Workflow

Lightroom Classic: development and organisation

Adobe Lightroom Classic is central to the way I manage photographs. It is both a development environment and a catalogue. A photograph can be processed, rated, described and classified without altering the original camera file; adjustments are applied when a new version is exported, so it is always possible to return to the original.

Development starts with selection: comparing similar frames and keeping the most useful. Then exposure, colour balance, tone, lens corrections and cropping. The amount of processing depends on the intended use. For technical material I want the photograph to keep the features and colour relationships that make it informative.

Lightroom also organises the collection as it grows. Ratings help during selection, keywords find photographs of a subject, titles and captions describe each image, and capture dates, locations and camera settings add context. The archive can be searched by what is pictured, where it was taken, or how.

Two ways of organising the same photographs

I use two complementary structures. The first classifies subjects in a hierarchy, broad categories broken down into smaller groups. The second is a set of photographic stories: photographs that belong together because they illustrate a place, a process or an idea. A photograph can belong to several stories without being copied into several folders.

The classification supports searching and browsing; the stories present selected photographs in context. Both are shown here as they currently stand on this site, generated from the keywords in the Lightroom catalogue.

Location

Location is an important part of a nature photograph. It provides a reference for return visits, makes it possible to compare areas, and relates a collection to its environmental or agricultural setting. Much of this archive was geotagged by a GPS unit on the camera.

Not every location should be published. Positions on the Natura atlas are rounded, and photographs of buildings, interiors or sensitive sites have their location removed before publication.

Export and the Natura publishing process

A photograph in the archive is generally larger than a website needs. Lightroom produces a smaller JPEG with the selected adjustments and the descriptive and technical information required for publication, while the original remains available for print.

Natura is built from the metadata carried in those exported files. ExifTool extracts it into a structured catalogue, from which the site builds its gallery categories, captions, stories and map. Photographs are added and maintained through the photographic workflow, not by editing the website.

Text that belongs to a whole story is kept separately from the individual photographs and linked to them by a shared story name.

From photograph to document

My interest in technical documentation grew out of work in the energy sector, where a document often had to explain a process, establish a practice or tell people what they needed to know to do their work. The writer worked with the people who understood the subject, organised the material and decided how to present it. Photographs and graphics were part of that work, not additions made afterwards.

The same applies to agricultural and environmental publications. A photograph can show a stage of a process, identify an object or establish the circumstances of an observation. Drawings explain relationships that are hard to see in a photograph; Illustrator's vector graphics stay sharp at any size, and Photoshop handles detailed preparation. I keep an unaltered photographic master and make separate annotated versions, and an altered or composite image is identified as such.

A well-organised collection can become an illustrated factsheet, a technical manual, a field-guide entry or a web article with maps and data. The quality of the result depends as much on the organisation of the information as on the photography.

Images as structured information

An archive becomes far more useful when its material is consistently described. A filename says little; the accompanying information identifies the subject, place, date, photographer and conditions. Standard photographic metadata carries much of that information with the file itself.

The approach is familiar from enterprise content and data management: a common vocabulary, consistent identifiers and a record of where each item came from. In a large collection these matter as much as the folders the files are stored in.

Different kinds of information have to stay distinguishable. An archival photograph records an observed scene; published research comes from an identified source; a simulation describes a hypothetical situation. A photograph beside a model does not make the model's numbers an observation of the place pictured. The card here shows the actual record for one photograph on this site.