The Photo Contest in On!

Dave has opened the photo contest. Whoo Hoo! Come on everybody let's get those fabby RM pics in and bamboozle everyone with our special gardens and scenery. Here's the link http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1045955/

Thanks, DN! The photo contest is always fun...

Just saw that! How fun. There should be Rocky Mt. photos in every category. Come on, Kyla, get your 'puter going! Plutodrive? Brenda? Katlian, Soferdig, Lisabees, ???? Dahlianut?? Everybody. We want to Win Big!

No kiddin roybird!!!

I'm up for it! Who else?

I am sorting through my pics. I don't think I can cover all categories but some for sure!

I'm sure I'll enter a few.

I don't have as much time for the contest this year because the roofing construction will limit how much computer time I will have during the next 2 weeks. Trying to get a few in early.

This sounds a bit weird since I copied it from the Has it snowed yet forum. But you will get my drift. Sorry If I am repeating stuff others have said.:

Roybird, I am delighted to hear that you are entering the DG photo contest. I hope you will too, lisabees, also Katlian and the others of you who entered last year and this year -- plutodrive! You have been taking some terrific pictures this year. And Kylaluaz. You have taken some great ones, too. And Soferdig. You have always been a great photographer. I want to see the Rocky Mt. Forum's name up there in lights!

I hope you'll be entering some of your iris photos, Paja!

Oh, I only record the flower. No art in my photos.

You DEFINITELY have some pics that you MUST enter dear Paj. I have just finished going through mine. I took roybirds advice from last year and created a Photo Contest file and put the ones I like in there. Now the sorting begins. I seem to have a plethora of hoses cuz alot of my pics this year have a hose or two in them. Maybe there should be a Hose catagory ^_^

Tee hee! I didn't do a photo contest file. Hmmm.

I think it's definitely another one of roybird's brilliant ideas. Last year I got sooo confused. This year I created a folder and just copied hopefuls in there so I don't have to keep going back to my disorganized files. ps I have very disorganized files.

I will find some to enter.

Well, I'm glad you followed my advice, Dahlia, because I sure didn't! O.M.G. there are pictures All over the place. Using 2 different cameras has meant 2 different what? Big Folders? And then there are all the little folders and sub-folders which I have tried to organize much along the lines of the D.G. Photo contest files but not exactly. Whew. Plus, there was the new computer which means most of my photos before June are on CD's ( and hard drive back ups ) so those have to be looked at because that is where the tulips are! And I may need my tulips. I have decided that I have saved Way Too Many pictures, as usual. I'm getting to a point where if I don't really love them I Will delete them mercilessly. This is getting overwhelming. And then something will look really nice and there will be a nasty bird poop on a leaf or something and I could fix it but who cares anymore? The good news is our roofing won't start until the Monday after next which gives me more time. The D.G. contest is a really good way to weed picture files! And perhaps we ought to have our own Hose pictures category because they do seem to sneak in rather often.

LoL, a hose picture category. Send that one to the DG admin.

Dave-who-is-Dave I did ^_^ Dave who is The Dave will probable snorkle. Roybird I spent an hour discombobulating around in my files until I became fugueish and then I just decided to dash through and grab the hopefuls and keep going and worry about the discombobulation later...maybe waaaay later. Yours sounds alot more complicated though :/

I am snorkling about hose pictures because I understand how they happen. I expect the DG staff will respond with some statement about the miscelaneous category. The "America's Funniest Home Videos" TV show would disagree, proving that mistakes sell better than serious.

Probably not Dave-who-is-Dave. All the catagorys were compiled by members at large this year in the Dave-who-is-The-Dave Garden Forum. This is totally a member driven contest. That's why it's so fabby ^_^ Although I'm not sure how many have a plethora of hose pics. We will probably get shot down on that one. HOWEVER there is a surge of interest in a "Plants I Have Luved and Killed' catagory which I also suggested ^_^

Well I didn't keep a contest file throughout the year, but that is an awesome idea! I went though my semi-organized photo folders YESTERDAY & copied the hopefuls into a contest folder. I know I'm missing some good ones but oh well :o). Now I have to narrow them down...

GO lisabees GO. I think roybird's idea, as usual, is brilliant

Oh! A photo contest file is a great idea! We have switched around between 3 computers this year, so my files are also a mess... I often have to go to DH's computer to retrieve pics (as his used to be mine, until I bought a new puter... now we are going to have to buy him a new one, and there is the external hard drive which holds pics from his old, old computer...). Oh well, we'll do what we can. But I AM making a file for photo contest pics!

I just leave mine in folders named with the date taken and a word or two describing the content.

I like to have folders such as "annuals June 2009", so by content and date, but more generalized. I take a whole lot of pictures and some are more to learn from than to look at. Those, I should delete right away after I look at them once. But, if whatever I'm trying to do works, then I want to keep it even if it doesn't really work as a good picture. Makes no sense at all. And then there are the ones I keep just to play with! The ones that get cut and pasted and get some weird FX, late in the winter when there is nothing else to do!

Whenever I upload a batch of pics from my camera, they go into a folder with a name and the date, so that's where all of this summer's photos are. When I have time I'll sort all the pics from my garden into the big folders corresponding to each of my garden beds. (I go around my yard with a camera regularly & try to document everything) Those folders tend to have lots of un-lovely pictures in them because they're supposed to be for reference, but there are pretty pics in there too - I have to remind myself not to take ONLY pretty pics in my garden. Other photos stay in their original folders, so if I have a great plant pic from somewhere that's not specifically a garden, it's less easy to find.

Yes, some pictures are for documentation. I have to admit that my garden space is so small I have a pretty good idea of where plants are and what they ought to look like. I think it is light that determines the prettiness of a picture. Overcast light, like today, is just super.

Gah!

I just went through all the digital photos on my computer and pulled over 200 possibles. I have much sorting to do.

Oh, girl, that's nothing! Last year I had 200 photos just of roses! I thought my eyes were gonna fall out. l.o.l. This year I have used admirable restraint and my roses had a bad year, anyway. (I'm afraid to look at the tulip c.d.)

I do have folders by date, but that doesn't help me when I want to find the pretty garden pics or landscape pics, or pet pics, as I also photograph motorcycle competitions, and they can all be in the same download. My DH competes in Vintage Motorcycle Trials events, and I offer pics from those events for sale on my website... www.trialsphoto.com if anyone wants to see what trials is. I throw a few of my favorite nature photos on there as well... but I need better organization for my favorite nature pics on my computer, so I don't have to go through hundreds and hundreds of pics to find the best ones. Thus, the creation of the new folder!

*blink*

oh the photo contest oh.

well, if I manage to get my new computer in a timely fashion perhaps I can squeak in with a few........... I want to be part of the fun, y'all and just hope the timing will allow me to but if not there will be other times........ you can read my update if you want to in the new Confessions thread I just started, not going to fetch the linky cause I want to spend my time now catching up with all the posts I missed recently.

Kyla, who Will Return! lol

Kyla! Well, this year it was tulips. Tulips part A. has 230 pictures. There are 10 that I like a whole lot. This gives you some idea of my insanity. Hope I didn't insult you, Jude! I still need to look at Tulips part B.

Roybird, I have to say you are proceeding nicely on the path to insanity with photos but I assure you there are further heights to be scaled. I recently filled my external drive I was using exclusively for flowers and transferred them to a new larger external drive. The computer sat there for six hours copying them without a pause before it was done. I don't want to know how many flower photos that was.

I have a system that works well for me. I sort by kind of flower, then add the year after the flower name when creating the folder. So I may have Cosmos 04, Cosmos 05, etc. So I can quickly locate all the cosmos and fairly efficiently locate any specific photo. I used to use Firehand Ember when I was on pc, but when I switched to Mac I started using Adobe Bridge. Those programs let me review things in hurry with their slide show features. I also use two cameras and they generally get along in the folders together.

I have some oddball categories like mixed, where I have several kinds of flowers in one shot, but this overall works quite well. The biggest exception, is, of course, poppies. I ended up doing Poppies Red, Poppies Iceland, Poppies White, etc. all followed by the year as I have thousands of poppy photos. They take a bit more reviewing, which I think is fun anyway. When I get really serious about sorting a poppy category I might then end up with Poppies Radiant 06 Best, which helps later. But most of them have not had that much time spent sorting them, I just whiz through on the slide show picking out what I want at the moment.

I don't do too much deleting, unless the darn wind blew the flower right out of the frame or something. I find I sometimes use a part of the photo for reference that I was not considering when I shot it, so I leave most things in the collection since I never know what I might suddenly want.

I am just getting interested in Bridge's ability to add keywords to photos so I could do a quick sort for one thing, but it is not likely I am going to retroactively add those labels to all my existing photos. Or perhaps even the new ones as there are so many of them.

Then we have Bern's photos, such as Brown Trout, Rainbow Trout, etc. Whatever it is, it gets its own folder, generally with a year added. The division in years keeps duplicate photo numbers from the cameras from colliding and I even sometimes recall what year I might want to search first.

HOLY COW, Mulch - & I thought I had a lot of pictures!

Mulch, great minds go insane alike! My filing is very like yours and I use the Photo Shop Elements version of Bridge to look at photos quickly. We also have Kevin's various video projects, mostly on external hard drives and on d.v.d.s . I keep thinking if I get back to painting, which will probably be inevitable, I will need all the photos for just the reasons you mentioned. 2008 was a good rose year for me. 2009 was apparently the year of the Tulip. I am finally starting to understand what I want from a photograph and Lo and Behold!, it ends up to be what I want in my painting or printmaking. Not always, but often enough to see a pattern. Your poppies are spectacular! How you doin', by the way?

Oh - the over 200 are just the best possibles for the contest (so far culled to 140). I pulled those out of my 4078 total pictures of which about half are of botanical things. I also couldn't help myself and took some winter / fall pics yesterday, which still need to be uploaded to my computer.
It's a good thing I don't have all my stuff from my film shooting days scanned in or I'd really be in trouble. My thing while studying photography in undergrad school (an elective pursuit) was almost exclusively black & white botanicals & botanical macros. I still have the negatives and contact sheets, but I never did print _everything_ (I did all my own printing back in those days). Someday I'll scan all those negatives in...

This message was edited Oct 11, 2009 12:57 PM

Well, there you go! Not to mention old portfolios and so on. In the interest of space saving and moving on, I have a bon fire every few years of old art work. I'm new to photography but I've been painting since I was three. I still have some crayon pictures from that time! I was mildly obsessed with ducks, rabbits and bees. Those pictures I'm keeping. I was never attracted to film partly because I dislike being around chemicals, though paint has plenty, too. But, many of my friends over the years were/are photographers and it has always been one of my favorite art forms. Digital hit me like a train because it is fast and totally profligate in that one Can have thousands of photos quite easily. Digital printing is a whole 'nother area and one I'm just getting in to. Fortunately, one of my best friends is a professional printer and he does my printing when it matters. Good Luck, Jude, with your picture selections!

Ye gods and little fishes.

"great minds go insane alike" lol

I am totally intimidated by the need for organization but it is a good thing about my computer/photographing hiatus that I have time to consider how to do this in a way I can manage. Cause once I get set up again I probably will just start taking so many pictures I will get lost in image jungles dire......... so so so easy to do.

You are brave people who are taming the image jungle, I salute you.

And silently cower away...........

Sounds like great minds go profligate together. I love that word. The dictionary says "recklessly wasteful" and "wildly extravagant".

My profligacy is uploading right now: 7.4G of tango music. Now I have to sort through and throw out all the stuff I don't like.

I am almost through getting my pictures in, although some may be changed later! Hurray!