I'm a firm believer that extra images (seconds) from a photo shoot should be saved. For a while at least or until you know you will never need them. The reason I stand on this is that seconds have proven to be invaluable on many circumstances in my past. Often it's a client preferring one of my seconds rather than the image I picked. The other common circumstance is the need to use some element from one of my seconds to fix an issue with the principal shot. Just recently I found myself in a situation where I couldn't decide which of two images was the keeper and which was the second. In the end I decided they would both be my seconds. Here's what I mean.

I don't know why we do this to ourselves. Every year at this time we lie to ourselves by establishing goals and making promises that, deep down, we know we'll never keep. Every year the ever traditional New Year's resolution is declared for one reason or another. For me it's something to shoot for, a to do list  of sorts. It always start out the same way too, nice and strong with high expectations and loads of enthusiasm that quickly dwindles down to a fond shimmer of a distant memory halfway through the year.

I have a love/hate relationship with watermarks on photos but I know there is a place for everything. While my opinions are my own I also realize that not everyone has the artistic skill to create anything beyond a simple text watermark. Adobe's Lightroom program has a very flexible watermarking utility that allows the creation of simple text based watermarks. For anything fancier Lightroom requires a pre-designed PNG file with a transparent alpha channel. If you are not familiar with alpha channels, they are see-through layers that allow a background to come through the non-logo areas when overlaid on a photo. While making these is relatively easy for a knowledgeable designer they can be tricky for the novice. Fortunately there is a great online tool that can make that whole process as simple as one, two, three.