(disclaimer: the "picture" above was taken a long time ago with a camera-phone, no creative process was involved!)
A reader asked me what my workflow was and I promised him I would do a write-up on it (and 'cause he donated money to my "feed me" fund, thanks Jeff!) Keep in mind that this is my style, my way.... it works for me, it was adapted to my needs. It may not work for you.
Shooting Stage:
I currently shoot with the consumer-grade Canon Rebel XSi (you can only laugh at me if you think your pictures are better than mine). My favorite lens is the 70-200mm f4L but I also like to use the 50mm f1.4 when I need a very soft, dreamy look. The f1.4 has very high level of almost-neutral-coloured halation, a form of chromatic aberration. Another lens that I have is the 17-40mm f4L that I use for environmental portraits. When I'm on the go, I shoot with the Olympus E-410 and a 14-42mm f3.5-5.6.
I shoot mostly wide-open and only rarely go above f5.6 when details such as clothes and accessories need to be in focus. I also shoot in RAW exclusively.
My lighting equipments consist of Sunpak 383's, Nikon SB-26's, Nikon SB-80's and Olympus FL-36R's flashes. All of them except the 383's have built-in optical slaves. I also have an Alien Bee B800 when portability is not needed. All of them are synced wirelessly with Cybersyncs and built-in slaves. To complement the lights, I also have various stands, umbrellas, a Photoflex LiteDome Q39 medium softbox and my home-made panels.
For memory cards, I use 4 GB Sandisk Ultra II SD cards. I have around 4 of them. I've tried other cheaper brands before but few of them were able to keep up with the Rebel's speed. I like the 4 GB capacity (which gives me around 200 exposures on the Rebel) because it allows me to stop often to back up and transfer my photos. You would NEVER find me shooting with a 32 GB card! I would rather lose 1/4 of my pictures when a card goes down than the whole of them. Don't put all your eggs in the same basket.
Immediately after filling up a card, I take a break and transfer my pictures to two portable firewire hard-drive enclosures. The daisy-chaining ability of firewire allows me to have the two hard-drives connected to one another and then both of them routed to my computer through a single cord.
To transfer the images while in a studio-setting, I either use my Macbook or my tiny Asus Eee PC runing XP. While on-the-go, I use the Wolverine Flashpack backup hard-drive to transfer my pictures directly from my cards without using a computer.
Post-Processing Stage:
After a shoot is over, I transfer all the files from my backup hard-drives into my custom-built PC runing Windows XP / Ubuntu. I wouldn't mind having a Mac as a desktop computer but they are too expensive. I've tried Vista and totally hated it. Vista takes an innordinarily amount of time to transfer files. Emptying my recycle bin (which usually contains around 1000 images) takes half-an-hour! Backup up in and syncyng with Vista is a pain in the butt. It's probably a bug that Microsoft is just too lazy to fix.
They rather spend their times making ass-sucking commercials. "I'm a PC and I eat cheese".. yeah how uncool is that uh? that's like the Joe The Plumber of IT*
All the RAW images from the shoot are converted to Adobe DNG format (you should do that!) using Lightroom 2 and are burned into DVD's for archival. I processs my images as 16 bits TIFF files with Photoshop CS4. My only plug'ins for Photoshop are Nik Color Efex 3.0 for skin softening, Nik Silver Efex for black and white conversion and PictureCode Noise Ninja for noise removal. I use a 4x6 Wacom Intuos3 graphic tablet to do my retouching. When it comes to tablets, I've found that the smaller the size the better - your drawing hand does not have to move over a big surface. My images are viewed and editted through a Dell LCD monitor calibrated with ColorVision Spyder2Express calibrator.
Backing Up Stage
All my files are backed up on my desktop computer (named Skynet), two external hard drives (Vault1 and Vault2) enclosures and one portable hard drive (Nomad). And as if that's not paranoid enough, I have yet another one at work just in case my house burns down. Note that I do not buy external hard drives such as the MyBook or MyPassport. I rather buy enclosures such as the Macally's and use regular 3.5" hard drives. That way after one fills up, I can copy all the files to another drive and move the maxed out drive to a safe location as a backup.
All my drives also have an exact copy of my Lightroom library so if I wanted to edit my photos from the Nomad with my Macbook when I'm away from my desktop, I could. I would then go home and sync all drives at the end of the day.
To sync everything, I use the awesome and free Allway Sync installed on my Sandisk Ultra USB Titanium Plus Cruzer drive using PortableApps. Having the syncing software on a USB drive allows me to run it even when I'm not at my computer.
- TN
* Although I have to admit, I do hate Justin Long. If I could only bitch-slap that smug look out of his face.
I wouldn't mind hearing why you use DNG in this workflow. I've worked for Adobe and I still don't see the benefit to DNG in a workflow like this, so maybe you could enlighten me. (I see benefits to camera makers and application developers to embrace DNG, but that's a different issue.)
ReplyDeleteFew of the reasons why I convert my files into DNG.
ReplyDelete1. Having a single format makes life much easier for me especially when working with different cameras from different manufacturers
2. DNG files are a bit smaller which is important when I have thousands of them.
3. DNG files have their sidecar files already embedded.
4. I'll be able to read my DNG files many years from now (probably) without having to track down my old D70 raw converter.
DT - if you print your own photos, can you elaborate on your printing setup? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThe photos you see on my wall are just pictures that I print to keep my creative juice flowing. Not all of them are mine. They are like photographic "Post-It"
ReplyDeleteTo print them, I use a cheapo Canon Pixma "all-in-one" printer. That's probably the weakest link in my photographic process but right now, the money just won't allow me to invest in professional quality printing equipments.
When I do need professional quality prints, I order from MPIX.