Good Entropy

That makes Tjintjelaar’s work sound easier than it is. “The first time a subject catches my attention, it’s rare that I can shoot it the way I see it in my mind,” he explains. “So I go back again and again until everything is perfect — light, weather, the tides. I’ve shot a few piers and breakwaters along the Dutch coast maybe a thousand times, from all angles and in all weather conditions, in broad daylight and in the dark of night, at high tide and low tide. And still I think I’m missing that one special shot that captures the essence of that pier. My wife hates it because I take her with me when she’d rather go shopping.” That’s understandable, given the photographer’s love of long exposures. “A long-exposure shoot of mine usually takes two or three hours,” he says. “If I’m really lucky, I’ll get five good frames.”

from Joel Tjintjelaar on Flickr.
I first saw him showcased in American Photo November 2009.

link is here

“Embedding the Raw files seems to be the safest way to go, to be as sure as possible of future proofing the photos.”
Alternatively, archive the raw files separately and treat them as another backup. While you can always extract embedded raws from the DNGs, this parallel archive approach also leaves the raws directly available if you want to try out some other software which doesn’t support DNG.

Apart from the good advice you’ve already received, I’d also advise you to work with a DNG workflow for a short while before you make the big step. I switched when CS2 came out and initially did so for a month, thinking that going back over a month’s new shooting wasn’t too long if I decided to abort the test and go back to a non-DNG workflow.

You need to review aspects other than escaping from sidecar hell. One is backup. There’s a point of view that xmp sidecars allow people to backup incremental changes by taking advantage of LR’s auto xmp writing – in DNG the xmp is written into the files so their backup programs would wastefully backup the image data every time there’s a metadata change. Alternatively – and this is where I am – others backup the DNGs only upon their creation and then only backup the database file. Work through this area too.

John

John Beardsworth
Photographer, Author, Consultant

Growing as a photographer means gaining more control over the choices and reducing some of the compromises in the process of capturing and presenting our images.
04-17-2007