Month: December 2013

Jeff Abbott’s Process for Ingesting, Processing, and Archiving Photos  →

Next on my journey of learning about photography workflows is what to do when there are too many photos for your computer’s hard drive.

Buy a new computer, right? (I wish!)

Seriously though. My Mac’s SSD is getting overrun with the (awesome) photos I’ve been taking for the past year, and I need to do something about them. And since I use Lightroom for all my editing, I wanted to keep my Lightroom library in tact.

My pal, Jeff Abbot, just so happened to write up a very clear and detailed article outlining how he manages his photo library and archives. This makes a lot of sense to me, and so Jeff’s way of managing photos will probably become my way as well. I’ll be getting a new external drive and moving my 2013 photos off the MacBook Air in a few weeks.

Jeff Abbott’s Process for Ingesting, Processing, and Archiving Photos

RAW vs JPEG: The Ultimate Visual Guide  →

This is a very easy to understand guide to shooting photos in RAW vs JPEG.

When I picked up my E-PL5 last year someone told me that I should shoot in RAW + JPEG simultaneously. And so that’s what I set my camera to do. But I had no idea why. Well, it turns out I don’t need to be doing that.

One of my favorite parts of photography is the editing. I use Lightroom 4 and the VSCO Film packs. And so my photography “workflow” looks something like this:

Take pictures → import to Lightroom → edit → export my favorites.

Since I’m processing all my photos through Lightroom and then exporting my favorites, there’s no need for me to have JPEG and RAW versions of the original files. So, I’ve set my camera back to just shoot RAW, and I used Hazel to sift through all the photos I’ve taken in the past year and pull out all the JPEG files (which just rescued about 12GBs).

RAW vs JPEG: The Ultimate Visual Guide

The Tools and Toys 2013 Christmas Catalog  →

Speaking of Tools & Toys and lists, our 2013 Christmas Catalog is up and it’s pretty great.

Something we didn’t include in our list this time around is games. My current favorite board game is Dominion. Earlier this year I bought Dominion the card game, and was instantly hooked. I’ve since picked up the Prosperity, Seaside, and Guilds expansions. It’s great with just 2 players (Anna and I play it often) but is also great with 3 or 4 (we play when my sister and brother-in-law come over for dinner). More than 4 players the gameplay can begin to get a little slow, but it’s still fun.

The Tools and Toys 2013 Christmas Catalog

Go to the App Store and Rate Your 5 Favorite Apps  →

Rene Ritchie:

Here’s an idea: Right now, right this very second, please take a moment to go and rate your five favorite, most-used App Store apps. […] We all want more great apps and the only way to get them is to help make them successful.

I did this over the weekend; I rated Day One, PCalc, Milage Log+, 1Password, Fantastical, Tweetbot, and Check the Weather.

Go to the App Store and Rate Your 5 Favorite Apps

Ten Lessons From a Maker  →

David Hieatt, founder of Hiut Denim Co.:

II) You are not an artist. You make things. You make things in order to sell them. The difference between you and an artist is you can’t wait years to be discovered. […] Makers are here to make. Makers are here to sell – Van Gogh had to wait till he died before he sold his first painting. You can’t. Sales after you die don’t count.

Gotta love his candidness.

Later on in his interview, Hieatt talks about the importance of quality but also that quality alone is not enough for a successful business around what you make. I agree. As I was writing and recording my audio book, or as I work on my sites day in and day out and record my podcast every day, my focus is on doing things the best that I can. And to me, that is art; that’s craft.

Slopping something together is not art, and if I allowed myself to do sloppy work then I wouldn’t consider myself an artist.

But the quality alone isn’t what brings me new readers to my site, new members, nor new buyers of my book. Quality is for the sake of my current audience. I do what I can to spread the word about my work to attract new readers, and I do my best work day in and day out so that current readers stick around because the quality is there.

Something I’ve said before regarding Apple and word-of-mouth marketing: good marketing gets people in the door the first time, but it’s a great product that gets them back in the door the second and third times.

Ten Lessons From a Maker

Sponsor: Atlassian’s Agile Guide  →

What’s the point of an agile standup meeting?

Gone are the days of 30-minute status meetings where most people are half-asleep or pecking away on their laptops, oblivious to what’s being said. Agile standups are the leaner, more efficient cousin of status meetings where attendees actually stand up. On our feet, we’re more focused, attentive, and concise. It’s science!

Whether you need robust tools for planning and tracking projects, communicating with coworkers, deploying products, or just some general tips on how to run an agile shop (and how to run them Rong?), Atlassian is here to offer you the tools and advice you need to get the most out of your agile practice.

* * *

My thanks to Atlassian for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Sponsor: Atlassian’s Agile Guide

The NanoPad for ElevationDock  →

The NanoPad attaches to the bottom of the ElevationDock, and uses “thousands of microscopic suction cups to stick to smooth, non-porous surfaces.” After reading Duncan Davidson’s positive review of the new NanoPad, I ordered one as well. Mine arrived the same time as Marco’s and I mimic both of these guys’ thoughts: it works extremely well.

I’m using this 3D-printed, $4 adapter from Shapeways that works perfectly for fitting my Lightning Cable in my Elevation Dock. And now, with the NanoPad, the ElevationDock no longer requires two hands to remove my iPhone 5s.

The NanoPad for ElevationDock

Recently, on ‘Shawn Today’

This past week, on my members-only podcast, Shawn Today, I spent 5 episodes on the subject of working from home.

I’ve been working for myself out of my home office for just about 3 years, and, as anyone else who works from home knows, it’s not all coffee and pajamas. Yes, there are many awesome advantages, but there are also many unique challenges and distractions.

While there’s no way I could fully exhaust the topic, I did want to hit a few of the areas that are hot topics for me personally right now. In the weeks ahead, I plan to continue this conversation on the podcast and here in written form as well.

Here’s a quick overview of this week’s episodes:

  • On Monday’s show, I talked about how taking time off is hard and shared some thoughts on working from anywhere and working all the time, and how it’s so easy to do (especially when you work for yourself).

  • On Tuesday’s show, I talked about “The Transition”. That time after work where you decompress from the work day and leave behind what was unfinished, and let it wait for the next work day. I shared some of my own pros and cons of working from home as it relates to having an office just one flight of stairs away, and thus the lack of a transition before and after the work day.

  • On Wednesday I shared many pros and cons to working from home as submitted to me by folks via Twitter in response to this question.

  • Thursday was about how to deal with the being alone (as in, not physically around other coworkers for face-to-face conversation and interaction) in our victories and defeats. When you’re working on a project alone how do you best celebrate the victory of shipping something and how do you best minimize the criticism that comes with a failure, learning from it rather than taking it to heart?

  • And on Friday, I shared some thoughts on defining our work by schedule rather than to-do lists.

A huge thanks to those of you who wrote something of your own, sent in emails, and/or shared your thoughts via Twitter after various episodes. These shows turned out better because of your feedback.

If you’re a current member to the site and haven’t already listened to this week’s podcast episodes, you’ll find them here (as always).

And, of course, if you’re not a member, you can sign up here. It’s $4/month and you’ll get access to the members-only podcast feed and the archive page with links to every single one of the 450 episodes recorded to date (including this week’s series on working from home).

Recently, on ‘Shawn Today’