Shooting the Milky Way with the D3300

This is a quick post for one of my viewers who is requesting my exif data from the shots in my video Review - Nikon D3300 which featured some Milky Way time lapse shots.  

The shots in questions are these here:

Nikon D3300 with Pro-Optic (aka Rokinon, Bower) 8mm f3.5 Lens

Nikon D3300 with Nikon 14-24 f2.8 Lens

Here is the Exif data for the images - at least the important data:

For the first image

For the second image

I will expand on this blog in the next few days but I wanted to answer the viewers questions quickly.

Thank you!

Organizing Your Photos -

Strategies and Tips

Organizing photos has always been a problem even in the age of film though the volume of photos people can generate has magnified significantly with digital.  There are a number of strategies for organizing photos and I will go into some detail what I do and perhaps you can take use this my process or develop your own to help you keep your images sorted.  The key is to figure out your system and then make sure to follow it as you unload photos from your camera onto your computer because once you get behind it can be hard to find the time and/or the motivation to clean up the files.  Then you run the risk of losing photos you treasure either because you accidentally delete them thinking they are stored somewhere else or your computer dies and you don’t get them backed up properly.

Really the only way to organize digital images is to figure out some sort of file structure that you can place your photos into.  It seems that people typically decide to organize by date (ie 2-15-2015), or event name (ie “Christmas at Grandma’s”).  Now there are advantages and disadvantages to both. For instance, you may not remember what date something happened on so you will find yourself spending a decent amount of time searching through folders trying to find the photos you are looking for.  Also, if you don’t use the right date format you will find that your folders won’t be in the order you expect.  For instance, if you use the format 1-7-2015, then all your January dates will be grouped together, then February, etc.  On the other hand, if you list it by event name and you don’t remember what you called the event – for instance you remember is was at Grandma’s house, but you forgot you called it “Christmas at Grandma’s” you will have to read each folder name until you find it.  What I have found that works the best is a combination of the two. 

Here is an example of how I organize my photos.

My top level folder I call “Photography”.  Under that I have a folder for different years 2007, 2008, 2009… etc.  Within each
year I have folders for events “Renaissance Fair”, “4^th of July”, and the like.  Since I started I have gotten into Milky Way time lapse which has become quote a large portfolio.  Each shoot yields hundreds of photos and since I didn't want to have to dig through my general photography images to find these I created a new broad category labelled “Time Lapse.”  In this folder I use a slightly different strategy to organize my files since I seem to shoot in the same locations regularly and the date is irrelevant to me, under the main folder I have a folder for different locations.  Those folders are then sub divided into more folders with descriptive names like “Silos with clouds” – which means something to me but probably not anyone else.  I have also created large broad categories to organize photos of local bands I shoot, Infrared photography and one folder dedicated to my daughter.  

This shows how Lightroom is organized .

As you broaden your photography interests you might make other broad categories  as well – such as Weddings or Real Estate or what have you. This works well not only for general file organization, but also works well in Lightroom.  Now each broad category can become its own Lightroom catalog.  The only issue I have had is if you want to transfer images from one catalog to another it can be a little cumbersome – but perhaps this was solved since v2.7( yeah I am a little behind the times…)

Maybe you are just taking pictures of your family and some landscapes or whatnot you could still separate the images into broad categories such as “Kids” or “Dogs.”  My mother-in-law takes pictures of trees.  She could have one folder labelled “Trees”, a folder for “Family” and then “General.”  Really, you can adapt this to you own personal needs.

One note that I would like to stress, if you do choose to label folders by date, is not to use the standard American date format (ie month-day-year).  The folders, which are usually sorted by name, will have all the months grouped together and your folders will be out of chronological sequence.  So, for example, all your January folders will be together, then all your February and so on and so on.  See example below.  The 1/1/2001 then the 1/1/2002 are next to each other.  

Naming Files with month first will group months together as opposed to grouping years together.

My suggestion is to label them year first, then month and day - always using 4 digits for year, 2 digits for month and 2 digits for day.  See below. This standardizes the titles of the folders and makes it easier to find a particular date. 

Name them with year first and they will be in chronological order. 

Backing Up Files:

On a side note, once you have a pretty well established file system, backing up files becomes that much easier.  I am not going to get into to much detail here since this is a whole other topic in itself but I mention it now since you should develop a backup routine because no hard drive or computer is going to last forever.  There are a couple different things you can do now to help protect your files.  One is to back them up onto an external drive on a regular basis.  They have become much more affordable and you can find a 1TB external hard drive for about $60 online.  Another option is to use a "Cloud" backup.  Meaning you upload your images/files to some online service.  This is a great option since internet servers (where your files will be stored ) have a very regimented and robust backup process and its highly unlikely that the data will be lost.  There are a couple disadvantages to this however, one being there is likely a monthly/yearly cost if you want to store more than 5GB of data, and secondly, uploading a lot of large files may take a long time or be impractical if you don't have access to high speed internet.  

Update - NEW CAMERA!

Well I am finally getting back to my roots in the film world. After getting the D300, I have traded my old D70s to a friend for a Hasselblad 500C. On top of that, I mixed up some of the good 'ole D76 film developer that I had kept in a drawer for probably 6 years now and developed roll of film from the Hasselblad. Now all I need is a film scanner, and I can stick to the digital work environment. However, I do have an enlarger sitting the basement right now.... maybe this weekend Ill plug it in an make some prints. Ill have to buy some new photo paper... Hmmm

Another option is to have the negatives scanned professionally, but when I found out how much that cost I am going to have to start saving my pennies. If I shoot 10 rolls of medium format film, then Ill will just about pay for the negative scanner.

For my invisible audience ( I am not sure how many people are reading this, I thinks its just me, myself and I at this point), you can anticipate me revealing my big photo project in the next couple of weeks. I have been working on the beginings of it for a few months now.

Take care.

Website: www.oil-rigs.net

Red Cross ball (10-11-08)

Almost two weeks ago I covered a charity auction/banquet for the Washtenaw County Red Cross. Here is a sample of some of the pictures I took at the event. Before I started volunteering, I didn't realize all the services that the Red Cross provided, such as assisting people whose house had caught fire. Besides helping out, volunteering with the Red Cross is providing a lot of great experience covering fast moving events and anticipating the great candid moments.

Here is the auctioneer in action trying to motivate the bidders to bring the price up. It was fun to watch, he was pretty funny.

The waiters were all dressed in costume - there was a WWII era theme to the event.

There was a "big band" and swing dancers. With the dancers I was trying to get a great shot using a slow flash, and I didn't get anything I was super happy about, but I did get some good panning shots.



In the next week I'll post images from Ashley and Jeff Kermath's wedding I covered on the 4th of October. Got some great shots I am happy with.

The begining...

This is my first blog. Hello.

My name is Matthew Eddy, and I live in the lovely town of Ann Arbor. I only moved here 2 years ago from the central coast of California. As you might have expected, its a bit of a change. Freezing temperatures in winter, humidity in summer, lack of hills, snow, and the terrible roads are balanced with the cultural diversity, the fall colors, beautiful sunrises/sunsets, thunderstorms (which I think are fun) and I am sure there are more positive comments I could make about Ann Arbor, and Michigan in general.

Well, my main motivation for creating this blog is for my friends, current and potential clients to get a taste of ME, and keep people informed on the projects I am working on. I will be focusing on my Photography, and the small company I started called Oil-Rig Productions.

Why Oil-Rig Productions? It started as a domain name, something that was unique since www.matteddy.com was taken. So why Oil-Rig Productions? Well, driving up and down the coast of California from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara, there are a number of oil rigs just off the coast, and I, being a industrial nerd, was fascinated with the contraptions. However, I am working on a current project that relates to oil rigs, but its not a mature project yet, and so I don't want to unveil it just yet.

My current public projects:
-Teaching photography classes through the Ann Arbor Rec and Ed department.
-Volunteering with the Washtenaw County Red Cross as a photographer


Well, I will post more as I have news. Right now I need to work on picture for a wedding I covered for Ashley and Jeff Kermath on Oct 4th. I will post some examples of my work on my website: www.oil-rigs.net

Take care,
Matt