How I do it - workflow

Since I went digital (and left the Fuji- and Kodachromes at home) a new word came to my attention, workflow.

Every digital photographer has he's or her's own way to work with the picture files after the photos has been taken. The photojournalist, the commercial still photographer and the sports photographer do it their own way. They all work with raw-files. Only a very few stick to the jpg type of files. My friend in Copenhagen, an experienced commercial photographer Steen Bjerregaard, says: Shoot in raw files, allways!! That way you can go back and adjust white balance, colour temperature and more.... so for the last one and half a year I've been a raw-shooter.
This is how I'm working (September 2005) with rawfiles from my Canon 20D:

I have 3 memorycards in a small waterproof plastic container. Each one with 1 gb storage. When a card is full I download the files to my portable harddisk, a Smartdisk Flashtrax with 40 gb storage. Back home I plug in the Flashtrax to my computer. I name a new folder with date and subject. For a fashionshow today September 21st. 2005, it would be something like: 210905fashion. Then I start up Capsure One, from Phase One, and use this nice software for viewing and selecting.
First thing to do is to run through all photos and erase the bad ones - those obviously unusable shots. Secondly I mark those that are usable and, well....pass my qualitymeasure. From 200 photos I end up with 10, 15 or even less, good pictures. They are moved into a subfolder called: 210905fashion-edit. Now it's time for cropping, adjusting, and optimizing the raw files into tiff files (for magazine use) or jpg's (for web use). In Photoshop I do some final adjustments, like 'levels' and 'unsharp mask' or 'sharpening'. The files I end up with are then burned down on a cd or dvd and send to the customer.

UPDATE: Since 1st of january 2006 I upload the files to a server and my clients can download them from there. It's easier and a lot faster also for me. No cd's or dvd's to wait for. Tjeck it out - its a danish piece of software: Kontainer

I keep the original raw files until the assignment is well over or the pictures are published. Then I erase them from my harddrive, except the 10-15 selected ones. Those are kept in my cd archive with the tiff files or jpg files. All memorycards are then formatted and ready for use again. Sometimes I keep the raw files on the Flashtrax as a backup for a few weeks.

Besides all this, sometimes I still fail on the important basics. Remember:
- Bring new fresh batteries to your flash and camera.
- Have a book or 'palmpilot' to write down notes like names, emailadresses and phone numbers of people you meet and worked with on an assignment.

I would very much like to hear how you work!!!!! Come on - respond! :-)

RAW software

Everybody is talking about workflow theese days. Within a short period of time I will post my own personal way of shoting in the raw format and the following workflow.

But first, let me hear what RAW software you are using. IF you use it!...I have installed the Capsure One software (it is danish like me...he-he!!) I don't use the Capsure One Pro version, but the LE SE (light) version. It is enough for my kind of work and a lot cheaper. I enjoy the simple way of working with it, and I have started all on my own. No teaching or learning...
A lot of photograpers swear to the RAW format. But some stick to the good old jpg standard format. I say it's all up to what kind of work I'm doing. This guy, Neil Turner, is one fantastic Canon-shooter and he works with jpg. Take a look - it is a super site! www.dg28.com

There are other kinds of software: Breeze Systems (www.breezesys.com), Pixmantec (www.pixmantec.com) and Adobe Photoshops own DNG format, besides the camera manufactures own formats (Nikon, Canon, Sony and so on).

Let me hear you're experiences......