minutes, the next 400 (Czech) took 175 minutes. 

My workflow is four passes:
Pass 1:  Rate the images 1-5, flag the ones to upload, mark the ones that are not appropriate for the photo-pairing project, mark the ones that need retouching (and are being uploaded).
Pass 2: Retouch the images that need it.
Pass 3: Add tags (and there's a long list of them) to images that are being uploaded.  The tag data is what's being used to find candidate matches across the world, so each photo ends up with 5-10 tags
Pass 4: Add titles and captions and location.  

I continue to be stunned by Adobe Lightroom.  There are so many methods for refining a photo, and they make a very versatile toolbox as a group.  I can brighten up a face to make it pop, de-emphasize some distracting object on the side, fix the lens vignetting issue that my relatively cheap camera has at wide angles...  I have to focus these efforts on the best photos though, or I'll sink in way too much time.

Working on photos gets me into a flow state that's reminiscent of coding, though it's a much more emotional state as I'm going through powerful memories from my trip.    It gets draining after a while though.  If I had to do this with a bunch of strangers' wedding photos, I'd drive myself insane in under a week.

Now I really miss India.   Seeing the photos again brought back a lot of the intensity of my few days there.

Road to Ajanta:

On the road from Aurangabad to Ajanta by you.

Indian Photoshop...

RGB saris on the beach by you.

Fake Taj Mahal

Fake taj mahal by you.

Ellora caves

Ellora caves by you.
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Those caves look awesome.

They were stunning. Very few foreigners know about them. ~98% of the tourists there Indian. Then again, when a crosscountry train ride is a few dollars and a billion people live nearby, you'll end up with a lot of locals.

I will once I'm uploading 4000 photos instead of 4. :-)

I find it helpful for any number of photos because I can upload as I go, just selecting "Export with Previous" each time and then beginning work on the next photo.

FWIW, I'm still working on getting through my photos quickly in LR. :) But yeah, it's magic. Such a powerful tool!

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