A good friend of mine recently joined the corporate world. Among other things, he’s commented on the use of so many ambiguous or nebulous terms and concepts. One of those hot (and sometimes nebulous) terms is workflow. While workflow can be ambiguous and and, in some cases not very meaningful, it can be very powerful and important to describe how someone can work more effectively and efficiently.

In simpler terms, workflow can be described by answering three questions. What do I do? What order do I do it in? What tools do I use to do it?

So, for a theme this week, I’ll describe my workflow. Today will describe my photo workflow from the 50,000 foot view. It will describe what I do and the order I do it in. Then, additional posts this week will provide more detail into particular steps or tools.

My Workflow - An Overview

We’ll take a look at this from the perspective of an actual shoot. I’ll set each as time stamps, reflecting roughly the amount of time each stage takes. This is an average and spaced out over an hour for the sake of breaking out the time - some shoots will go faster and some will take longer.

Minute 0 : Start setting up for the shoot. Get camera ready. Canon 40D, with lens - almost always the 24-70 2.8L or 70-200 2.8L. Make sure I have enough memory cards. Make sure the lens is clean. Make sure the settings are where I need them. Check white balance, ISO, F-stop and Shutter Speed. Make sure the time setting is correct (the photos’ time stamps need to be accurate if I want to easily synch with any GPS data) Check the battery.

Minute 5 : Set up other gear. This depends largely on the type of shoot. If shooting landscape, make sure tripod and shutter release are set up. Turn on the GPS and set to take automatic readings every 5 minutes. Attach any needed filters. If a portrait session, set up any flashes, reflectors, etc. Possibly connect camera directly to laptop to shoot tethered.

Minute 10 : Begin shooting. This is one of the steps that has the most potential for variety. If it is a shoot for kids - it needs to be over quickly (a good number of our shoots for kids take 20 minutes or so - sometimes stretching to a few of the 20 minute sessions if other poses or outfits are needed). If it’s a landscape, I might be there for 3 or 4 hours waiting for various lighting. Make sure to continue changing settings as appropriate when the shot changes significantly. Switch filters, memory cards and batteries as the need arises.

Minute 30 : Pack it all up. Head back to the digital lab (either my office, or in the field, a laptop and a restaurant or the hotel).

Minute 35 : Insert cards into CompactFlash card readers. Adobe Lightroom (my tool of choice for importing, sorting and doing basic image editing - more on this later in the week) detects the cards and opens up an import dialog. I choose to copy the pictures from the card to my hard drive into particular folders. I also enable the setting to convert the Canon camera raw files to .dng. Repeat for all cards with pictures on them.

Minute 37 : Begin reviewing and sorting the pictures. One of the great things about Lightroom is that I can begin sorting/editing while other pictures from the card(s) are still importing.

I always go through two stages when reviewing pictures. The first is a basic pass, marking bad photos for deletion from my hard drive. Shots that were extremely out of focus, shot in the wrong direction, etc. I then permanently delete those photos. I know that some prefer to keep them all, but I like to keep more hard drive space usage as lean as possible. Also, some like to backup the photos automatically to another hard drive at this stage. I typically wait until later in the process (this hasn’t bitten me yet - I’m half waiting for the day that my hard drive crashes right after I import and clear off my memory card… the other half is hoping it’ll never happen).

I then do another, more thorough pass, marking my photos with ratings from 1-5. I don’t often use all 5. Usually just 3’s for the okay shots and 5’s for the best. All the rest are left at 0. If I had a very large or diverse set of photos, I might use more.

If I shot landscapes or travel photos and captured the GPS locations of the photos, I attach those GPS coordinates to the photos. I do so using GPicSync. You can read more about that at a previous post here.

Minute 42 : Create a collection (collections are ways to organize photos into different areas outside the standard folder structure) for this shoot. Create sub-collections called Good and Best and Use. Display only photos with 3’s and put them in the Good collection. Display 5’s and put them in the best collection.

Minute 45 : Begin editing photos, focusing on those in the Best collection. 80% of editing happens in lightroom - adjusting white balance if needed, tonal adjustments, playing with B&W, etc. Lightroom has a great Synch function that allows transferring the adjustments from one photo very quickly to a large number of other photos.

I then bring the photos that need some additional work over to Photoshop. It is best for adjustments that apply to just part of the photo, advanced cloning or masking, etc.

Minute 55 : Output photos. Use Lightrooms output modules (Slideshow, Print and Web) as needed. Print my own on my Canon
Canon PIXMA Pro9000. When larger prints are needed, export as .jpgs or .tiff for printing at an online vendor (I like MPix). Or, if needed In some cases, post up to my blog, e-mail, post in Flickr, etc.

Minute 59 : Back up photos to an external hard drive. Also, back up the Lightroom files once a week.

Minute 60 : Sit back and enjoy the photos. Begin planning the next shoot.