Photographic Workflow
Derek Smith • 11 May 2022
For a photographer, I feel that it’s important to have an efficient, and smooth workflow for editing, and storing images.
Quite often I will return home from a shoot, or weekend away, with several hundred images. I don’t want to be spending days in front of a computer, so my workflow consists of taking the SD card out of the camera, and using a card reader, copy all the images, then pasting them into an external hard drive.
Opening the photo editor, I edit the RAW images that I’ve just saved to the external hard drive, and a lot of this process involves “culling” images (sorry dear reader not all my images are just as I want them!!) probably only keeping about a quarter of the images taken on that session.
In the photo editor I will quite often use a template, or a pre-set to apply to the image, this is for consistency, as well as speed, one example of this is where I have been on a portrait shoot and want the images to have the same “style” to present to the model following the shoot. After applying the template, or pre-set, I will crop the image if required, then save the edited finished image to a temporary folder on the computer hard drive, I have named my folder “Upload”.
With all my edited images in the temporary “Upload” folder, I upload all these images to a personal photographic website powered by SmugMug, (it costs about £50 annually) the folders on the website are organised by “Year” and “Month” for my personal images, “Glamour” and “Model” for my portrait work, as well as a folder for “Competitions”, these photos can be viewed on a mobile phone or tablet. I also import the photos from the “Upload” folder to my Apple Photos, and these are backed up again to Google Photos, and Amazon Prime Photos. After uploading all my images, I delete all the images from the temporary “Upload” folder ready for the next photo editing session.
I truly believe in safeguarding photographic images by storing them away from the computer, I have found Google Photos very useful for locating images for competitions as the search facility is very good. Recently while selecting an image for the “Derelict Buildings” competition I remembered a photo I had taken in Grimsby, but a couple of years ago, Google Photos found the image within minutes.
Quite often I will return home from a shoot, or weekend away, with several hundred images. I don’t want to be spending days in front of a computer, so my workflow consists of taking the SD card out of the camera, and using a card reader, copy all the images, then pasting them into an external hard drive.
Opening the photo editor, I edit the RAW images that I’ve just saved to the external hard drive, and a lot of this process involves “culling” images (sorry dear reader not all my images are just as I want them!!) probably only keeping about a quarter of the images taken on that session.
In the photo editor I will quite often use a template, or a pre-set to apply to the image, this is for consistency, as well as speed, one example of this is where I have been on a portrait shoot and want the images to have the same “style” to present to the model following the shoot. After applying the template, or pre-set, I will crop the image if required, then save the edited finished image to a temporary folder on the computer hard drive, I have named my folder “Upload”.
With all my edited images in the temporary “Upload” folder, I upload all these images to a personal photographic website powered by SmugMug, (it costs about £50 annually) the folders on the website are organised by “Year” and “Month” for my personal images, “Glamour” and “Model” for my portrait work, as well as a folder for “Competitions”, these photos can be viewed on a mobile phone or tablet. I also import the photos from the “Upload” folder to my Apple Photos, and these are backed up again to Google Photos, and Amazon Prime Photos. After uploading all my images, I delete all the images from the temporary “Upload” folder ready for the next photo editing session.
I truly believe in safeguarding photographic images by storing them away from the computer, I have found Google Photos very useful for locating images for competitions as the search facility is very good. Recently while selecting an image for the “Derelict Buildings” competition I remembered a photo I had taken in Grimsby, but a couple of years ago, Google Photos found the image within minutes.
Louth Photographic Society
The Exhibition will be in place from 10th - 29th September 2026
I was scrolling through the archives yesterday, and found these "Still Life" images. Still Life is an interesting photographic genre that requires good lighting, and compositional skills, but the results can be amazing. Here are four images of the genre, "Breakfast" showing cereal falling into a bowl, "Four Candles" (no not the ones from the Two Ronnies sketch), the moody "Decaying Tulip", and the simple but effective monochrome "Opener". Perhaps these images might give you some inspiration.
I joined the NELPS outing at Chambers Farm Woods on Wednesday. The NELPS visit to Chamber Farm wood and butterfly garden was well attended, with several members from NELPS, Grimsby, Dunholme and Louth, kind thanks to all that came, although it was very hot the butterfly garden, being rather full and slightly unkept did not let us down with butterflies, two less common were seen, a Comma butterfly and a humming bird moth, with loads of very lively common blue butterflies. Most of the insects in the butterfly garden were highly active, and by the time an insect was spotted, it was off!! I managed to just about get an image of the Comma butterfly, and nobody stood a chance with the humming bird moth, it was too fast. The dragonfly was more accommodating remaining fairly still posing for us. The next NELPS outing will be to the Peoples Park in Grimsby on Wednesday 19th, I'm busy on that day, but I will be attending the meeting at the Sandtoft Trolleybus Museum on Wednesday 26th. Many thanks to NELPS for organising these outings, it was a thoroughly pleasurable morning.
A visit to Whitby for a sunset picture didn't quite go to plan. Unknown to me today is the last day of the Whitby Regatta. Whitby in the summer is usually busy, but today it rivaled Time Square in New York. My planned shoot of the East Pier was a non-starter because for tonight only there's a fun fair along West Pier where I planned to shoot from. I had to re-think and resort to plan b, which was also a non-starter because the East Pier was closed as it was packed with fireworks. Plan c was OK though and I got an image I'm pleased with.
I've been up to RSPB Bempton Cliffs this week, and have taken some excellent photographs, the weather was fine, and the lighting was less harsh than usual. This pair were on the cliff top, obviously well established, and saw off this interloper trying to muscle in on their space, those beaks look very vicious. I hope that everyone else is having a productive summer break.
For club interaction, we are invited to these NELPS photo shoots. So lets start this club interaction, NELPS are now on there summer break, but it does not stop there. The NELPS club president has put together some outdoor photo shoots:- Lincoln 5th Aug meet at the Cathedral 11am Not forgetting the photo exhibition by Lincoln Camera Club in the Usher Gallery! Chambers Farm Wood & Butterfly Farm 12th Aug meet at 10am. Peoples Park Grimsby 19th Aug meet at 10am. Trolley Bus Museum Sandtoft 26th Aug meet at 10am Cadwell Park 10th Aug motorbikes, 24th Aug cars and both are track days so free to get in.
Sutton & Trusthorpe Camera Club have their annual Exhibition at the Meridale Hall, Sutton on Sea, on 29th / 30th August. Drink and a Home-made cake only £3!
I’ve lost my photographic “mojo”, that desire to go out and take impactful photographs. That creative spark has gone, vanished, will it ever return? Writers talk of a “writers block”, when they just sit in front of a blank page, and can’t think of anything else to write, I’m the same, still out with my camera, but just not creating anything meaningful. Some of this I suppose is due to the fact that I’ve almost stopped my genre of model photography, we had the Studio evening, and other than that I’ve only had 2 model shoots this year. So what is my photography genre now? I know that I’m not a bird photographer, I haven’t got the patience to sit in a bird hide for hours with a long lens, waiting for the right bird shot to appear. Landscape, possibly, but I look at the work of some of our members, and YouTube videos, and don’t know whether I can achieve as good a standard in my work? I do enjoy macro photography, but again do my photos reach a good standard? One way forward is to look at our Societies annual project, this year it’s “water” one photo a month depicting water. Then of course there are the planned photo competitions for the rest of the year, those subjects could inspire me to go out and take some images. Anyway, that’s me, enjoy the rest of the summer, and if any of our members could share a photo, with a line or two of text I will be very happy to post on this blog.
Good Morning All Last week we had a very good evening at Kirkby Gravel Pits, it was a warm sunny evening and there was wildlife about to photograph. There were Dragonflies about, but all flying, but we did manage to photograph some Damselflies and grasshoppers etc. We then called at the local pub in Kirkby on Bain for refreshments. There were only 7 of us, if you have other ideas for outings please let me know and I will look into them for next year. Derek has also done a blog on the evening. Louth did make it through to the LPA Battle finals coming fifth overall, the final is on the 18 th October at Nettleham village hall. That was the last event before the summer break, so we now have a break before returning in September. I won't be doing any newsletters unless there is something to report. If you do anything interesting over the break you can always send Derek a blog for our website. There are things you can do over the break, the monthly project of water, preparing for the PDI competition in September, with the categories of "Objects in the Air" and "Open". In September our first meeting back will have members speaking on the topic "15 minutes on what you have done over the summer", you may want to prepare something for this. Have a good summer, Graham
Lincoln Camera Club are holding an exhibition at the Usher Gallery, Lincoln. Commencing July 30th to November 1st.
