After spending a few days in Yosemite National Park (photographing from before dawn until after dark each day), we came out to Santa Cruz to spend some time on the California coast. I have never been here before, but to say that I love it would be an understatement.

In search of recreational as well as photographic opportunities, I decided to spend a couple of hours walking around the University of California Santa Cruz’s arboretum, which is open every day from nine to five and is completely free (always a plus). I took a lot of photos there, but here are a few of my favorite “textural” ones. These aren’t intended to be strict foreground/background, subject/backdrop photos, but rather as tangible shapes and textures.

On Saturday morning I’ll be hopping on a plane up here in Boston to take me out to California. I’ll be landing in San Francisco and then driving from there to Yosemite National Park for a solid four days of shooting. Yosemite has often been described as “the most beautiful place in the world,” but probably has a better chance at “most beautiful place in America.” It’s a mightily subjective title, but who am I to argue?

I will stand in many of the places where Ansel Adams stood and was touched by the unique beauty of the American West. With preparation and some luck, I will return with a great deal of images to share with you all.

I apologize for not posting as much as usual, but the preparations for this voyage have monopolized my attention. To make it up to you, here are some photography travel tips that might be helpful.

I was at Harkness Memorial State Park (again) and had to break out the Lensbaby 3G for a bit more fun.

In the last chapter of my Automated Workflow series, I showed you how to use some neat scripting tricks to apply watermarks to your photos automatically. In this chapter, I’m going to talk about naming and organizing photos and show you how to set up some scripts to make things easier for you.

You have a bunch of pretty photos; shouldn’t they have pretty names?

Do you find yourself performing the same mundane tasks over and over? Exporting photos, sorting them, watermarking them, renaming the files, applying metadata, uploading them, etc., etc. These kinds of tasks are simply ripe for automation. Make the computer do all the work, that’s my mantra.

In this series of articles, I will discuss the down and dirty mechanics of how I’ve automated a good deal of my workflow. I’ll probably continue to add chapters to this series as I figure out new methods, but hopefully you can start saving time right off the bat with some of these tips!

Today’s topic is exporting and watermarking.