You really should check out my gallery – that where I showcase my favourite picture; and I occasionally write the odd story there too!
On cameras
The best camera is the one, that gets the pictures. And the one that gets the pictures, in the one you bring with you.
While high-end photographers do use high-end gear, it’s not the gear that does it. A good photographer will take awesome pictures with a smartphone too (and some smartphone come with awesome cameras these day.
So while I do own a bag full of heavy glass and an DSLR body to go with it, please consider if you need that. I am looking for a smaller camera to supplement it, but haven’t found one yet.
If you still want my advise, it would be: go take a look at the relevant Camera Buying guide over at dpreview. It probably won’t make the decision easier, but it will make it more informed.
Workflow
When I bring out my DSLR, I mainly shoot RAW. Which in turn means, that I have to have a post-processing workflow. It is a lot more work, but I enjoy the process and I think I get better results this way.
I have also decided to go Linux and largely open source. Because I happen to like Linux, and because I am not keen on clouds and subscriptions.
If you’re more into Mac or Windows, you really should consider Adobe Lightroom – I used an earlier version, and once you get used to it take on a workflow, it’s really good.
Moving pictures of the camera
For lifting pictures of the camera, I use Rapid Photo Downloader and the build-in SD card reader in my computer.
I place all my photos in a hierarchy indexed by year and month and I – and this is important – add year and month to the filename when I download it. I preserve this information in all postprocessed result, and it makes it really easy to find the original RAW file again, if need be.
And this kind of moving and renaming is something that Rapid Photo Downloader does really well.
Processing
I do my processing in Darktable.
Darktable will do the same as Lightroom does: it will help you narrow down and select the pictures that you would want to work with (the classical lighttable), and it will help do that work (the classical darkroom). Darktable, Lightroom … Lighttable, Darkroom, get it? 🙂
But if you used to Lightroom, you are in for quite a surprise. The two programs are not very like each other, once you start using them. And Darktable is not nearly as polished a Lightroom, so you will need to read the manual, and you will need to invest time in finding the tools that does the job for you.
Still it does a very good job, and I very rarely find need for further processing.
Presentation
After moving around from platform to platform and never quite being happy about any of them, I opted for hosting my own gallery. This might very well be one of the better kept secrets of the ‘net, and if it is exposure you’re after, you might want to consider alternatives. Or post a lot of links back to your self-hosted gallery.
I chose Koken, because it struck the right balance for me between presenting real well, and still having pictures metadata like shutterspeed, iso and aperture as an important part. Being based on PHP, MySQL and ImageMagick it was really easy to host.
Backup
Backups are important. Always do backups. And do as I say, not as I do *cough*.
The way I ended up doing it, was to use rsync and a fast USB dock for the “spinning rust” hard-disks that I happen to have.
rsync is by far not the easiest program to use, and I guess the Rapid Photo Downloader probably could do a lot of it as well.
Whatever you do, remember that while the pictures are irreplaceable, a lot of work has gone into selecting and processing them as well. Have a plan of keeping that information backed up as well.
And consider using formats that aren’t proprietary. Please read my short piece on sidecar-files.