Photographic workflow: from camera to eternity
What is the flow that brings your photos from the camera to being published? Do you use many different software of just one?
In this small article I will explain my methods, hoping they can be helpful to someone and hoping someone can critique them well enough to make me change my mind on them!
One of the things you should know immediately is that I use only Aperture. I do not use Photoshop, Lightroom, Picasa or any other software. I feel that Aperture (or Lightroom for those who cannot use a Macintosh) can do 80% of what a photo can require. I love realistic photos, I am not a supporter of heavy filters: those fell in the rest 20% I am not entirely interested in.
That said here is my usual flow:
1. Import I connect my camera and I import all my RAW photos. In Aperture I have various projects, usually divided by year and type of photo (Events, Personal, Models, Street…). Every import is put in the right project and in a specific Album. The albums inside the projects are divided in different folders, one for each month.
2. Cleanup After every import I see every photo, marking as “Rejected” all the photos that does not meet my first level of quality standard. Out of focus, badly composed, boring and useless shots goes in this category. I can discard from 10% to 50% of my shots in this first passage, depending by the type of photos I was taking. When I shoot moving subject I can reject many photos, as I try to capture “the moment”, but when I shoot film (and import the scan) I rarely reject any image, because I am more careful. Aperture hides the rejected photos.
3. Star The photos that survived my first rejection are then rated from 1 to 5 stars. It is a personal selection, but I always try to get Fabiana’s comment. Some of the most successful photos were amongst those SHE considered “Very Good”. Very few shots receives 5 stars as very few receives only 1. Those with 1 star are then set in the rejected list.
4. People Tagging I always tag all the photos containing known faces. In Aperture I have a ordered tag list that I expand when I need, but that I always keep organized. So if, for example, I have to tag Fabiana in a photo, I find her tag under “People->Europe->United Kingdom->London->Fabiana Zonca”. Aperture lets you handle the tags in the way you want, so it is a matter of how you are organized.
5. Deleting Rejected After having sorted out the initial people tagging, I usually check the rejected photos and, once and for all, I delete them. Shooting thousands of photos every month (5,000 to 10,000 is a realistic number), the quantity of rejected photos can block my hard drive.
6. Master file relocation To keep my hard drive quite empty, I usually relocate the master files (The RAW files) to an external Hard Drive. This allows me to keep my Aperture library quite light and my internal HD with enough space.
7. Backup The RAW files and the configuration of my library are mirrored in two different drives more than the external HD: a NAS in Raid1 at home and another drive at work. Yes, you can easily call me paranoid, but in the last years five HD have failed me, and I am not willing to risk all my photos for being careless!
8. Editing The photos that have received 4 or 5 stars are those I will take into consideration for publishing. I usually edit few photos as soon as possible, making them as more close to what I perceived. Aperture let me do a complete edit in few minutes, even if some can take a little longer.
9. Extensive Tagging & Captioning Just before publishing a photo I usually tag the photos extensively with the most identifiable tag I can find in the photo and I usually write a caption, like a blog post.
10. Publishing Well, nothing new on this.
I feel my flow has some issues, like the fact that I do not tag every photo immediately. It would take me too much time doing it, but it would help INCREDIBLY while searching my library (that is getting bigger and bigger).
The other day, for example, I was looking for a photo of some policemen to use for the London Calling Photographers meeting. If I had tagged all my photos correctly, I would have just had to type “police” to find all the photos I needed. Obviously without being tagged I went to my “Street Photography 2008″ project, where I knew I had some, and I started a manual search. It took me some time, but it is not something I do so often. I think that if I had to search photos more often, tagging thoroughly every photo
My twits, if you want to follow!
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