Exercise: Your own workflow 2

Outline: As before, devise a workflow for a specific shooting assignment however this time the shoot will be unlimited and unstructured. Make notes afterwards.






So this exercise has the same approach as the previous one, except for the fact that this shoot is not to be timed in anyway. There is no official 'backdrop' or model and the final image cannot be be foreseen. Whether shooting a holiday or a music festival, it's the memories, place or performance that you will be trying to capture and obviously you have no timescale of when during that 'event' that moment will be.



Workflow:

• Prepare equipment - ensure battery is full and memory card has sufficient space.
• Shooting - as and when the situation arises. Camera settings are adjusted at the time of shooting each individual photograph. There is an open-ended time scale for shooting depending on how long the 'event' takes place. Photos are taken to document a moment, place or person as opposed to a set time scale with a specific visual outcome.
• On the spot development and technical checks to delete obvious mistakes
• Number of photographs is continuous.
• Upload images to hardware.
• 'Official' technical check.
• Select images for processing.
• Processing.
• Label and rename.
• Save to external hard drive.
• Print final image(s).

Conclusion:

This exercise was definitely different from the previous one. I found that even though I initially thought there wouldn't be a specific visual outcome, which overall there is not, I had certain visual outcomes depending on what I was shooting and so I took a variety of the same image to try to capture that outcome. For example, if an artist was performing and constantly moving, I took quite a few photos in the hope that one would come out exactly as I imagined.  The volume of photographs taken was almost three times that of the timed shoot. There was a lot more work on the selection process due to the high volume of images and I found it really difficult to narrow down to my final selection. I felt that I needed to show the 'best bits' of the festival but there were so many best bits I still had a handful of images that I wanted to use. I found that I didn't actually use much on the spot development as I had initially thought I would've. This meant that the volume of 'mistakes' during the technical check was larger than I had expected. Other than that, the workflow was pretty much accurate.