Thursday 3 January 2013

Initial thoughts on Digital Photographic Practice

My first thought as I flicked through the course as suggested, was that this module was right up my street, as in it seemingly was fitting for where I was in my photography. I had been becoming more and more interested in the process of taking a photograph and then editing it afterwards anyway. I also felt the selective and workflow processes were the somewhat weaker sides to my photography. Combining these two aspects together meant this part of the course made perfect sense for my development in photography; in my eyes at least.

   More specifically I had been experimenting with noise reduction and selective sharpening both personally and for the course and these were consequently the areas I was looking forward to most. Then there was the selection processes for each batch of photographs produced. Although this didn't particularly excite me, I had inadvertently developed my own, rather clumsy and painstaking methods for processing images (mainly through trial and error). Therefore making this 'work flow' more efficient sounded desirable.

   Also, I was looking forward to creating more refined images as a product of better post-processing, editing and of course the actual shooting. Being able to do this consistently as well sounded important to me and I had an inkling this could potentially be a direct cause of work flow in future projects. I felt it was a case where lots of small details could make a big difference, such as organising a library of photos well in a structured manner, little tricks in processing and getting a shot 'right' more often than not at the click of the shutter (then later improving/enhancing it).

   A the time of writing my workflow was primitive if you were to go by how detailed the examples in the course were. I thought it would be interesting to see how my workflow developed so I have posted the fairly haphazard workflow I have been using up until now here with a few variable scenarios for different shooting types:

   1. Make a basic plan written down for how I will approach the project at hand and put it in the camera bag.

   2. Check all equipment is in the bag and that batteries are charged/ memory cards have enough capacity for the session.

   3.  Go to the location and either shoot spontaneously, making adjustments to the angles/lighting as I went along in street photography shooting or go to the location and refer back to the notes I had made beforehand intermittently between shooting in a portrait session while still making adjustments to angles/lighting.

   4. Review some of the shots as I shoot, making adjustments where I saw fit - refers to both portraits and street photography.

   5. Download the photos via memory card reader to the computer.

   6. Preview all of the images, then slowly copy the photographs I felt were potentially strong into a new folder.

   7. Process all of the photos I had put into the new folder and save them into a folder within this folder.

   8. Upload the photos to my blog if they were for the course.

   9. Back the photos up onto an external hard drive.


   After writing this I could already see quite a few areas for improvement in my workflow and was sure some of these improvements were simple to implement.

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