A photo journal

This sunset was for the birds

I came across an article from Digital Photography School that I first rushed by, but then came back to. The post was about keeping a photo journal. At first I thought it was something along the lines of what I have going on in Evernote now, articles of tips, lists of places to shoot, etc. But this was a journal of how the photographer felt about individual shoots or outings. You can see the article here. This got me thinking. In Aperture I often times keep photos that I remember having high hopes for but for one reason or another fell flat. The idea is that I'll somehow magically come back to them and learn from whatever mistake I had done. If you can't sense the sarcasm in that last sentence, I'm sorry, but basically I rarely if ever go into Aperture looking for shots that I wished had turned out better.

So this idea got me thinking on how I could use this. I thought I'd take only the out of camera shot to journal about, though I might start taking a finished shot also later, and to pick what I felt was my best shot and my worst shot, give a quick critique and have the photo and the basic exif data in the journal entry. The idea being that quickly critiquing my own shot and pointing out the boneheaded mistakes along with pointing out the elements of a photo worked would be more useful than a handful of crappy photos somewhere in Aperture. Embedded below is the PDF copy of my first photo journal entry. I'm using Evernote and it's partner program Skitch to capture mini screen shots of the histogram and basic relevant data (ISO, f speed, shutter speed). Not shown in the PDF version is the title of the journal entry. It's the same name I use for the Aperture project, in case I have a need to go back and cross reference.

About the photo up top. It's a quick snap taken with my Moto X and processed in VSCO Cam. I had originally shared it with just my social media networks, but felt this post needed a photo.