Photogrpahy Process Flow
Saturday, August 8th, 2009 | Photography
I have been a fan of photography for a long time. My first SLR was Canon AE-1 Programming. See Wikipedia for more information on Canon AE-1. Although I had a lot of fun taking photos with the SLRs, the time required to develop photos as well as the cost of developing discouraged me to continually use my AE-1. At that point an alternative might have been purchasing a Digital SLR, but DSLRs were just introduced and very expensive. For this reason, I opted out for a compact digital camera.
Still, I had an itch to get my hands on a DSLR. After two weeks of investigation I purchased a Nikon D90 kit based on the reviews on several websites. Although I was first concerned with the extensive list of settings that are available in the camera, the manual as well as ‘Digital Field Guide – Nikon D90’ written by Dennis Thomas made the transition from a point and shot camera to a DSLR smooth.
Next, I am going to describe my workflow as well as software that I use in the process:
- Downloading: I generally shoot in NEF which is the Nikon version of RAW image format and use Nikon Transfer to download them. Although there are several other tools that can be used, Nikon Transfer is one of the most flexible tools in the market. Key features that I frequently use can be listed as:
- Embedding metadata such as keywords, copyright information, etc.,
- Choosing primary destination, backup destination as well as online upload to Nikon website,
- Grouping thumbnails to make selection easier.
- Sorting: After downloading the pictures, I group them into three sets. I assign the pictures that I like most to the first set further process in Capture NX2. I will go into details in other post. These are stored in NEF format as well as in a smaller JPEG format for quick publishing or distribution. Second set generally consists of average photos that I would like to keep. No processing is done on this set and directly stored in JPEG format. Last set of photos are discarded without storing.
- Storing: All the files are stored under folders that correspond to the city and year photos are taken. Every week or month the photos are backed up to a DVD.