From Nikon RAW to iPhone HEIC
Tom has worked in Lightroom Classic since 2013 and has photographed hundreds of weddings, so the pictures on this site are not holiday snaps that got lucky. On our first world tour he carried a Nikon D750 and shot RAW, with an 85 mm and a 35 mm lens, an ND filter and a DJI Mavic drone packed on top. The results still matter to us. I also still remember exactly who ended up carrying all of it.
Since then our private photography has drifted to the iPhone, currently a 15 Pro. Tom did consider shooting RAW on the phone and then talked himself out of it, because editing every single family photo removes precisely the convenience that made the phone appealing. So most of what you see here starts life as a HEIC file.
The camera matters, but the photographer matters more. Years of watching light and framing weddings do not stay at home just because the big camera does.
How Tom edits
Everything goes into the same Lightroom Classic catalogue he trusts for paid work. He rates the series first, which is how hundreds of nearly identical shots of the same viewpoint become the handful that actually carry the memory. A personal preset then gives the whole set a consistent starting point.
After export, the keepers get one final pass in Exposure X6. That preset adds a slightly film-like character without tipping over into an obvious filter. The aim is a look you recognise as ours without being able to name what was done to it.
- CaptureMostly iPhone HEIC today, RAW when the bigger camera earns its place.
- ImportEverything into one structured Lightroom Classic catalogue.
- SelectRate the series and keep the frames that carry the memory.
- FinishTom’s Lightroom preset, export, then the restrained Exposure X6 look.
- PublishExport web-ready files and give the photographs a home on WTTW.
The backup routine
At home an external drive hangs off the Mac and runs continuous Time Machine backups. The main photo archive lives on a Synology NAS with redundant drives, so one drive can fail without taking the whole archive with it.
On a journey the rule is physical: the Mac and the backup drive never travel in the same bag, and the drive gets stashed separately wherever that is possible. If a car or a room is broken into, losing the computer should not automatically mean losing the backup as well. The current iPhone photos stay on the phone too, which quietly adds another copy until we deliberately clear them.
Two copies sitting beside each other disappear in the same theft, the same accident and the same wet backpack. The second location is part of the backup.
The gap we still have
Redundant NAS drives are not a backup, and Tom is the first to say so. They cover one drive failing. They cover nothing at all if the whole unit is stolen, flooded, burnt or simply dies, and the NAS sits in the same home as the Mac and the Time Machine drive. Every copy of the archive is currently in one building.
The missing layer is an off-site copy, and the reason it is missing is unglamorous: our home internet has been too slow to push a full second copy to a cloud service or to a second Synology somewhere else. I would rather write that down than let this page pretend we have it solved.
There are only two realistic ways to close it. Either a copy that physically lives somewhere else, or a cloud copy fed by a connection fast enough to keep up. In 2017 the internet along the route settled the question for us, because uploading a day of RAW files was hopeless. If the accommodation and mobile connections in 2027 are better, periodic uploads finally become possible. We will test that on the road and report what actually worked, rather than publish a workflow we have not lived with yet.
What comes in 2027
The Mavic and the 85 mm stay at home. The open question is whether a Sony A7 III with a single 35 mm earns its space beside the next iPhone, and Tom has not decided yet. The laptop is coming anyway for work, and one separate backup drive is not up for discussion.
After the 2017 kit that may sound almost too modest, and that is the point. A lighter setup gets carried more, gets used more, draws less attention and leaves more of the day for the journey itself. The best camera is still the one that came along on the walk instead of staying in the room.