Inspired by this old post by my friend Eirik Solheim (great photographer and new media guru by the way), I'll try to describe how I deal with my photography, and hopefully improve the way I work along the way.
My pictures are usually up on http://flickr.com/rsepulveda.
1) Equipment
I used to shoot point-and-shoot for many many years. A bit over a year ago, around April 2008, I decided to get back to photography, an art I learned with my mom as a teenager. And as before, I am really interested in portraits and details, not really landscapes or group compositions.
I first bought a Canon 40D and a 50mm f/1.4 (great lens) in Paris at LeCirque (highly recommended shop, knowledgeable, and cheapest prices usually. Walking distance from my place helps :). I then got in San Francisco (much cheaper prices than Paris, at another great place, Calumet Photo) a telelens, a Canon EF 70-200mm L IS USM f/4 (great lens for daylight. the f/2.8 is more expensive, heavier, and I suppose only useful in low light) and a wide angle: a Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM II (another great lens that I love). Later last year in Hong-Kong I got a Canon EF 85mm f/1.2, a fantastic lens for light portraits, with a great bokeh.
However, all those mid-range DSLRs have a 1.6x factor on lenses, hence I was longing for a full-frame body. I knew the Canon 5D was great, but 3 years old, and that an update should appear at some point soon. That's why I had not bought EF-S lenses, and only EF lenses, guaranteeing compatibility with future bodies, in the upper-range. Eventually, the Canon 5D Mark II came out late last year, and I got mine through a friend in Hong Kong in January 2009. Now I really have a 16mm to shoot with, and not a 16mmx1.6 = 25mm-ish.
Since, I've sold my nice 40D body to a friend of mine with the 50mm lens (that I miss. I might have to buy it again).
So rule of thumb #1: invest in lenses as much as you can, they will last 10-20 years (until an upgrade comes out: faster, better optics, etc.). Don't over invest in bodies, as their life-span is about 3-5 years.
I now travel with 2 Crumpler bags: a big one for my 3 lenses, laptop, cables, etc. and a smaller one that olds the camera and 1 lens for photo-shoots. I either take the wideangle with the telelens (day), or the wide-angle and my 85mm (low light at night, parties, etc.).
I always have 2 batteries (fully charged) with me, ie. one spare one, just in case (and it's been helpful on more than one occasion). Same for my 2 x 8GB CF cards. It allows me to keep shooting, while one is being emptied on a laptop for example, or just in case one is full. I tend to reformat each CF card before I sue it; although sometimes I forget to do so, and it's a pain :( (although easy to not import duplicates in Aperture - see later).
Now I seldom travel with my Manfretto 1,2m tripod. I should use it more often, especially for HDR photography (more on that later).
Of course, a mini-USB/USB cable is necessary to download the pix from
the camera to my laptop. I just broke the external card reader I had
for that.
I use a small external hard disk to store all my pictures, and I always travel with it. My laptop tends to be overcrowded and it's best to have external space for this. I backup every week my external traveling laptop and external hard disk to a desktop hard disk using SuperDuper. It's always a good idea to check the sanity of your external (laptop or desktop) hard disks with for example Disk Warrior or Drive genius, using a surface scan. One of my disks holding all my video footage crashed, hence I probably lost it all. Now I've becolme more cautious about backups, and will in the future probably keep 2 separate copies of everything.
I used to shoot RAW with the 40D, but the files are just way too big on my 5D mark II, hence I just shoot high-res JPEG now. That gives me 999 pix on my 8 GB CF card (vs. about 220 if I shot RAW). I might revisit this in the future.
2) Importing pix to my laptop
I attach in sequence, my external hard disk, and then my card reader or camera. Automatically OSX recognises (yes I use Macs...) them, and launches Aperture, my picture management software.
I then import all pix (and video) in the camera to a specific folder I call "in". I've created 6 smart folders (5*, 4*, 3*, 2*, 1*, no *) underneath it, so that I can easily tag my pix, the ones I like, dislike, likke more than others.
I do this in preview mode, meaning I have to wait usually for Aperture to calculate preview thumbs (takes a while!). This allows me to eliminate quickly all pictures I don't want to keep.
3) enhancing pictures
I used to immediately afterwards start working on Aperture with my pictures, working on cropping, orientaton, colors, highlights, shadows, etc.
I've found that a good part of this can be done with an external program. So I now export all remaining pictures to a temp folder on my desktop (DxO_input). I then run DxO Optics Pro on them, letting automatic settings correct chromatic and optical aberrations on my pictures, and let the output files go into a separate directory (DxO_output).
This might take a long while. I'm now working on 2 modes. Either I let my laptop do the work (takes a long time, so I keep this for small batches), or I copy the (DxO_input) directory to my desktop (MacPro QuadCore), and run the process there. This works better for hundreds of pictures. It might take the night sometimes. I then recopy DxO_output directory back to my laptop (I use a 1Gbps Ethernet connection at home to do so).
I then reimport the pictures back to Aperture to another directory (in_DxO). And that's where I start working with my pics (cropping, colors, etc.). Once done, I move the pictures to a specific folder, with a date and a description, ie 090830_someplace for example.
4) sharing pictures
Easily enough, that's when a quick drag n drop of the last folder into Flickr Uploader is done. I add either a destination set (not a collection), add tags, descriptions, etc. and upload everything to Flickr for you all to enjoy. This is a step not to be neglected, as I manually add tags + description + titles to each picture, and the appropriate Flickr rights (Family, Me only, Friends, everyone).
Coming up in an update to this post:
- usual enhancements I use
- how I do panoramic stiches
- HDR photography
And you? how do you manage your photography workflow? please comment and share your tips!