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SAFFRON - SESHU'S DOCUMENTARY WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY & PORTRAITS BLOG
Digital Workflow For Wedding Photographers |
02.17.09 |
The Foundation Of Quality And Efficiency |
| It's been a long time since I shot film. You know, that stuff that came rolled up tightly in a canister that you put in the back of your camera? I bet it's been a while since a lot of, nay, a majority of photographers have worked a professional gig with film. Digital is here. Digital is now. Digital is king. It's as simple as that. When asked, "Do you shoot film or digital?," I don't waste a nano-second to say "fully digital."
One of the things I enjoyed about film was the mystery. Yes, crazy, huh? Not knowing whether I got THE shot was actually pretty exciting to me. I raced my film to a custom lab which processed, cut the film into strips and stored them in an archival negative holder. My work was essentially done after I shot the images. But then came along film and slide scanners that allowed us to tinker with images. And, with Photoshop came even more "independence" where the photographer could enhance or manipulate photographs. But back to digital. We now capture images in cameras ranging from point-n-shoot to the fanciest digital SLR. Depending on your level of expertise and interest, working with Photoshop or some sort of an image editing software that resides on your computer or is online is the next logical step. Why? Well, images straight out of the camera rarely have that finished look. To most consumers, this may just be overkill, but professionals should be expected to take the time to post-process their images. Here is an image that is straight out of the camera: |
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| And here is that same image, after it has been enhanced. |
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| So, you may then try your hand at enhancing the images and then printing them at home or burning them to a CD/DVD to take to your local printer. We are also able to quickly share these images online as email attachments, blog posts or slideshows. The possibilities seem endless with digital photography, right? Right. However, there is a whole lot more to this process than, yes, meets the eye.
This blog post is about how I capture, process, print and archive images for my clients and myself. I would like to thank Ariston Collander (@whoisariston) for inspiring me to write this article. Several other photographers have joined in an unofficial "photo ring" to also post similar articles on their blogs. Here they are: Ariston Collander, Jigar Champaneria, Lara Swanson. [If you are taking part in this ring and you are not listed here yet, please leave a comment with your link. I'll post your name and the link here in this space after I have read your article.] The night before a photo session, I start by cleaning my camera sensors. I then make sure that the electronic contacts between my lenses and the camera bodies are also free of dirt. Then I go into my camera's (currently two D300s) menu system to set different folder names for for the files to be save to. Setting this correctly will save me a whole lot of time down the road if I should find a corrupt digital file. I'll know which camera body created the file. I also set the camera bodies to sequentially name the files so that files names won't overlap when I import the images into my system. I next re-format all my compact flash cards. They are all 8gb or larger and made by Sandisk. I try and maintain some consistency in size and brand, again to limit technical issues down the road. Reformatting a card is about the healthiest thing you can do for your sanity. Reformatting, essentially, realigns the card and saves you from encountering errors that some card readers may cause when reading un-formatted cards. I work with multiple camera bodies and synching their internal clocks is vital in keeping the events in chronological order. Having reception pictures in the beginning and wedding pictures in the end is a recipe for disaster. So, I avoid that by using my computer's internal clock to adjust and set both the camera bodies to the same time. Each camera brand has their own way of doing this, so read your manual. As a starting point, I set the white balance of my cameras to AUTO. I want to start somewhere. If one camera body was set to tungsten and the other to day light, I am going to get two very different files to deal with. Once I encounter the lighting at a venue, I make a quick decision to change the white balance from AUTO to whatever will provide me the cleanest files. Sometimes, though AUTO white balance, just works fine, too. The color space of my cameras are set to AdobeRGB (1998) to capture the widest gamut of colors. Yes, I will likely be converting them from Adobe RGB (1998) to sRGB for my lab and for the images you see here on my website. But I don't like throwing away information when one can capture it and perhaps use it in the future. I also set the working color space in Photoshop to AdobeRGB. In Photoshop CS3, go to Edit>Color Settings>AdobeRGB (1998). I shoot in RAW mode and only in RAW mode. I don't begrudge photographers who swear by shooting jpeg's, but I just like the added security that shooting in RAW provides me. Again, I don't like throwing away potentially useful information. In my opinion, shooting jpeg images mean that you are compressing the data and tossing it out ... forever. With images in RAW, I can always go back and rediscover "lost" parts of that image. Yes, shooting RAW also means I have to constantly think about larger capacity storage devices for my digital files. After I photograph an event, I ingest my compact flash cards using a terrific program called PhotoMechanic. As a photojournalist, I remember being introduced to this robust software when having to edit quickly on the road. I edit my images in, giving my image selects 1 star. I choose images based on content, quality and moment. After renaming all the files, I group the selects and bring them into Adobe Lightroom, an amazing program that is constantly evolving. There I enhance the images by tweaking colors, exposure settings and resetting the white balance in images, if I somehow got them wrong in the first place. From Adobe Lightroom, I save images out for my client's private gallery and ordering system, this blog, a slideshow and for my client's custom album design. To learn more about digital workflow, check out Peter Krogh's book, Digital Asset Management and the Digital Asset Management Using Lightroom Workshop held in Connecticut by Paul McNerney and Matthew J. Wagner. These are awesome resources you should also check out. Like anything, my workflow is always evolving and I am looking for simpler and faster ways to do the things for my business and ultimately for my clients. What is your digital workflow? Share it by providing a link or an extended comment below. Thank you! |
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| category: News tags: Digital Asset Management, Digital Workflow, Efficiency, Quality Control |
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