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Photo Tips
Digital Workflow 101
By Chris Alvanas
Everyone that takes photos has some kind of workflow, like it or not. Most photographers are shooting a lot if not all digital now so the workflow has gone “digital”. Originally the thought of shooting digitally and not having to manage hundreds and thousands of slide and negatives was quite appealing. As appealing as it was or still is, it is not for free. Instead of shoe-boxes and binders filling our closets we now have hard drives and DVD’s. Yes they occupy less space but are more expensive than a shoe-box and require the photographer to be somewhat in the know of what’s going on with all those ones and zeros.
First we take the photo, or the camera takes what we think we see as the image and it magically gets stored to some kind of media inside the camera, SD, CF or some other hybrid version of storage. Quite amazing I might add, that we can fit so much in such a small space and it is re-usable. Possibly forever?!
This is where it all begins. Whether it is RAW, JPEG or TIFF, doesn’t matter, it all gets stored on the media in the camera. So where do we all go from here? Pretty easy so far, just point shoot and when it comes to storing the image the camera does the rest. Now when the media is full, it is time to get involved. Consult your manual and remove the storage media from your camera. You are now left holding this small little chip that contains everything near and dear to the photographer in you.
What flavor the media is, is important because it will dictate what kind or media reader you will need to have in order to extract the image from the media card to the computer. You could simply connect the camera to the computer and not bother with the reader but this creates yet another problem to consider. Imagine yourself out on a shoot somewhere special, a PQA trek for example. You connect your camera to the computer and start moving the images from the card to the computer. Now let’s think about what is needed here.
Mostly power, for the computer and for the camera. You do not want to download images directly from your camera using battery power. Logistically this can be a nightmare.
Option 2 would be to remove the media card when full and load another empty card into your camera and continue shooting. This leaves you with the downloading piece for later on when things are much more under control. Now depending on how much you shoot and the image file size, will depend on the medial storage size right for you. Photographers carry many blank cards with them to avoid the downloading and focus on shooting. The only thing to manage here is which cards are full and which are empty. I put my cards into a case with the back showing if they are full or exposed. This way when I go to grab a fresh un-exposed card, it would be the one showing the front of the card only. I realize that this article has covered only the bare bones of DAM (digital asset management), but fear not for there is more to come. We will talk about where the images go from here. We will talk about things like Lightroom and Photoshop as resources to manage your images, keep them organized and most off all safe. Make note… although gear is expensive to replace when lost or damaged, there is nothing that will replace the images you have recorded with your camera. Taking care of them and developing a process that manages and organizes them will be one of the most important things you will learn. Until then…cheers.
