In the next installment of my DP Tips, I thought it would be useful to give all the “newbies” out there a brief run down on the role of software and the importance of establishing a digital workflow.
Software – Use It Or Lose It:
Regardless of your skill level or experience, everyone needs to have an idea about the software that is available and what it can do for you. My recommendation for people starting to think seriously about digital photography for the first time would be to research and begin experimenting with some of the more prevalent and free software management tools out there. For most of us, Google’s Picasa or Microsoft’s Live Photo Gallery will give us all the features that we would ever need to: import, coordinate, manage and edit our photo collections. Many family and friends that I talk to (who have digital cameras) admit to taking pictures but then leaving the pictures pile up on the memory card until they are either forced to erase them or until they have saved up enough cash to buy a new card. This is a recipe for disaster. Get those pictures off your camera and loaded into a photo management tool on your home computer. Picasa and Live Photo Gallery provide basic photo management, photo backup, editing and tagging capabilities. Regardless of which tool you may choose to use, take my advice and spend a few hours researching the basic functions and features that each tool offers. This is the first step in understanding and establishing a digital workflow.
Digital Photography Workflows – No 2 Are The Same:
Once you have gained some familiarity with what a piece of software can do, you’ll want to start using some of its features by importing some or all of your photos into the application. Workflow is defined as ” … the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion.” In our case the piece of work is the importation, management, editing and output of your digital photographs. A digital photography workflow could be as simple as the steps you take to get the pictures off your camera and then backing up those photos to an external hard drive. It could also be much more complicated – a documented series of steps to: crop, color-correct, tag, print and publish your photos to an online photo sharing service like Flickr or FaceBook. The bottom line here is that the tool you use to manage your photos will go a long way in defining your digital workflow. There are plenty of websites that attempt to recommend a specific workflow to follow. Although I am always curious to see what others may be doing, I think it just as important to adopt a workflow and then stick to it for a while. Workflows evolve and are made more efficient as you use them over a longer period of time. I may tweak my workflow here or there a little bit, but for the most part – my current workflow is the same that it was almost 2 years ago!
Improving your Photography – One Deletion @ a Time:
After importing and possibly backing up your photographs, the most important step (IMHO) in a digital photography workflow is what I like to call “purge and burn”. Let’s face it, the great advantage of digital photography is that you’re not paying for development and therefore you should not be hesitant to take hundreds of photos during the course of a given day. However, after you’ve taken those 350+ photos at the baseball game who (other than yourself) is going to want to look at all of those photos? After the blurry photos, the dark photos, the repeats and the poorly composed photos you might just be left with 35% of what you took that you would actually be proud to show your family. Don’t save a photo unless you are really proud of it. The more photos you take the more open you’ll be to “purge and burn”. At the end of the day, everyone (including yourself) who looks at your photos will think you a much better photographer if they are looking at quality as compared to quantity. For a frame of reference: at this point in my photographic “evolution”, I am keeping only 20-25% of what I shoot on any given day.
Cropping Your Photos – The Easy Way to Fix A Keeper:
Sometimes, you recognize that a photo doesn’t work, but you are hesitant to “purge and burn” it. The solution to this dilemma is to re-compose the photo by cropping it. It seems so simple, but many casual photographers never think to take the 15-20 seconds in their software to make a mundane but treasured picture more interesting. I normally like to crop a photo into a different orientation and size just to make it stand-out from the rest that are in the bunch. Most of today’s digital cameras will allow you to crop as little as 35-50% of the original photo into a new version which loses little of its original clarity and sharpness. If you’re ultimately printing to 4×6 or 5×7 paper – cropping your photos in this way will not take away much from the final printed result.
Online Photo Services – The “New” Printed Album:
Let’s face it, the days of printing your photos and putting them into physical albums are long gone. Too are the days of keeping track of all the envelopes you get back from the photo processing lab. No matter how simple or complicated your digital workflow is, your final step should always be to publish your photos online via one of the literally dozens of online photo sharing services. I don’t want to get into a review of the features of the various services, but the bottom line is that it should offer an easy and intuitive way to get your photos “into the hands” of your friends and loved ones instantly. Some of the more popular services include: ShutterFly, SnapFish, Kodak, Mobile Me, & Flickr. Adobe and Microsoft also offer online versions of their popular tools to help manage and distribute your digital photos regardless of where in the world you may be sitting. Even the most popular social networking sites (FaceBook & MySpace) offers basic functionality for storing and sharing photos. Personally – my workflow includes using Flickr, Mobile Me and FaceBook to post and share photos.
Final Thoughts – What About Paid Software?
You may (or may not) have noticed that I had yet to mention any of the most popular paid software options. Whether it be (Apple’s) iPhoto or the more advanced Aperture, (or Adobe’s) PhotoShop Elements, Lightroom or PhotoShop (the grand-daddy of them all), each of these products is a little different and is targeted to a slightly different type of digital workflow. Over time, I’ll talk more about these as part of some advanced articles. However, unless you have already purchased one of these products, I think much can be learned initially from using one of the free products that I mentioned earlier. In the end, it really doesn’t matter what software you make part of your digital workflow. What matters is that you realize the importance of adopting a workflow that allows you to get the most out of the photos that you and your digital camera have created. Embrace the reality that although the taking of the picture is the most creative aspect of this hobby, the “stuff” we do with the pictures once they get off our cameras is what will keep the photos alive and relevant for years to come. I’ll be writing additional articles down the road which will dive deeper into many of the steps that appear regularly in advanced workflows, but for now – go out and start learning a new piece of software.
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