My travel photography workflow 2

So now all my pictures are in Bridge. Why not Aperture or Lightroom you say? Well firstly I'll admit to being a PC guy so Aperture is out for me, and why not Lightroom will be revealed. Needless to say it has nothing to do with Lightroom being either a good or bad programme (I've never used it so wouldn't know) but more the fact that I'm happy where I am and if it ain't broke...

Anyway, as I mentioned in my last post as my images get imported into Bridge they get renamed and have metadata added. I use a naming protocol suggested in Peter Krogh's great DAM book, which is now in its second edition.

When I was shooting transparencies I used to name my images according to subject matter. So mammals was M followed by a three digit number. So starting at M001 and going up. I then had a Microsoft Access database which required me putting all the details of every picture in by hand. As you can imagine it was pretty arduous.

Anyway the naming was pretty irrelevant in terms of finding specific images and only really useful for locating their physical position in the filing cabinet. Using slide sheets you used to get 20 slides per sheet so M82 was on sheet 5 in the Mammals folder. But sometimes I would have elephants in the mammals category (if they were wild) and sometimes in the transport category (when they were carrying people). It didn't really matter where the slides were physically because there was a description category in my database and if I just typed in elephant it would tell me where every single one of my elephant pictures was.

And I went with this principle for my digital cataloguing. I wanted a situation where I could find a picture no matter what hard drive, folder or disc it lived on. I also realised that the name of the file wasn't important in locating it. Searching for images required good keywording. So again I followed Peter Krogh's advice and went with a naming system of Surname_date taken_camera file number. Makes no sense at all to a client but it does the important task of telling them straight away who took the picture.

The other important metadata I put into every single file at the time of import is my contact and copyright information. I make sure that my name, address, website, email, phone number and contact details are attached to everything I shoot - even the stuff I delete. You never know where your pictures are going to end up sometime so you want to have that information embedded in all your pictures. This metadata plus the naming of the files makes it pretty easy for an honest client to find me if they want to license my pictures. Does it stop people stealing my stuff? Does anything?

Now my workflow is based around shooting Raw. I only shoot jpeg on my little point-and-shoot, everything that gets shot on my dSLR (whether it be personal or work) gets shot in Raw. I just like to know I have the best quality every time. So that means all my files are in the Canon CR2 format.

Now making changes to Raw files in Adobe is all fine and dandy when you're using Adobe products. Any changes you make to the file in Camera Raw are there to see, but as soon as you take that file out of the Adobe environment you hit a wall because other software can't read the changes you make to your file. Make lots of glorious changes to a file in Bridge and then try and open the file in your Canon software.

While your file might have been adjusted in Camera Raw to increase saturation, contrast, brightness - whatever it is you do - as soon as that file comes out of its nice little Adobe nest the other software just sees the boring Raw file that came out of your camera. So I don't stay with CR2 for long. All I do is make basic changes to my images - enough so that I can show them to a client for them to make a final selection.

But to show them to a client I have to take them out of the CR2 format into....more on that next time and what I use to catalogue my work.

My travel photography workflow

Alrighty, so here I am back in the world of blogging after a week or so of running around like a headless chicken. Firstly let me preface this series of blog entries on my workflow by stressing that word MY.

I love learning new things but once I find a way of doing things that works for me I tend to stick with it until it doesn't suit my needs any more. Or until I see something that absolutely hands down beats the way I'm doing things at the moment. So if it seems a bit out of date - well you should see my wardrobe. :)

Secondly this is a workflow that is going to work better for those of you who don't do a lot of post-processing. I find that I hardly ever open up Photoshop any more. In fact working on the scans for my entry into the Travel Photographer of the Year awards was the first time I've had the programme open in quite a long time.

So here is my (possibly) ancient, straight out of the box (ie camera) workflow. Firstly I try and make sure I have enough CF cards to last me for at least a day's shooting. I carry a portable hard drive with me just in case, but in general terms I prefer to be able to shoot all day and back up at night. So this has meant going from 1GB to 4GB to 8GB and now 16GB cards! I never delete anything directly in the camera but keep absolutely everything so that I can go over it later with a fine tooth comb and make sure I don't throw anything out that I wanted to keep. Even shots you thought were terrible sometimes have their uses later down the track.

When I get back to the office if I've only shot one or two cards (which often happens on commercial shots where setting up takes more time than shooting!) I just upload them straight from the camera. Slow I know but I just let it do its thing while I'm in the shower or catching up with the kids or whatever. I'm a pretty relaxed kind of guy - no need to rush these things. :)

If it's a whole day of documentary travel shooting then there's usually a lot of full cards so I download them all to a portable card reader/ hard drive. I won't mention brands because then I'll be really dated. But I will say that I've had it for about 4 years, it's 80GB, downloads 1GB in about a minute, runs on rechargable AA's and has never let me down (touch wood). It doesn't have a screen but I never was the type to want to look at my pictures during the day. I think that comes from all those years of shooting slide film - sometimes you just know when you've got it and when you haven't.

When I have them in the portable hard drive I use a little script I got from Peter Krogh's site called Import from Camera. It's a bit old now and I believe Peter recommends a programme called Image Ingester. Anyway IFC is a great little script that when I point it to my hard drive will scan it and detect all the image files there.

It will then import them into a folder on my hard drive called "Unprocessed Raws" and I have the choice of keeping the original folder structure (as in separate all the pictures according to CF cards) or I can flatten the structure so they all appear together. I usually choose the latter. I can also rename all the files and add metadata. I can also choose to create a back-up copy of all my images in a different destination at the same time.

Tomorrow I'll talk a little bit about my re-naming structure, the importance of metadata and how I begin to work on my files.

Still alive and photographing!

Hi there everybody,

sorry for being so slack on the blogging front. I've had a couple of big projects on that have taken me away.

Firstly in some pretty exciting news I found out that I'm a finalist in the Homeland portfolio section of this year's Travel Photographer of the Year contest. I've never entered before so wasn't really sure what was involved or if I'd get anywhere but I'm really excited to have made it this far.

Anyway I've been busy organising A4 prints of the entries, which I had to get printed in England because I wouldn't have time to get them done here and then send them over. I then had to upload the entries for possible inclusion in the book of the awards as well as fill out various forms. You can see the finalist images in the Gallery section here.

Last week I also had a commercial shoot which involved a lot of organisation and then post-shoot editing and processing. Seeing as it's something I've been so preoccupied with the last few days I thought I might go over my workflow in the next few posts.

Anway just to let you know that I'm still alive and kicking and will be back to blogging as usual.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

Up over the mountains behind Cairns is an area called the Atherton Tablelands. Some marketing genius has decided it should be called the Cairns Highlands, but I think most people still know it by its original name.

It's a lush area of rolling hills, dairy cattle and one giant tree that takes your breath away. Just outside the tiny town of Yungaburra is the Curtain Fig Tree.

To give you an idea of how big it is I used the time old photographer's trick of putting a person in the frame - in this case me. I put the camera on the tripod and the self-timer and then ran like a madman round to the other side of the tree and hoped I'd make it in time. You can see me as a tiny speck just to the right of the tree, on the boardwalk.

Because the tree is in such deep rainforest, and the top of the tree is so much brighter than the bottom half, you really have to photograph in here before the sun comes up in the morning. A check of the EXIF info tells me that I tripped the shutter at 6.29 am. Considering it's a couple of hours away from my house this means that I got up really early!

But I knew I'd have to get there in the dark to shoot it properly. If you wait until the sun comes up too far the rainforest just gets too contrasty. Anyway seeing as I'm heading back up the Tablelands next week for a commercial shoot I thought it might be timely to post an image from the local area.

Have a great weekend! I'm off to figure out how to programme my new fangled washing machine to start washing the clothes while I'm still fast asleep. Exciting stuff I know. :)

Commercial travel photography

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent the weekend out and about doing some scouting for an upcoming commercial photo shoot. Travel photography comes in two flavours - editorial and commercial. And they can be very different, or they can be pretty much the same thing.

With editorial travel photography the style is very much dependent on the type of publication. Upmarket travel magazines tend to run tight, close-up shots of wine glasses, crumpled bedsheets and salt and pepper shakers. You've all seen those I'm sure.

Other travel magazines tend to run pictures of travellers interacting with locals and enjoying themselves in the location. And yet others will only feature images of local people, scenics and food taken in a more 'general' style for want of a better word.

My photography tends to naturally lean towards the 'general' storytelling style. When I'm out photographing I don't tend to notice the salt and pepper shakers! And I'm usually too busy stuffing the food in my throat to remember to photograph it. :) Which doesn't mean I don't photograph that stuff when the assignment calls for it, but it's not in my general nature to photograph that stuff otherwise. In other words it's not my passion.

When it comes to the commercial side of things that passion translates really well to the world of travel and tourism. I'm big on being as natural as possible. I like to get the models out and about and really doing the stuff that they're supposed to be selling. So if it means me getting out on a kayak (and destroying my mobile phone in the process!) then I'm all for it.

I usually find that local clients tend to want to hire me without seeing any of my work and the first thing I do is send them to my website. Why? Because I'm certainly not the photographer for every job and not every client is for me. It sounds crazy to turn down work if people want to hire you, but in order to follow that passion and stay true to your vision you're often best to pass on some jobs.

When I know that there are other people who would do a better job than me I always recommend them to the client. I would rather do this and have the client be 110% happy with the job then have me do it and not have the images live up to their expectations. I know some photographers like to accept more than they can handle and work like crazy to do a good job but I prefer to work on projects that I know I can knock out of the park.

One of the biggest differences I find between commercial and editorial clients is what they want to show. Commercial clients (particularly those who don't have a lot of experience hiring photographers) want to show everything literally. If they have nice rooms they want to show the whole room exactly how it is.

Editorial clients often want you to take more of an approach of showing what it feels like to visit a place. So you might concentrate and focus in on a small part of a place to give a feeling of the whole, as opposed to showing everything. Editorial often likes to leave a bit to the imagination, whereas commercial often tends to hit you over the head with a big, blunt object telling you that this is exactly what it looks like and what you'll see when you visit.

Which is why I often advise my commercial clients to think a bit laterally and aim for images that tell a story. Give the viewer a feeling. Leave a little bit to the imagination. And in that way my commercial travel photography often looks just like my editorial travel photography. Which fuels my passion and helps me stay true to my artistic vision.

Scouting

I've got a commercial shoot happening next week. Although a lot of my work is editorial assignment and stock photography I find that my style of imagery tends to work well for commercial clients in the travel industry.

Anyway I hate to go into a photo shoot blind, whether it's one for myself or a client, so yesterday I took a 3 hour round trip to check out the site and just work out my bearings.

Scouting is a really good use for those times of the day when the light is no good for photography, or on the days when the weather isn't co-operating. Rather than feeling you have to get out to take a photograph, cut yourself some slack and consider this scouting time. You can leave the camera behind if you like, or if you feel compelled then just take a minimum amount of gear.

When you are scouting there are a few things you want to be looking for. The first thing is direction. I have a compass built into my watch so the very first thing I do is check out which direction East (for sunrise) is and West (for sunset) is. This helps me plan a schedule. There's no point getting up early to photograph a famous building if it faces West.

Another thing you want to look out for is unusual vantage points. Anybody can shoot a scene from tripod height standing in the middle of a tourist lookout. See if you can find somewhere unusual to place your camera - think up high, down low, off to the side. I often look for hills that look down on the scene I want to photograph.

For landscapes you might want to look for the best place to be for an interesting composition, keeping an eye out for leading lines, trees etc that you can use as frames. Resist the temptation to shoot anything during the scouting trip unless the light is fantastic. Remind yourself that you're just here to find a good place to come back to when the light is wonderful.

Especially with landscape photography scouting really helps because often when you're up to photograph sunrise you're wandering around in the dark. If you've been there during the day you'll have a much better idea of where you want to be and won't have to stumble around in the pitch black wondering if you're in a good spot or not.

Anyway the scouting trip was really useful. I was able to work out that there's no point getting my models out there early because everything faces west so they'd all be backlit in the morning. There's also a lot of reflections inside the buildings so I'm going to need to bring some black cloth to darken everything. And I managed to work out a time line to keep everything going smoothly during the day.

Oh and the shot at the top is an example of the result of scouting. The canal in Otaru is one of the city's most famous sites. I had been there at high noon to take a look and just see where might be a nice place to take a shot from. The blue time of day is over very quickly, sometimes you only get 10 or so minutes, so I knew I needed to be in exactly the right place before the beautiful light appeared. Scouting gave me the reassurance that I could walk straight to a good position and just wait for the light to do its thing.

So if you're ever wondering what to do when the light is no good for photography, go and scout some good places to put yourself when the light will be fantastic.

Fantastic FNQ photo Friday

One of the things I love about travel photography is the fact that it lets me get out into pristine areas of wilderness all by myself. Photography's a pretty solo pursuit a lot of the time and being out in nature by myself in the peace and quiet is something I really enjoy.

A lot of people know that Cairns is on the doorstep of the World Heritage Listed Daintree National Park, but what many people might not realise is that there's a lot of beautiful rainforest within a few minutes of the centre of the city.

One of my favourite little places to get away from it all is a section of rainforest called Crystal Cascades. About half an hour out of the centre of town by car and you're a world away.

The main river just inside the entrance is where everybody goes to swim, picnic and generally lay about and enjoy the atmosphere. But if you do the full walk all the way to the end you'll find a gorgeous waterfall.

And if you don't get that far, about half way along on the left hand side there's a gorgeous little rainforest stream. You'll have to scramble up some boulders to get the best view but it's only a couple of feet off the sealed walking path.

For rainforest shots I always have my polarising filter on. It cuts down the glare from the wet, tropical leaves and brings out the vivid green in them. I also make sure I have my tripod because it's pretty dark in there. Closing down to f16 for a large depth of field gave me a shutter speed of 2 seconds at ISO 100. No point trying to hand hold that!

It's best to get there early in the morning before the sun comes up and makes it too contrasty, or aim for a day when there's a lot of cloud cover. It's a beautiful place and definitely worth a visit if you get the chance. And no I didn't put the leaves there. :)