Category: Photography

Workflow. Something many photographers need to consider.

• Importing your photographs
• Backing up your photographs
• Processing
• Digital Asset Management
• Metadata, keywording
• Choosing your Picks
• Choosing your Selects
• Final imaging processing
• Long Term Storage

Thats a lot to consider, and i’ll not go into it all today in this post but lets consider the first part.

Before I start, let me suggest you get yourself a good DAM program (Digital Asset Management). If I had to pick one it would be either Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture program. These two programs enable you to handle the processing, DAM, and metadata and keywording. They can also handle 90% of your post processing needs, meaning you need to spend less time in your heavy duty pixel wrangler program (eg GIMP/Photoshop CS5/Coral Paintshop Pro).

• Importing your photographs
• Backing up your photographs

Your photos are on your Compact Flash/ Secure Digital card safe in your camera. But what next.

Well for a start they are not safe, you only have one copy, you need to get those files backed up so you have two copies. First rule, don’t connect your camera to your computer. Take the cards out and put them in a card reader. If your in the field many photographers use devices such as Epson Photo Viewer, some are using Apple iPad’s via a camera connection kit, as am I now.

If your using a laptop, then for myself, I back them up to the local hard disk. I pack the memory cards and the laptop seperately. If one gets lost the images are still safe.

Once back at the hotel/home/office, I then import the photo’s into my DAM program. For me this is Adobe Lightroom, the import preset applies basic metadata information and keyword details. The preset also copies the files to an external hard drive. This now gives me three copies of the files. One still on the cards, one on the laptop and one on the external hard drive. At the end of the day I run a backup (if your an Apple Mac User with OS 10.5, 10.6 or 10.7, use the built in Time Machine Application or I recommend you buy the application SuperDuper) this does a complete backup of my laptop including my photos, this now gives me a fourth copy of the photographs. Its now at this point i’ll risk wiping the cards.

Sound like overkill, well it does not take any real effort when you have the right products, and how much are the images worth to you?

If you follow Scott Kelby’s blog you will see that the World Wide Photowalk has again been announced.

I’ll let Chris Bennett give you the details over at his blog.

Chris has entered all three up to now, while I have entered the last two. Last year I was pleased and proud to win the Lincoln round.

Hope to you there.

Saturday I spent the afternoon having a bit of fun.

The great thing about C-Stands is there versatility, with the boom arms fitted they not only light stands but also background stands. It was this versatility I wanted to test to day.

Clearing some space I set up the C-Stands with there boom arms, and used them to support a background roll of paper.

I then set up my Elinchrom Rotalux softbox using my portable Elinchrom Quadra Flashes to provide the illumination. One head in the soft box and one pointing at the background.

Using my long suffering and ever patient wife Caroline as a test model, and using my light meter, I soon had everything set up to give professional high quality results.

Having had such a busy week, I am only now getting round to processing my images from last week and our long weekend in the Yorkshire Dales. A fantastic long weekend, but it being a biking trip the photography was limited.

During our exploring I made it a goal to visit a number of waterfalls. With the heavy rain earlier in the week the rivers were full and that meant the waterfalls were in full flow.

Without a tripod I was limited but I still tried to use long shutter speeds. I also bracketed extensively, as I was intending to HDR the images like the one above taken earlier in the year.

As I was going to HDR the images I set the camera to aperture priority. You want the aperture to stay fixed while the shutter speed changes, having the depth of field change will ruin your HDR image.

Recently I have been looking at a number of HDR images on line by other top photographers, and they often have a far better, more realistic quality then mine. In an effort to get a more real quality I have now started to combine HDR with digital blending techniques.

With the camera set for auto bracketing I fired off a number of shots then chose the above two, to combine for the HDR image. I then imported one of the orginal images and the produced HDR image into photoshop as two layers. I then, where I thought was necessary masked the HDR image to bring some of the qualities of the original file back.

The end result is still not realistic but still, for a HDR image I like it.

Watch out for the end of the month shot, I feel I will be using this technique again to produce my Photo of the Month! I’ll try my best to use digital blending to make it more realistic but with a hint of HDR.