People ask me all of the time what my workflow is, and like with any other artist, painter, or musician, no two people will attack the same thing the same way. Due to the specialized nature of my work and my background in CompSci, my workflow tends to be more analytical and structured than many. I also focus on my target audiences and tailor my workflow to best suit their needs, which may be very, very different from your own target audience.
So, without further ado, here are the 23 steps it takes from the moment I put the camera in hand until the final product.
a. This is by far the most enjoyable part of the workflow. Simply go out and shoot whatever it is you want to capture. Remember that no matter where you go, or what you're there to shoot, there is always something to capture. Serendipity is a photographers best friend, and even though you might be out to shoot flowers, you might see an interesting pattern on a fence, or a cloud that catches your eye. Shoot, shoot and shoot more. The more you shoot, the better you get! It's really just that simple.
2. Copy to computer HD from portable HD and/or cards
a. I carry a NextoDI portable hard drive/card reader with me when I shoot. When a card is full, I offload it into the HD and depending on the shoot, I either store the card so I have 2 copies of the photos, or I erase the card and keep shooting with it. While I tend to carry about 20gbs worth of cards, there are times where I'll blow through that rather fast. When I'm through shooting, the next step is to copy those pics on the cards or portable HD onto the computers hard drive. One thing worth noting is that I keep my unedited/untagged/unsorted pics in a folder away from my final pics. You can call it working, or draft, or unsorted, but I find that it pays to keep the two separate so you know what's been done, and what is left to do. At this point I make a folder in the unsorted folder named something descriptive like Day at so and so park - Date, or Wings wheels and Rotors Airshow and Date. I also make 3 folders inside of it for RAW, JPEG, and Movies since all 3 need to be handled differently.
3. Backup the unedited pics onto external hard drive
a. I reserve a special external HD just for unedited/unprocessed photos. If by some chance I screw up copying/moving, or something, I can go back to the full days dump. And yes, I have indeed screwed up moving back and forth a few times and this step has saved my bacon!
4. Open Adobe Bridge and do my initial sort/review
a. At this point I'm concerned with sorting by geographical location if I was in multiple places, say touring long beach and hitting multiple spots, or shooting a day at the fire station with multiple calls. If it's just one single place, say an airshow, I'll skip this step and go straight to the Geotagging.
5. Apply Geotags using geosetter from portable gps tracker
a. I will either use the saved track or point and geotag all of my photos at this time. This is good for 2 reasons, 1, so you can see where you've been and 2, so others who view your photos can get both a general understanding of where the shots were taken, as well as allow other photographers to see interesting places to shoot. Most of the time I'm very general with my geotagging, with all airshow pics getting a single point at the general location of the airshow and such.
6. Open bridge again and Apply metadata template (work or personal)
a. The template fills in Creator, Job Title, My State, My County, Email Address, Website, and Copyright information. This data is stored in the exif data so that people know who the photo belongs to and who to contact. Think of it like signing the back of your photos.
7. Full sort
a. This is the big time sort and review. Everything gets broken down into its own groups to make renaming and tagging easier. For example a wedding might have the Pre-wedding photos, actual wedding, meal, reception, and dancing split up. An event might have, Police, Fire, Military, and each item has its own folder as well nested inside. This helps a lot when I shoot 1 subject multiple times throughout the day due to lighting and other considerations. Instead of being spread out, I can group them all together to make naming and tagging easier. The way I do this is using the star and labels in Adobe Bridge and a simple notepad list that might have 1 star being Engine 6, 2 stars being Engine 25, 3 Stars being Ambulance, 4 stars being gear, and so on and so forth until everything is grouped and moved into it's appropriate folders
8. Mark any that are unsharp/or major f-ups for deletion
a. Anything that is an obvious fail, like a completely white or black image, hey, it happens to all of us, those get marked and shoved into the crap folder at this stage. NEVER be too quick to move a bad pic, sometimes even the worst ones can be fiddled, adjusted, and played with and turned into something special.
9. Keyword/Tag all of the Files (notice how many keywords my pics usualy have???)
a. This is where my workflow enters the tedium stage. Everything is tagged and most of my photos have more than 5 to 10 different tags. Why? Because people don't think like you do. No matter HOW you think, or think people think, you, the photographer, are always wrong. People search for the craziest stuff and patterns, and unless your photos are tagged with almost every imaginable combination, some one else's pic will be found and they will get the business and not you! It's really just that simple. Also another key factor is for when you are searching later for whatever reason. Say someone asks you 10 years later if you have any photos of something or so and so, you can simply type in the name, and boom, every photo of so and so is there. No having to remember, dig, or mess around!
10. Add description
a. After the tags are all applied and every photo has been scrutinized a dozen times, everything gets a description. Sometimes they're verbose, sometimes they're as short as Engine 125 @ a Medical Aid or Flower @ the park.
11. Rename the Files from default camera name
a. Now that everything is sorted, tagged and gone through not just once, but multiple times and everything is where it belongs, I now rename the photos. Naming photos is something that trips up ALL photographers until they find the right system for them. At first I renamed my photos with a very simple system. An LAPD helicopter was simply LAPD-Air-001.jpg. But that shortly became unusable when people would say, "hey, I like that shot of LAPD-Air-001.jpg" and I realized I had 6 to 20 photos named that in different folders. At one point I would go back and see where I left off number wise, but even that was added work and cumbersome. Then I decided to simply date the photos and started with the traditional American dating system of 060109-LAPD-Air-001.jpg, but I soon found that storing the photos and sorting them like that was problematic due to the Month/Date/Year format. I've finally settled on Year/Month/Date such as 20100601-LAPD-Air-001.jpg which allows databases and programs to sort it easily, and when people say they like the photo, I can simply go to the one shot that day without conflicting with other shots taken at other times.
12. Backup to external hard drive
a. At this point I backup to a 2nd external hard drive since all of the photos are sorted and tagged and named. If anything should happen at this point, you won't lose any of your considerable time and effort.
13. Import into lightroom
a. Once all of the photos are ready to be edited I move the photos from the unsorted directory on my hd to the "FINAL" directory under its appropriate folder hierarchy and then import that into Lightroom. Due to the nature of my photography, I have 2 main folders, "Action" and "General". Within action you find law enforcement, fire, airshows, and those types of photos. Under general you'll have Disney, nature, and travel photos. You may not realize it now, but someday you'll have a hell of a lot of photos and by breaking them down into folders and subfolders and having a good filing system, you'll save yourself a lot of heartache later.
14. Evaluate and Rate
a. After all of the photos are in lightroom, I then remove all labels and stars from the sorting step. Then I pick a folder to start with if there are multiple and I use the star system at this point to designate edit or ignore. I will go through every unedited photo at full size and give it either 1 star or no stars. The 1 star photos will get edited and processed, the no stars will just be left alone and ignored. The ones without a star aren't necessarily bad shots, but they might be just be too similar to another shot to bother with.
15. Edit the photos
a. I shoot in RAW mostly which means that I then have to:
a. Set the color space calibration (canon standard for reds, others for predominantly yellows)
b. set the contrast, white and black points
c. the saturation
d. the cropping (if needed)
e. remove dust spots
f. And any other edits for EACH and EVERY photo edited
b. One thing worth noting is that sometimes a single photo will have more then one development to it. Maybe it'll yield two or three photos depending on different tweaks and croppings! I make virtual copies in lightroom, but let me be clear with this WARNING, vc's are just that, virtual. You lose the database, you lose that VC and all of your edits!!! So anytime I make a VC, I export it as a DNG after just in case. That way I always have a hard, physical file with whatever treatment I gave to it.
16. Retag if Necessary
a. If a photo got turned into black and white or an artistic rendering, it'll get the BW tag now. If I crop out something significant that was tagged, I'll remove that tag now.
17. Export
a. I export twice, once is at a maximum of 640x using lr mogrify and flickr uploader to add a border with my name, © and website, as well as no less than 16 hidden digital copyright symbols from a service I subscribe to. Even if someone tries to crop out the border or the exif data, those symbols are placed throughout and can be read by special software that scans the web. The flickr uploader tool adds my "ad" for lack of a better word that lets people know about all of my social media accounts so that people can easily find what's new, and any other information. I don't put that into exif data, since I don't necessarily want that info in each shot that I might sell/give to someone else or agency.
b. The second export is full size without the borders or anything. If the raw should ever be damaged or unreadable, this gives me a 2nd copy of the pic, and is also what I use for printing
18. Backup edited photos
a. At this point the RAW and full size jpgs get backed up onto the 3rd HD as well as onto DVD's that I store at a separate location. This allows for 3 separate copies of the final images. One on the HD, 2 on the external, and 3rd on the DVD kept elsewhere. It may seem excessive, but I've had a HD fail on me and when I went to check the External, it too had errors!
19. Upload to my personal website
a. When dealing with a large set, like an airshow or an event, each folder becomes a sub album of a main album of the event. With an Airshow or large incident, it can have 20+ albums all broken and stored hierarchically. Whereas flickr is more basic and just a photo stream, this allows people who are looking for specific things to better be able to find them. As I said earlier, no two people think or use the web the same. Some just want to see everything in a stream, others are more interested in specific things and don't want to wade through hundreds of other photos to find what they want.
20. Link the pics
a. If I shoot an LAPD helicopter at an airshow or an incident, I also cross link that photo to the LAPD air album. Same with general shots, if a person wants to see a sunset, they're no going to look in the Seal Beach folder, and vice versa. This way everyone can easily find what they want amongst the 40+ thousand pics I have. Tags help, but people won't always search for the right tag, nor will you always know what tags people want. This dual placement helps people locate exactly what they want.
21. Post update on Website, Myspace, & Facebook
a. I pick a single picture that jumps out in thumbnail form for the website/facebook/and rss feed and write an update that says what's added, where it's added and any new info.
22. Best Of:
a. Once every photo from the entire collection/set/group is done, I'll wait a day and go through every single pic again and add additional stars and make a best of collection
23. Groups
a. At this point I'll go back to the flickr photos and add certain photos to certain groups to help promote my work.
24. Stamps?
a. And after all that is said and done, I ask myself if I should take up stamp collecting instead!
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