Exercise: Your own workflow 1

Outline: Devise and then put into practice a workflow that personally suits you for a portrait session that is limited in time. Make notes of your experience.






When I first read about devising my own shoot, I already had an idea in mind. I have always wanted to do a portrait shoot in front of a graffiti wall, I have no idea why. So I took this opportunity to actually put that into practice. As this exercise is only to create the workflow and to explain and make notes on how effective it was when actually undertaking the shoot, I will use the photos from this shoot in another exercise is this course.

There is a 'gallery' of graffitti at our local recreation centre and wanted to use this is my location. A friend stepped in as my model.
Ahead of time I am already aware that this will be a time limited shoot. I have an idea in my head of the type of images I would like to capture and this exercise, although time limited, will have a set amount of photographs doing the poses that I have already decided. On the spot development will help me to  determine when sufficient shots have been taken by reviewing images on the camera at the session. As I have visualized the shots I would like, the session will end when I feel these have been captured.


Workflow:

• Prepare camera and equipment - ensure that the memory card has sufficient space and that the camera battery is full. Also, gather other equipment to take to the location, such as a tripod, flash gun and a selection of lenses.
• Arrive at location and judge lighting conditions etc. Adjust camera settings accordingly.
• Time limited shoot - use on the spot development to get the right 'look' by reviewing images on the camera screen.
• Upload images from camera to 'elements organizer'.
• Technical check to delete any images with immediate faults.
• Select images for processing.
• Process final selected image(s).
• Label/rename images.
• Save to external hard drive.
• Print final image(s).

Conclusion:

This exercise was really good. I enjoyed putting the workflow together beforehand and seeing how the workflow actually fit in with the process on shoot day. I think my workflow was pretty spot on to the actual physical exercise. I decided on the day to shoot against two different backdrops which I hadn't really accounted for at the time of producing the workflow but I found the second backdrop looked better in the shots, as noticed during on the spot development.

The exercise did open my eyes as to what you actually do pre and post shoot though. Even though it's pretty much the norm that the above points are undertaken when shooting any type of photographs, however you don't really acknowledge each individual step until you write it all out like this. I was very happy that my workflow was pretty accurate and that I didn't seem to stray from it, with the exception of changing the immediate backdrop halfway through.