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My Workflow: Ed Pierce
Workflow for Wedding Photographers
Like many in the profession, wedding photographers have a unique workflow. A wedding photographer may have 30-40 clients a year and take up to 5,000 photos over a 12-hour period for any particular job. Good workflow practices combined with the right technology enables you to spend more time with your camera and clients. To learn more about both, iView spoke with Ed Pierce, well-known workflow and photography technology instructor.
Technology is supposed to save you time and a good digital asset management program will save you time. But, with all technology, it helps to know a few tricks of the trade. Here are the best practices Pierce has used and learned from his work with some of the nation’s top wedding photographers.
- Synchronize camera time stamp:
At the wedding, most photographers shoot with multiple cameras and an assistant. To make it easy to sort your images in chronological order after the wedding, synchronize all the cameras to the identical time stamp. It’s a fairly simple procedure, but one you will regret not doing.
- Backup original photo files:
When you return to the office, you face the task of sorting the images. Going through 300 images is one thing, but sorting through 3,000 to 5,000 images is another task altogether. At this point many photographers backup their images. I use a RAID 1 setup, so I download the images directly to the mirrored RAID drives and I don’t backup until I sort through and delete my first round of rejects. (NOTE: I realize for many photographers this is heresy, but I encourage you to look into a mirrored RAID storage solution.)
- Create a catalog of photographs:
Next, I import my images into an iView MediaPro catalog. I select all the files and under the View menu, chose Sort, and I sort by (EXIF) Capture Date.This quickly puts all the image files in chronological order. This allows me to quickly identify my selects: favorites, maybes and rejects. MediaPro lets me look at thumbnails and full screen proxies of the Raw or .JPEG files, so the process goes very quickly. I have the option of looking at original media files, but at this point, I am simply culling out the obvious bad shots. It doesn’t take long to identify the rejects.
My goal during this process is to cut the body of images down to a reasonable number to work with. My favorite method for doing this is using the Slide Show function. However you can view, classify and label your images in virtually any viewing mode including Thumbnail View, Media View, Light Table, or my choice Slide Show function. If I want to look closer at a photo or zoom in on the image, the original file is one click away. But, viewing the proxy images is a much faster process.
- Batch rename and apply metadata:
Once I have gone through the first pass, I begin to assign metadata such as copyright, client name and location. That’s easily accomplished by selecting all the images and in the Infopane under Annotations typing in the information once and it’s automatically applied to all the images. Next, under the Actions menu, I Batch Rename all of the files with the client name, date and re-number them chronologically.
- Backup to DVD: After this has been done, I backup the files onto Delkin Archival Gold DVDs. At this point I have three copies of the images: I have copies on two WiebeTech removable hard drives (the RAID 1 solution) and a copy on DVD. I only use my computer hard drive for applications.
- Catalog storage and setup:
I also have a secondary hard drive for my computer with two partitions - one as a scratch drive and the other as an iView catalog drive. On this second drive I save my primary iView MediaPro catalog and I also store a backup with the original media files (on the RAID system). I always work from the primary catalog but upon saving, I do a ‘Save As” and find the path to my backup catalog at which point MediaPro asks me if I want to replace (overwrite) the catalog and I click ‘Replace’. This way both catalogs are always updated.
My primary catalog contains full screen previews and these proxies allow me to work with the catalog even if my original media files are offline. Being able access the proxy image at any time is also a great client service feature. I can set up my catalogs so that I can search for the client alphabetically and while the images may be stored offline, the catalog shows the path. So I just pull the hard drive off the shelf, plug it in and the MediaPro catalog looks for the file when the drive comes online.
- Review and edit files:
When editing files, I prefer to view proxies. With MediaPro, you can build very large proxies, to create the highest quality full screen preview. This (as opposed to looking at original media files) enables MediaPro to run really fast.
Once I have gone through the initial editing and deleted all the obvious rejects, I begin editing down to the images that I will show my client. At this point I may have 1,500 photos to work with. MediaPro has two features that make this process easier and quicker. I begin in Slide Show mode and then drop into the Light Table feature to compare images of a similar nature. It’s very easy to navigate between the two of them. Light Table is very helpful because it allows you to view up to six images at once – and you can zoom all the images at the same time. Also, I can see any image in full frame. MediaPro is extremely elegant in terms of fast sorting and the speed of looking at your image files.
- Modify images with a Helper Application:
I use MediaPro to sort, organize and track. If I want to modify my images, I use Adobe Photoshop. MediaPro is easy to use with Photoshop and a number of other applications. For example, many times wedding photographers want to make some of their images black and white or sepia. With MediaPro, I simply open the catalog, highlight the images and then use the Open With command (Action menu) launch them into Photoshop and run an action. You can also turn a Photoshop action into a droplet and access it directly from your MediaPro catalog using the Open With command. If you turn on the Folder Watching function in MediaPro, the catalog will recognize that an image has been changed and updates the files in the catalog.
- Present images to client:
Now that you’ve edited and sorted the images you want your client to see, how do you best present the images? I like to go through the images personally with my clients, I believe it leads to better sales. You can use MediaPro’s Slide Show feature and sit with your client and help them make their decisions. You can move from the Slide Show to the Light Table for quick comparisons. For weddings, I suggest showing no more than 400 – 500 photos.
This process enables you to modify the image rating from any view. This makes it easy for building an album and it makes it easy to show the client what they have chosen. You can also have the client work with iView MediaPro directly. They can download the trial version from the Web site and have them make the choices from the catalog.
Or you can have them use the free Catalog Reader program, if they simply want to view images. If you are going to use either of these choices, I suggest you modify the proxy thumbnails with a watermark to prevent them from being exported and printed and obviously you would never want to include the original image files. Other great presentation options are to create a Web gallery or to create a QuickTime movie from the Slide Show.
Good workflow practice is all about time, organization and presentation to your clients. Using the right tools with the right processes will give you more time with your camera, not more time with your computer.
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