A new photography workflow

The more things I do, the more I understand the importance for a clever, yet simple, workflow.

Since I’ve been without a camera for quite some time, and have been moving all my old files over to the mac into iPhoto, I’ve been putting some real thought into the way I’m going to be capturing, processing and storing all of my future photographs.

Might not actually happen

This is the problem-solving workflow I’m going to try to adopt. I want to see if it does me any good… but of course if it feels like it’s hindering me, I’ll make changes.

The problem is, I’m a bit of a hoarder

By that I mean I used to keep absolutely every image I ever produced. Not very often the blury ones, but certainly ones I can never seem myself using or publishing.

If you’re producing thousands a year (like me) and 98% of them turn out to be rather pointless or boring or poorly done (like me), that’s just not cool. On top of that, sometimes I even kept original files righ next to altered ones. You can’t keep everything like that.

However, I would add to that by saying that the ordinary people who take a few holiday snaps every now and then really need not bother - I’ve seen these sorts of libraries and they’re small and manageable, and there’s nothing in particular to worry about.

Get critical

When you scroll though iPhoto or Picassa or whichever tickles your fancy, you don’t want to see all the rubbish shots which you know you’ll never use. You want to see your best, your brightest and most promising pics which are going to be useful, in one way or another, in the future.

I’m not talking about the 0.1% of your photos which will be run-away successes, rather the 20% or so which are of decent quality and are appealing and unique (within your library). Often, I take shots of one thing over and over and hope one comes out the best. The problem is I never bother picking that one best one and deleting the rest. But looking back, I really may as well… because no one really ever wants two photos of the same thing when just one will do.

So put on your Simon from Pop Idol hat and bin those duplicates.

Hang on, though! Who are you to judge photographic merit? Every now and then I’ll post an image to Flickr which I didn’t really think was so great, which goes on to get an absolutely lovely response [example]. So I think the key is to be cautious, and as a rule, if it’s not been taken correctly, or is downright boring, loose it. If it’s a duplicate, think carefully about the photo’s siblings, choose the best and bin the rest.

My planned process

Based around the idea of just keeping the photos you think carry merit and are worthy of their disk space, I’ve decided that I’m going to take the following steps when taking and storing photos.

Capture

I did see RAW as a superfulous format which can only do harm unless you’re doing high-pro photography. But after talking to some fellow photographers at flickl, it became clear that I should at least give it a go. I don’t quite like the sound of the filesizes, but I’ll have to see how it turns out.

Also, less of exactly the same shot. Unless you think you’ve messed that last shot up, don’t do it again. Try a different angle or composition style altogether.

Better processing with Aperture

Alright, this is where the costly software steps in… but I have it and am going to use it.

Aperture is a great piece of kit. It makes the whole processing stage so much easier and has some really great selection tools.

It’s also got some great photo tools which means I can do my whole selection/alteration stage all in the same application. Brilliant. In this order, I’ll be using Aperture to:

1. Group photos into their subsets
2. Disapprove of photos which don’t meet my standards (effectively deleting them - or at least removing them from any future workflows)
3. Doll up the photos I’m keeping - saturation, lighting, etc.
4. Add titles and proper keywords.
5. Export them, dolled up, to high-quality JPEG

After a few month or so, I plan to delete each photoshoot from Aperture - that’s all the originals gone. If it’s an important project, it’s going on DVD.

Long term storage with iPhoto

iPhoto has great integration with everything on Mac OS X, and since it’s the program with all the plugins, etc. as well, I’m sure the best thing to do is to keep the photos there in a ‘library’.

You can always back them up to DVD, make a book or set of cards very easily, etc. So it’s hardly a limited bit of software.

Onto Flickr

I loved flickr when I had my other camera, so this time round it should only be better - more shots more often. I won’t upload too many each day (doing so means each photo doesn’t get equal exposure)… I think about three is good, if you spread those out.

Finally, more portraits

Lots of people have a firm policy about family and flickr, and I do, too. But I’m changing it slightly to allow space for my friends and decent shots of my family, because I plan on tying to do a lot more of them.

I love some of the portraits on flickr, and would really like to get a move on and learn how to do them properly.