Berlin always fascinates me. I’ve wanted to live and work there since I was a child.
My parents got to know each other and still have friends in Moabit.
Because of that I’ve been visiting the city almost every year of my life.
This year was the first time I brought my D90 and D40 with me.

The city has a different vibe, depending on the season and the places you see.
These three images capture how the city felt last week.

Two products are build after this principle: the R-Strap and the Sun Sniper. Both have two big disadvantages though.

First, they attach to the tripod mount of your camera using a special screw. The tripod mount is not build for stress like this! Having the camera dangle and bounce from a strap attached there might very well destroy it. Further, the screw can come loose if the camera twists around. Both products take measures against this, but a certain risk remains. Second, both straps are pretty expensive at around 50€

In this post I’ll give instructions on how to build such a strap by yourself with material for 12€. This strap not only works similarly to its 50€ brothers but is of very high quality as well and can be trusted with heavy equipment.

This is what my strap looks like (click the images to enlarge):

A list of the parts I used:

• Two carabiners stripped from a camera bag (the black plastic things sliding on the strap), free!
• A aluminum munkees carabiner from an outdoor store, 2€
• 20mm black strap from the same store, 1€ per meter
• Various plastic parts, like the fastener, the snap-lock and the two buckles, also from the store, 3€
• Tatonka shoulder pad, same store, 6€
• 2cm key ring, 50 cent

The most difficult part was to find a carabiner that slides on the strap, that I’m also comfortable with attaching a heavy camera to. The plastic ones from an old camera bag looked sturdy enough. They were a little hard to handle though, so I added the aluminum munkees carabiner that is very easy to open and allows me to quickly attach and remove the camera from the strap.

You might wonder why I have two sliding carabiners on the strap (one stays hidden inside the shoulder pad). Well, as you can see in the next picture, I designed my strap so that you can open it, slide the carabiners to the open ends and attach them to the camera again, in the way regular camera straps are used. If you think you don’t need this, you can omit some parts to make the connection inside the shoulder pad simpler.

The big, shiny metal carabiner on the upper right is a replacement for the one from the camera bag. I stripped it from a dog leash (for big dogs!, 7€ at Fressnapf). Should I ever carry a 70-200/2.8, I’ll use that one, but for my current, lightweight equipment I prefer the plastic parts because they’re easier to open and weigh less.

The last image shows how the strap is attached to my D90. I don’t trust the tripod mount and finding a matching screw is difficult as well. A simpler and better way to attach the camera to the strap is to use the dedicated strap eyes on the camera body. To be able to attach the carabiner and to make the system a bit more flexible, I added a simple key ring that remains on the camera.

Update:

I got back to the hardware store and bought some 25mm strap. The result is much sturdier and cleaner that the previous version, but lacks the ability to attach the camera in an old-fashioned way.

Lightroom offers several methods for organizing photos and I believe Aperture provides something similar:

• Images can be sorted into folders that correspond to folders on your hard-drive
• Images can be tagged
• Images can be rated from 0 to 5 stars
• Images can be picked or rejected
• Metadata can be edited
• You can create virtual copies of images

That’s quite a lot to worry about and for a long time I couldn’t imagine how to use all these options properly. But I think I finally figured out a way that works for me. What works for other may differ, especially the purpose of your photography is different. I’m doing this only for fun on private occasions with a relatively low numbers of pictures per “shooting”. A professional probably has a different workflow but for beginners looking for ideas my workflow might provide some orientation.

Import

I have my Mac configured so that it opens Lightroom when I insert the SD Card from my camera into the card reader. To do this, open the Image Capture program and select Lightroom in the preferences.

Lightroom itself is configured to open the Import dialog when a card is inserted. This way I only need to insert the card and whatever I’ve been doing before, the Lightroom Import dialog pops up. For maximum convenience, I’ve set up Lightroom so that it even ejects the card after the import is done.

During import I store the images into folders that are hierarchically organized by date. In my photo folder I have 2 subfolders currently, “2008″ and “2009″, each of which contains folders from 01 until 12 for each month, and each of those — you guessed it– contains folders for my shootings, prefixed by day like “2008/08/01 – Barbecue Party”.

I rarely have more than one “shooting” per day. If I do, I append letters to the day, like “2008/12/24a – Decorating the tree” “2008/12/24b – Christmas Eve”.

Rejection

In the next step, I set up Lightroom to only show unflagged photos and begin looking through all of the photos with the filmstrip displaying at the bottom of the screen. My goal here is to sort out any pictures that are garbage or duplicates. Unusable stuff gets marked for deletion with the X key. Duplicates (usually from shooting people in continuous mode) are reduced to a single best shot by deleting the excess ones. If I have several very similar shots that I don’t want to throw away, yet also not deal with individually, I group them by selecting all, going to the best one and hitting CMD+G.

After I’m done, the rejected photos are deleted for good by pressing CMD+Backspace

Tagging

In the beginning I didn’t use tags because I could easily keep all my shootings in my head but since my first photos in Lightroom half a year has passed and I don’t really remember them anymore. Now’s the time I wish I had used tags back then. I tag photos by location, by subject (if it’s a person or something significant), by event, by purpose or by any other criteria that I might some day use to find those photos. Generally, I find it pretty hard to come up with good tagging schemes. This is somthing everyone has to learn on his own I guess, find a system that works.

Rating

For rating, I collapse all stacks (grouped photos, via “Photos” menu). Then I go through the photos and assign stars via the following scheme:

• 4 stars: best shots of the series, the ones I would show someone who doesn’t have a lot of time.
• 3 stars: good shots, ones I would show someone who won’t be bored by them.
• 2 stars: mediocre shots that are too boring in the context of the entire series but might have specific features in them I personally like.
• 1 stars: bad shots. Not deleted because they might show people I like or contain memories or any other reason to keep them but are not even looked at by me unless I specifically search for them.

Then I look at the 4 star photos and give those a 5th star that qualify for my all time best shots.

The overall goal here is to reduce the amount of images. Say, I have a hundred images of a given event. Someone interested in the event will NOT want to look at all the pictures. Someone who wasn’t there might only care about the 15 best shots, while someone who was attending and whose interest is higher will pobably want to see the 30 best shots. To the first person I’d show the 4-star photos, the other person would also get to see the 3-star photos. And I probably only want at most one, rarely even two photos of a series in my 5-star all time favourite list.

Picking and Collections

I rarely use these two features. I can imagine how picking could be useful if you intend to throw most of your taken pictures away during import (as opposed to keeping most of them like I do). I have found another use though: If I export my photos to a photo sharing site or for a friend, I use picking to select the photos I want to use. When I’m done, the Picked-flags can be removed again.

If I decide that I’ll use one of the selections made this way again at a later time, I create a collection from it.

The tools Lightroom provides are extremely flexible. This can be overwhelming at first and it takes time to develop an effective workflow that combines the needs of the photographer with the options provided by the software. The result will likely differ from person to person. The presented way is one that works well for me and might work for many other beginning photographers but you should feel free to explore other uses for Lightroom’s tool.