Exercise1: Your own workflow 1

In this exercise we are tasked with devising our own workflow for a specific short assignment. It is suggested using a portrait session which is limited in time. I however had an opportunity of taking some images at a small local festival, and I would only be there for one pint so time in this case was certainly limited.

From these time limited images we are to select a final two encompassing our entire workflow.

Digital workflow is not new to me and I took on a lot of advise a while ago from a digital camera magazine on this very topic, though this was more concerned with organization of files it did include many aspects of workflow.

For this exercise the workflow devised was:

Preparation:

Batteries charged, flash cards cleared of old images, use of mid range zoom lens, camera set to 100 ISO and auto white balance.

Images to capture the essence of a small music festival, people, tents, music, dance, colour etc.

Shooting images

Processing

Upload images to PC in raw format (note the directory I use automatically syncs a backup copy to another disk for security). I used the Adobe Bridge utility to automatically rename the images to the event and store them in a directory called ‘digital negatives>oca>dpp>part one>festival’, keeping the files in an ordered place helps me find them in the future.

Use Adobe RAW converter to weed out poor images, or out of focus, blurred etc., mark these as UNSELECTED. These will be deleted later from the hard disk.

Select all possibles, and mark the ones I like as RED, potentials as YELLOW, noting that these may look OK if cropped or converted to grayscale.

Process the final two images, this may include cropping, curves, colour [ the camera makes no adjustments], save as JPEG.

Further crop image to a smaller size suitable for the blog and upload.

I found that this workflow works well for me, although I didn’t capture as many images on the day I would have liked the overall process has helped me to think about preparation and improving workflow to help be more efficient in getting results. I also need to devise a plan to archive off the images that are not suitable, perhaps just to a DVD and leave only the Green images on the disk, with the amber archived and the reds deleted entirely. My hard disk is getting full……

The final approved two images, showing movement, people and colour....