Michael Freeman: Words and pictures

It’s a funny thing, but most photographers aren’t very much into writing. Perhaps I’ve got some quirky gene somewhere, because I actually do like writing, and so I do books, and pages like this for Manfrotto – and enjoy it.

But there’s a very basic kind of writing that needs to be part of the basic workflow of digital shooting – your workflow as well as mine – and that’s the captioning and keywording. Groan? A bore? Maybe, but it’s pretty well essential. And if you think about it, the subject matter in what you shoot is usually important and interesting – which is probably why you were attracted to shoot it in the first place – and that information needs to be embedded in the digital image file. There are two stages to this. The first is actually making notes or doing the research in the first place to write down the information about a subject. The second is entering that information – or some of it, at least – digitally into the image file.

But why bother? Surely keeping notes about what you just shot or are about to shoot just interrupts the creative flow of the shooting, and it’s a chore. Well, look, the value of the information needed to plan a shoot, whether a day out or a two-week trip, and to prepare for all the picture opportunities is the same for the photographs that you bring back. If the content is important for the image — the what, who and where of it all — then it’s worth noting it down. If you’re traveling to a new destination, for example, there’s he name of this temple, the location of a hidden beach, the date and significance of a special ceremony. There’s likely to be a constant stream of facts accompanying your photographs, and the details are normally at their most available there and then. Noting them on the spot, either in a notebook or with a small tape recorder (and some cameras now have the ability to make recorded audio notes, will save a lot of trouble later trying to retrieve information that you have forgotten. But there’s always Google….

Keywords are what search engines search on! Lightroom makes them easy to create by offering tips and suggestions.

What’s good about it? Captions sell photographs. At least, they sell content-based photographs, and the more specialized the subject matter, the more important it is to know exactly what you shot. The best time to do this is on the spot while you can still ask, and before you forget. A notebook or audio notes are the easiest means. As part of a normal workflow, captioning fits most easily into the stage at which you give filenames to your images and download them onto the computer. The reason for this is that if you shoot raw (well, we all do don’t we? Hint…hint), then the caption information embedded in that file automatically gets transferred into the TIFFs or JPEgs that you make from it when you process.

A successful caption is informative, focused and succinct, and the first skill is to identify the salient facts and then prioritize them. With stock images, the aim of the caption is to present all relevant information to other professionals rather than general readers, while the keywords add to the searchable information. All this information can be extracted by image management programs and other databases. Several images may share the same basic information, or at least some of it – you could then copy parts of entries from the master list into, for example, Photoshop’s File Info for each new image.

The idea You can add descriptive information to images in such a way that it remains embedded in them. The standard for doing this is called IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council ) and it includes entries for descriptions, keywords, categories, credits, and origins. This is important not only for cataloguing, but also for selling reproduction rights in images. Captioning images may seem a chore, but now that stock sales play an important part in the business of photography, it is necessary and sensible. Noting the key details of what you shot is useful for your own records, but the real reason is so that other people can find your images. This is very much a feature of being digital and on-line because the descriptions that are easily attached to the image file can be used by search engines. In pre-digital days, there were only two ways for a picture researcher or art director to find a specific photograph: call up stock libraries and ask, or look at the printed catalogues from the same libraries. Now stock agency websites allow the people who want pictures to search for these themselves, and understanding how that happens in practice helps to sell images.

Step One: gathering the information Wilson Hicks, the renowned picture editor at Life magazine in its heyday, wrote that “the basic unit of photojournalism is one picture with words”. He meant the caption, or sometimes a longer text, that went on the page to explain  what was going on in the photograph. One very well known way of tackling this is the journalists’ Five Ws, and they go like this:-

Who The person’s name if famous, newsworthy or relevant. Ethnic origin. Job or position if relevant. Gender if a baby.

What Decide first whether the action or object is the subject (consider which motivated you to take the picture). If action, describe it in a first short sentence. If object, give the name (if a known building, landmark, geographical feature), description, and if a plant or animal give the scientific name. In some cases, the concept will be appropriate – that is, an idea that you were trying to express (such as harmony, love, security).

Where Location as precisely as possible, ideally with a hierarchy (eg Montmartre, Paris, France)

When The date

Why If the action is not immediately obvious to a viewer, explain it (usually in a second sentence)

All of the above applies both to a caption that you might display in an on-screen slideshow, and to the caption that you embed in the digital file. And here’s a small shooting tip: where there is one, shoot the label or the sign. In situations where objects are signposted in some way, such as in a botanical garden, or even a museum if you are allowed to photograph there, the easiest way to record the information is to take a shot of the label. Do this immediately after or before the main photograph, but be consistent in this.

Step Two: embedding the captions and keywords There are a number of ways. In Photoshop, there’s the File Info dialog. Lightroom and Aperture are actually databases with processing capabilities, so they’re tailor-made for entering information that will stay permanently with the image and any versions you later make from it. I personally use a database called Media Pro, from Phase One. But they all do similar jobs.

Metadata

This is embedded file information, some of it automatically added by the camera, some by the user It includes the following:

File Properties Characteristics that include size, creation, and modification dates.

Camera Data (EXIF) Added by the camera, EXIF information includes the camera settings that were used when the image was taken such as the time, date, ISO, shutter, aperture and other extended details. EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) format is an industry standard developed by JEIDA (Japan Electronic Industry Development Association).

GPS Some digital cameras have GPS (Global Positioning System ) technology that allows the location of a photograph to be recorded.

Edit History A log of changes made to an image

IPTC The only user-editable metadata, this allows you to add caption and copyright information to an image.

Editing IPTC Information in the Nikon Browser

Two-sentence captions

You can certainly get away with a few-word description, but to be thorough, try this. Summarize the essential facts in a first short sentence, then expand on this and give the context in a second, longer sentence. Some databases and search engines designed for images have a ‘short description’ and a ‘long description’ entry field. A two-sentence caption can be divided easily between these fields. Nevertheless, avoid redundancy – if you wrote it in the first sentence, don’t repeat it, and don’t state the obvious (if a dress is red, there’s no need to mention this, although you may want to use it as a keyword).

Keywords

The value of any information you have about an image lies almost entirely in retrieval — that is, how easy it makes it for a user to find a suitable image. As images accumulate in any archive, it becomes increasingly difficult even for the person who took them to remember the details, and if you want other people to be able to search through your library of pictures, as for instance if you are selling them as stock photography, you will certainly have to anticipate how they might search. The software issues are highly technical, but common to all is the concept of keywords. These are words describing some aspect of an image; when someone enters a word in the search box of the database, the program will look for images that have the same word attached. The more varied yet apposite the set of keywords attached to each photograph, the better the chance of matching the searcher’s request. The trick is in imagining what other people might look for, beyond the obvious description. Here are some tips:-

-               keywords supplement the caption for the purpose of searching

-               there is no need to repeat a word that is already in the caption/description

-               too many keywords is as bad as too few. Aim for no more than 10.

-               think of what words your target audience is likely to use (eg a natural history picture researcher may use the scientific name)

-               include different spellings and usages (eg petrol/gasoline)

-               include the plural unless it simply has an ‘s’ added

-               consider adding synonyms (use the thesaurus tool in a word-processing program)

Often, you’ll find that a number of shots share the same subject – and so need the same caption and keywords. Lightroom offers presets that you can apply to a number of images

Photoshop Elements is a popular and far less expensive version of Photoshop, yet offers good keywording help. During the importing process, you’ll see the Photo Downloader window. Clicking the Advanced Dialog button brings up some additional options, including some basic metadata information. Click Get Media to copy the files across.

Once you’ve copied the image files, they’ll appear in the Elements Organizer browser window. In this example, as all the images are of the same subject, wildflowers, you can create a new keyword category. Click on the “+” icon and in the pull-down menu, select New Category to bring up the Create Category window.

In the Create Category window at left are a number of preset Category Icons to select from. Choose an appropriate icon and assign it a name under Category Name. Next (center window here) return to the Keyword Tags menu and you’ll see the newly created category and it’s associated icon. As all the wildflowers in this case are of one species, snowdrops, we can create a sub-category keyword tag. With the new category selected, again click the “+” icon, and this time select New Sub-Category to bring up the Create Sub-Category window (right). Snowdrops have been added under the Sub-Category Name under the Parent Category Wildflowers. You can create as many sub-categories as you need.

 

To assign both the new category and sub-category keywords, simply select all the images in the

Organizer window and drag the sub-category icon from under the Keyword Tags tab over to an image. With all the images selected. the sub-category and category keywords will be assigned to all the images. It’s possible, of course, to assign a keyword to any number of images. Clicking on

the Keyword Tags Cloud icon brings up a list of all the keywords found in Elements Organizer.

Keyword tips

-          keywords supplement the caption for the purpose of searching

-          there is no need to repeat a word that is already in the caption/description

-          too many keywords is as bad as too few. Aim for no more than 10.

-          think of what words your target audience is likely to use (eg a natural history picture researcher may use the scientific name)

-          include different spellings and usages (eg petrol/gasoline)

-          include the plural unless it simply has an ‘s’ added

-          consider adding synonyms (use the thesaurus tool in a word-processing program)

 © Michael Freeman – All Rights Reserved
www.michaelfreemanphoto.com