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I have a Sony RX100 Mark II camera. It's wonderful, I highly recommend it. Some important features:
See my RX100 mark 2 review for details.
I have a Dell U2410 computer monitor. This is an IPS monitor. I tried using a cheaper TN monitor (which had good reviews) but i found that the colors on my photos looked much worse, so i had to return it. From now on i'm going to stick with IPS monitors (unless they invent something else for the same price that has even better colors). If you are sufficiently interested in photography to be reading this, then i recommend that you get an IPS computer montior too. If i had to buy another one, i would get another Dell UltraSharp? (in fact, i would get the Dell UltraSharp? 27; i'm excited about the Dell UltraSharp? 32 Ultra HD, but as of this writing it's about $3000, which is more than my budget).
Another thing i look for in a monitor is the ability to easily switch it from horizontal to vertical orientation. I use vertical orientation for coding, for reading stuff, and for editing text files, and horizontal orientation for photography.
You can get sdcard readers that plug into a USB port for less than $10.
I take a lot of pictures of stuff, even if i don't think the picture will be any good. Sometimes i am pleasantly surprised, but mostly i end up deleting a lot of pictures. My whole workflow is organized around not spending much time per-picture (except for possibly on the few good pictures that result at the end) so that there isn't too much of a deterrent to taking a lot.
In this step, this means that i must learn to take pictures very quickly so that there isn't too much of a deterrent to taking a lot.
I put them all into a folder called 'new' in my home folder (~/new).
It's important to be merciless with deleting, and to not spend too much time on it, otherwise you'll be tempted to not take a lot of pictures.
I start qiv using an alias in my .bashrc (that's GNU/Linux stuff):
alias qqiv='qiv -l -m -f'
-l means 'auto-rotate'. -m means 'expand image to fit screen'. -f means fullscreen.
Then in qiv i use the left mouse button to advance one picture, and the right mouse button to go back one. When i see a picture i want to delete, i hit the 'd' key (this actually just moves the picture to .qiv-trash, so until you manually delete that folder you can still change your mind). The 'u' key undeletes the last trashed picture. Sometimes i fiddle with the gamma using 'g' and 'G', and then hit the enter key to reset it.
qiv provides a command ('a', presumably for 'archive') to copy an image that you like to the folder .qiv-select. However what i want to do is to use the main folder as a list of undecided images, and to progressively move each image out of undecided and into either the trash or a save folder. Qiv doesn't come with a way to do this but it does support an extension mechanism by which you can make the number keys (0-9) do whatever you want, by writing an external shell script called qiv-command. So i put the following into a file called qiv-command which resides somewhere in my $PATH:
case $cmd in 1
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5) exiv2 $fname | grep -i 'iso\ | aperture\ | exposure time\ | focal length\ | exposure bias' ;; |
6) dir=save; mkdir -p $dir; mv -v "$fname" $dir;; 7) dir=save-family; mkdir -p $dir; mv -v "$fname" $dir ;; 8) dir=save-facebook; mkdir -p $dir; mv -v "$fname" $dir ;; 9) dir=memories; mkdir -p $dir; mv -v "$fname" $dir ;; 0) dir=dir$cmd; mkdir -p $dir; mv -v "$fname" $dir;; *) echo "unrecognized command"; exit ;;esac
So in short, what i do is type 'qqiv ~/new/*.JPG' to start, then i go thru each picture using the mouse buttons, press 'd' for most of them to trash them, and press '6' for some of them to save them.
There will be a lot of photos for which it's hard to decide immediately whether or not to save them. Rather than spending time deliberating, i sleep on it and go thru them again the next day.
Remember that the goal is not to spend very much time on most of the pictures. For me, many of the saved pictures are not 'awesome' pictures, but just pictures that are interesting enough that i don't want to trash them, or that are not that pretty, but which help me remember some part of my life. These are pictures that i'll upload and post publicly, but not because i think they are great, just because i like to make things public most of the time. Those pictures often don't get any post-processing, although sometimes i'll do some anyways.
I've noticed that if the original JPG has areas that are over- or under-saturated, then although sometimes you can post-process them enough to see the detail, you can't bring much of that detail out in a natural-looking way (perhaps you could do more if you were working with RAWs instead of JPGs).
Then there are pictures that i actually think may be good. These get a quick Color->Auto-Correction (accessible from Digikam's edit mode), and possibly a crop.
And finally there are pictures that i think are really good. These are the only ones that i'll consider seriously post-processing.
For post-processing, i usually just use Color->Auto-correction, and then sometimes crop. Under Color->Auto-correction, Normalize is usually null. Equalize usually does something crazy, but sometimes in a cool way. Which leaves Auto Levels, Stretch Contrast, Auto Exposure. If there are saturated highlights, e.g. when looking at the bright clouds of a sunset, all three of those make it worse, so then i don't do anything. But otherwise, often especially near sunset the natural light will have a yellowish tinge which Auto Levels removes and which the other two ameliorate to some extent.
I tag my pictures in digikam and then upload almost all of them to flickr (although some are private or friend-only or family-only).
If i think my friends might be interested in seeing a picture, i upload it to Facebook.
Note: when i first authorized digikam with facebook, using Firefox, digikam told me to copy the URL from facebook back into digikam after authorization, but the URL showing was https://www.facebook.com/connect/blank.html#_=_ , which wasn't right. I had to look at Firefox's history list and right click on the previous URL and select Copy.
Someday i plan to upload my best pictures to 500px an 1x, both so that i can get some serious feedback on what i can do better, and also so that i have a place that only shows my best pictures.
