My Favorite Place: Done – Moving Pictures

My young friends the Redman girls, Kaitlyn, Dixie, and Elizabeth, pose for a photograph at Ada Lady Cougar softball media day earlier this month. Kaitlyn and Elizabeth played and have graduated, and Dixie is a junior.

I am in the middle of one of the busiest times of the year: back to school. This involves, among many other things, putting together our newspaper’s football preview section. The photography, of course, falls almost entirely on me, and involves making hundreds of images, from player headshots to team photos to features of our “players to watch.”

One of my best strategies in these crazy busy August days is to stay as much caught up with my editing as I can. As I speak, I’ve shot four football media days and one softball media day, all on top of my regular schedule, and I have edited and submitted every image. No one ever waits on Richard at my office.

This is my screen at work yesterday, with my last image enlarged. As tempting as it is to imagine an "app" will help you get organized, it really comes down to your own ability and willingness to organize. — This is my screen at work yesterday, with my last image enlarged. As tempting as it is to imagine an “app” will help you get organized, it really comes down to your own ability and willingness to organize.

This “best practice” applies to all photographers. Unedited images sitting in your camera or on a computer hard drive somewhere might as well not even exist. No one likes to wait, and editors and clients hate waiting for their pictures. Don’t believe me? Wait a month before you start to edit a wedding you shot, and enjoy the constant phalanx of phone calls and emails. “Where are our pictures?!?”

Another reason this is a best practice is that staying ahead of the ball lets you stay better organized, both mechanically and in your head. I have seen students and fellow photographers browse through thousands of images on the backs of their cameras, on their phones, or, and this is the worst, one media card after another, trying to find just one image in a sea of images. Here’s a tip. You can’t find “Johnson Wedding 2016” in your camera or on your phone, but I found “Reeves-Milligan Wedding” in just a few seconds on my laptop. I just opened a search and typed the words.

The inability to find images makes you look foolish and incompetent, and has potentially disastrous consequences for your photographer-client relationship. It only took a few seconds to find these results, since I was well-organized.

If this kind of organization isn’t your thing, it might be worth considering hiring someone to do it for you – an office manager or editing partner. Most of the complaints I hear and read about photographers are about timeliness and organization. And nothing can sour your reputation like angering your customers.