I imagine that most of you reading this piece might have read one or two of my others before, all about managing personal knowledge.
Less of you will know that I’m a photographer, and actively enjoy taking photos of nature and the natural world, from landscapes to wildlife.
But as photographs are a part of our personal knowledge and information management almost as much as the written word, I thought I’d share a little about how I capture and manage images, and how they fit into my creative work on this side of the internet.
(This article was inspired heavily by Tiago Forte’s recent blog post that you can read here)
My mobile camera roll
I don’t carry around my camera all day. But sometimes I come across things that I want to capture and save. So I use my phone’s camera.
It’s not great, but it does the job. And I’ve realised that most of the time it’s capturing special moments without having loads of gear to lug around that’s important, not having a lot of pixels and settings on the camera.
My photos from my camera roll bring back the memories that I’ve captured on a whim, rather than deliberately. Even so, this makes them even more authentic at times.
If you’re a subscriber to Fundamentalised, you might have noticed that the images I use now are taken from my camera roll, from my own life, rather than some AI-generated, non-personal art. I think that this now gives the reader a little more insight into my own life. I know it’s not much, but you can now see what I’m surrounded by and what I think to capture daily.
My ‘professional’ photography
This is the stuff that I take all my camera gear out to go and shoot specifically. I’ve been focusing on nature, from wildlife to landscapes for the most part. And I’ve been doing it for a while now.
Much longer than I’ve been writing on the internet. I started doing the former in early 2023, whereas I have photographs in my archive from a decade ago, taken when I was just 9 years old.
My photographs are managed differently to my written content. The words are managed in Obsidian but I use Adobe Lightroom for photos. That’s the best tool for the job and I want to be able to edit and improve the images when I need to.
Everything’s managed chronologically too. This makes more sense for photographs because I can see everything in a timeline that reminds me of what I was doing around certain points in my life.
There’s not a set use for these images that I’ve been capturing for the last decade and more of my life. I’ve just been doing it because I love it. My dream is to be involved in the production of wildlife films, travelling around the world and shooting the nature that it has to offer.
Now that’s not what I’ve ended up doing as of yet, as I now have this text-based online presence, but I’ve been quietly posting my images and videos for many years, hoping this proof of ability will come in useful in the future when it’s time to head for jobs that will get me closer to this dream.
So what can we take away about knowledge management from this?
The first and most obvious point is related to tool choice. In PKM, you’re going to come across different types of information, such as photographs, and you’re not going to have an app that can handle everything equally as well. The lesson is to find a selection of tools that are the best in each of their respective fields and use them for each different file type that you’re likely to handle.
An example of this is using Obsidian for text, and Lightroom for managing photographs. Each tool is one of the best in class for what they do, so if you can sacrifice time in order to learn to use the tool (normally the learning curve is higher for specialist offerings), doing so is almost always the right thing to do.
I might start posting some of my photography on my blog Fundamentalised, telling the stories behind the images. Seeing as I’m leaving the UK for the first time since 2018 this summer to go travelling in Italy and Portugal, it might be a good time to start doing this.
I hope that has shed some insight into my photo management as it relates to the rest of my PKM. Thanks for reading!