Photo Safaris By Region AFRICA - Botswana Wildlife - Madagascar - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya ANTARCTICA - Ultimate Antarctica - Wildlife & Landscapes of Antarctica, 2010 ASIA - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - India—Rajasthan & Puskar Fair - Japan's Winter Wildlife - Laos & Vietnam - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival EUROPE - Best of the Greek Isles - Eclectic Holland - Finland's Arctic Wildlife - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Tuscany - White Horses of France's Camargue NORTH AMERICA - Alaska Overland - Aurora Borealis—Fairbanks, Alaska - Bald Eagles of the Chilkat River, Alaska - Bosque del Apache & White Sands, New Mexico - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Summer - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - Colorado Fall Colors - Denali National Park in Autumn - Exploring Lake Powell - Florida Birds—Best of the West - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Great Smoky Mountains - Horses & Icons of the Wild West - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage - Mexico's Colonial Heartland - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women - Predatory Animals of North America - Springtime in Callaway Gardens, Georgia - Ultimate Wolves - Ultimate Yellowstone - Washington's Palouse Country - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Yellowstone & Grand Tetons in Autumn - Nature & Digital Photography Seminars with John Shaw PACIFICA - Midway Atoll SOUTH & CENTRAL AMERICA - Galápagos - Patagonia's Mountain Landscapes - Ultimate Dolphins Wildlife Models Shoot - Wildlife of Brazil's Pantanal Photo Safaris By Date JANUARY - Ultimate Wolves - Nature & Digital Photography Seminars with John Shaw, Dallas, TX & Raleigh, NC - Ultimate Yellowstone FEBRUARY - Japan's Winter Wildlife MARCH - Florida Birds—Best of the West - Nature & Digital Photography Seminars with John Shaw, Phoenix, AZ & Boston, MA - Midway Atoll - Aurora Borealis—Fairbanks, Alaska - Monument Valley & Slot Canyons - White Horses of France's Camargue APRIL - Springtime in Callaway Gardens, Georgia - Galápagos - Finland's Arctic Wildlife - Patagonia's Mountain Landscapes - Eclectic Holland - Great Smoky Mountains - Grand Canyon at Havasu Falls - Mexico's Colonial Heartland MAY - Wildlife of Brazil's Pantanal - Turkey—Continental Crossroads - Ultimate Dolphins Wildlife Models Shoot - Best of the Greek Isles - Tuscany JUNE - Washington's Palouse Country - Predatory Animals of North America JULY - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Summer AUGUST - Washington's Palouse Country - Humpback Whales of Alaska's Inside Passage SEPTEMBER - Masai Mara Wildlife Reserve, Kenya - Denali National Park in Autumn - Alaska Overland - Essential China—Iconic Landmarks & Landscapes - Brown Bears of Katmai National Park in Autumn - Madagascar - Yellowstone & Grand Tetons in Autumn - Botswana Wildlife - Colorado Fall Colors - Predatory Animals of North America - Horses & Icons of the Wild West - Mongolia—The Golden Eagle Festival OCTOBER - Exploring Lake Powell - World's Best Raptor Shoot - Nova Scotia—Photo Tour for Women - India—Rajasthan & Puskar Fair NOVEMBER - Laos & Vietnam - Ultimate Antarctica - Bald Eagles of the Chilkat River, Alaska DECEMBER - Bosque del Apache & White Sands, New Mexico 2010 TOURS - Wildlife & Landscapes of Antarctica, 2010

		Ive just returned from two lengthy Photo Safaris (two weeks in Svalbard, immediately followed by two weeks in Iceland) with a lot of shot film. And I mean a LOT of film. Most of the members of our groups returned home with the same. On both trips, when it became apparent that we would all have many rolls of film, I was asked the same questions: How do I label all that film and how do I store it so that any particular shot can be retrieved? Labeling slides is a chore, no two ways about it, but if you do nothing youll face that all-too-familiar moment of total bewilderment as you look at a photo and dont have a clue where you took it. Just where is this scene? Whats the name of that mountain? Can I even narrow down the location as to which continent its on? Better to label your slides while the memory of your trip is still fresh in your mind. Along this line, I would strongly urge you to file away all those maps and brochures you picked up on your trip, for the correct name and spelling of locations. Ive got a couple of file cabinet drawers filled with travel literature, national park brochures, guidebooks and maps — all filed by location. Just try to remember how to spell something like Breiamerkurjkull three months after you were there. FYI, thats the name of the glacier that calves off volcanic ash-streaked icebergs into a beautiful lagoon in Iceland. I shot about 15 rolls of film at that lagoon less than three weeks ago but still couldnt spell the glaciers name without checking my map. The most primitive way to label slides is to hand write on the slide mount itself. Its pure drudgery, and a sure cause of writers cramp after a short time. Far better is to use stick-on labels and either type (who still works with a typewriter?) or use a computer to print the information. Here's a SlideScribe label. Copyright © 2001 John Shaw Hands down, the best slide labels for 35mm are those from SlideScribe™ (www.slidescribe.com). They offer labels in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and colors, but I use and would recommend the plain white version of their most popular one: the STD PROlaser™ label, in sheets for ink-jet and laser printers. These come 84 labels on a page (four columns of 21 labels) and are sized 1 x 7/16 inches, just slightly smaller than the fat side of a slide mount. What makes this companys labels the best is the permanent glue used; the labels wont fall off your slide mounts, even when subjected to the heat of a slide projector. The current price is $11.95 for 12 sheets (thats 1008 labels) or $39.95 for 60 sheets (5040 labels). So how do you get all that caption information onto the label? You could use a special slide labeling software program, and indeed SlideScribe does sell such programs. Many other software packages are available, but if all you want to do is write a legible caption then do as I do: use the labeling program you already own, the word processing program you have on your computer. Im a WordPerfect user from way back, but this method will work with Microsoft Word or any other full-featured program. These word processing programs are already set to deal with labels. In fact, most word processing programs have the formatting in place to print standard Avery labels. Since you will be working with a special label, youll have to tell your software how the labels are arranged on a label page. Its simple in WordPerfect, and works similarly in other programs. You specify how many rows of labels there are on a page, how many columns, how many total labels, how far apart rows and columns are spaced, and the physical location of the upper left corner of the topmost left label. Tell your software program this information, then save the format youve created. Now add type to the label. You need to specify the typeface you want to use and its size, the line spacing, and any margins you want on the label. This is exactly the same as formatting any document. Since youll need to get a lot of information on each label, choose a font that is legible when printed small. I would suggest a sans serif typeface such as Arial or Univers. In small print sizes these are far more legible than serif fonts (the ones with the extra little curlicues and bars on each letter). For a starting point, try 6-point type size and .8 line spacing. Do this and you can put four lines of type on each label. Save the label form along with the document format as a template name it something original like slide labels and you can call it up at any time. One advantage of word processing software over most labeling programs is that you have access to what we consider standard writing features: spell check, italics or bold print as needed, automatic word wrapping at the end of a line, text centering and justification, and special characters such as ♀ and ♂. If you wish, you can easily add your name and the copyright symbol along with the caption. Word and WordPerfect both have automatic spelling correction features to which you can add words you frequently misspell. I told my program to print © JOHN SHAW anytime I type cjs. No problem in doing this, as I know of no word with that letter combination. Word processing programs usually treat labels as a series of pages in a document. As you fill up one label with text, the next label will automatically appear. If you want to make a number of labels with the exact same caption, just block your label text and copy it as many times as needed. You would rarely print an entire page of labels, all 84 at once, so how can you keep from wasting any? Software always wants to print starting in the upper left corner. Hit print page once, and the top left label space is the one that is printed. The fact that programs treat labels as a series of pages in a document solves this problem. You can easily force the program to start printing at any point on the label sheet by adding the correct number of blank pages. Lets say youre already used the first 16 labels on a sheet. To make the printing start on label space number 17, add 16 blank pages at the start of your document. This is not rocket science here. Look at the label sheet, count the spaces (lets see, four rows of four are missing...hmm, my grade school math tells me thats 16). Both WordPerfect and Word make a hard page break by using control-enter. Do this 16 times, and youre done. Check your location on the program toolbar, which will show you the page number where your cursor is active. Peel off the labels, stick them on your slides, put the slides in archival slide pages, and store them as you prefer. An easy way is to take 10 slide pages and drop them into a standard hanging file folder, then put that in a metal file cabinet. Using a file folder makes handling all those slippery pages a lot easier, plus lets you organize your files. Label the file folder as to whats inside, then label the file cabinet drawer also. How you actually organize is up to you; there is no one best way, but rather it depends on what you need to do with your slides. At the minimum, I would suggest storing slides either by trip or by subject. You could have a series of file folders for each of your trips, or for specific subject matter such as ducks. Three potential problems arise. What if you cant remember which trip you were on when you shot that photo youre trying to find? And what if youve photographed mallards, and pintails, and black ducks, and ruddy ducks, and green-winged teal, and...well, there are a lot of kinds of ducks. Should you have one expanding duck category or should each species have its own? And the biggest potential problem: what happens when you have thousands and thousands of slides and need to find a specific one? If its a duck shot, but you took it on one of your many trips to Bosque del Apache, just how do you locate that specific image? Some photographers have no problem with this. They are familiar enough with their files that they can pull a picture quickly and easily. For the rest of us, there are databases. You could scan each image into a digital database, but personally I dont do this. Theres a simple reason: Ive got better things to do with my time. I sent well over 200 rolls off to my lab when I got home from this double trip. Lets call it 250 rolls just for convenience. Thats 9000 frames for these two shoots alone. Now if I was successful in half of my pictures and my percentage had better be much higher than that Im still dealing with 4500 slides. Just to retrieve one slide, scan it even at low resolution, and return it to a given location takes at least one minute. But 4500 minutes equals 75 hours, or 9.375 eight-hour workdays. Read that again. For almost two business weeks, ten working days, I would have to do nothing but sit and scan images. A digital database for me no way! If I want to see thumbnail images of my slides, I just drop some slide pages on my lightbox. The slide label for this photo (from my Fall Color file) reads: Autumn sugar maple leaf (Acer saccharum) caught in frosted knapweed; Michigan. Copyright © 2001 John Shaw You can tailor just about any database for use with slides. Your first decision is how to number and categorize your files. Im not suggesting that my way is the best, but heres how I structured my files. This has worked for me for thirty years now, but you should decide what your needs are before adopting this or any other filing system. I file by category, noted by one or two capital letters, and then by sequential numbers within that category. If I have multiple original frames that are identical, a lower case letter notes them. My categories are extremely broad: M is Mammals, B is Birds, FC is Fall Color, NP is National Parks, PA is Patterns, F is Flowering plants, N is Non-flowering plants, etc. So the first slide in my bird file is numbered B1, followed by B2, B3, B4, and so on. Suppose I have three identical frames of image B5 these are numbered B5a, B5b and B5c. Its a pretty easy system. But what if my photo was taken in a national park of an elk, standing in fall color, surrounded by flowers. Should this image be filed under Mammals, or National Parks, or Fall Color or what? In reality it doesnt matter at all, as the computer will find it (Ill explain how this works in a moment). The categories are only there for my convenience in storing the slides. Then all the information is entered in a database. I use FileMaker Pro, a straightforward stand-alone database. I chose it for two reasons: first, I could import all my files from an old DOS database without losing any data or changing my numbering system, and second, it searches for character strings rather than key fields. This last point was important to me. If youre setting up an address book, you know what information is important: last name, zip code, etc. But with a slide file, how do you know what you want to search for, how do you know whats a key field, until youve been asked a question? Heres how I tailored FileMaker for my slides. My computer screen shows the following fields within each of the category files and to enter data I just fill in the blanks: Slide Number ________ Multiples Frames ________________ Subject _________________ Season _________________ Location ________________ Year __ H/V ___ To find an image, I fill in the blanks for the parameters I need, then hit find and the computer tells me all the records that match my request. Yes, my system does mean that I have to type information twice, once for the slide mount and once in the database, but I consider this no big deal as I can type fairly rapidly. Plus there is information in the database that doesnt need to appear on the slide (if youre looking at the slide and the photo is a snowy landscape, you probably dont need to be told on the label that the season is winter). You might have noticed that nowhere in my database is there any record of camera and lens, film, or exposure. I dont know anyone who keeps track of this information. All that info you see published its all made up. Its reasonably correct, since any pro can look at an image and tell how he or she took it. But still, its not recorded anywhere. If youre looking for a total software package tailored specifically for image files, check out Agave Stock Photography Solution, created by photographer Randy Prentice (www.randyprentice.com). This program is not inexpensive, but it is by far the most comprehensive Ive seen.

	Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc. P.O. Box 655, Vashon Island, Washington USA 98070 Phone: (206) 463-5383   Fax: (206) 463-5484    Email: info@photosafaris.com Copyright © 2008, Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, Inc.