When I go out on walk, I’m not like professional photographers, who take good photographs after analyzing the angle and studying the area and pose. I’m pretty much a point-and-shoot guy, and once I get home to take a good look at the photos, it shows. <\/p>\n
And unlike good photographers, my photos go up in Flickr on a pass\/fail basis. I very seldom if ever retouch them. Having said that, there are other rituals I follow once I get home from my walks.<\/p>\n
1. Map my hike. I’m very interested to know I’ve walked, so I plot it out in Gmaps Pedometer<\/a>. Once I have the total, I add it to a spreadsheet and then create a path in Google Earth, which allows me to produce pretty maps like this one.<\/p>\n 2. Send all the photos to the panorama manager, which stitches them. I use Autopano Giga<\/a> to saw up photos like this one or more complicated shots like this one. I do have a fisheye but seldom use it.<\/p>\n 3. Once the panoramas are rendered, I start the tagging and keyword process. I use iTag<\/a>, an invaluable windows program. I am a tagging fiend, and like adding several keywords to my photos (see example here).<\/p>\n 4. If it involves a NYC Landmarks Commission designated property, I use the designation report<\/a>. I started scanning the PDFs late in 2009 and adding them to my photos. Some reports are either intelligible or scribbled over but most are legible to a degree. But for example, on Tuesday I photographed eight landmarked theaters so I had to go over the reports for each of them, and I’m still not done.<\/p>\n