Attempting to follow my existing workflow I conducted a second shoot. This time I didn’t have a time limit apart from the natural constraints that are the daylight hours. For this shoot, I decided to visit Chester as it contains very interesting, attractive buildings and scenery.
1 Preparation – First of all I chose where I wanted to conduct the shoot (Chester), checked that my battery was fully charged and ensured that my memory card had plenty of space. I use a 16GB SD card in my Canon EOS 500D and carry an empty 8GB card in case I need some extra storage. I made sure my lens and attached filter were dust and smudge free and got all the equipment that I wanted to use out of storage.
2 Camera Settings – I then checked that my desired Saturation, Contrast, Sharpness and Colour Tone settings were correctly set on the camera.
3 Travel to Destination – Next I had to travel to my destination so I decided to drive to Chester with it being only about 45 minutes away where I live.
4 The Shoot – Upon arrival in Chester I began taking photographs of the buildings and scenery. I played around with the White Balance, Focal Length, Angle of view and subjects to constantly strive for a better picture. I began by taking a shot of my girlfriend Lindsay and as we walked through the city I shot buildings, scenery, wildlife and close-up details in the attractive architecture. My workflow slightly differs at this point. I hadn’t finished shooting but I wanted to review what I had been taking pictures of whilst eating lunch.
5 Review/Break/Lunch – After a couple of hours I took a short lunch break, over which I decided to review my shots. There were a few that needed to be deleted straight away due to poor exposure and camera shake.
6 Shooting Continued – After my break I continued to take photographs of Chester and I’m glad I did because I came across a couple of friendly Squirrels playing on a patch of soil. After another couple of hours, the light began to fade so I called it a day.
7 Review and Delete – Before driving home I sat in the car and once again reviewed my shots, deleting the obviously poor.
8 Return Home – This is another additional step in my workflow. At the end of the day I needed to return home before transferring my shots to my computer.
9 Transfer Shots to PC – Upon returning home I took my SD card out of my camera, placed it into my card reader and transferred the RAW Chester photos to a folder on the hard drive.
10 Review again and Delete – After the transfer it was then possible to view my photos in Adobe Bridge using “Review Mode”. This makes it very easy to see which photographs I can instantly Reject due to faults that I may have missed on the on-camera reviews. In total I took around 200 photographs and rejected about 50 straight away. I then continued to whittle my shots down to several best. The lighting was very poor on the day and so I felt most of my shots were pretty terrible. I was left with 15 after several reviews, these can be seen below. I then took a brief break so that I could return to choose the very best photos with a fresh mind.
Images 1 + 2
Images 3, 4 + 5
Images 6, 7 + 8
Images 9 + 10
Images 11, 12 + 13
Images 14 + 15
11 Choose Final Images – After a brief break I returned and chose two shots as my final favourite images. These are displayed below.
Best 1 + Best 2
12 Retouch – After selecting my final two best shots I decided to retouch one of them slightly to improve it. With “Best 2” I boosted the contrast, converted it to black and white and replaced the sky. I feel I have created an aesthetic, eerie and daunting shot. The high contrast adds interest and a viewers eye is drawn up it and towards the sky. There’s a lot of architectural detail visible which helps to strengthen the composition and keep a viewer interested.
13 Process and Save – With shooting in RAW, after retouching a photograph in Adobe Photoshop, it then has to be saved in a different format. Also converting RAW files to JPEG reduces their file size which takes up less hard drive space and they will upload quicker to a website or blog.
14 Backup Images – I then backed up my selected photographs onto a DVD, which is kept away from my computer to ensure I have a backup of all my work.
15 Print and/or Upload – We have now reached the final stage of my workflow. This is the stage I am doing now, I am uploading my images to this blog and writing about them.
I found that trying to stick to my original workflow worked at first but soon I began to deviate from the plan so that I could take a break and review my images part way through. Another stage was also added, I forgot at first that I would need to return home before being able to transfer my shots to pc. All in all my workflow was practically identical to that of my first shoot, however it contained three extra stages. Having a set plan of how I’m going to conduct a shoot is helpful, but being able to deviate from the plan and then return to it can ultimately mean more shots, better pictures and an overall better result.
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