Work Flow

Sometimes the best and brightest programs get in the way of work flow. Especially with sub-par computers. No matter how great Aperture or Lightroom or Bridge were, they simply didn't run well on my first(low powered) Mac. And lets face it we've all been there. Or will be.

I instead relied on programs that weren't as full featured like Picasa and DIM. Not the best but my computer could run them and I could  get my pictures moving. Because that's the point. Get the pics from the camera to the computer to organized folders to the editing software to print or publishing.

I liked Photoshop(And still do.) but before that I used GIMP or GIMPshop, because the price was right. Sure it wasn't as smooth. Or powerful. But I'd rather have something than nothing. And when you shoot 500+ a day you can get buried fast.

Speaking of large quantities of data. Storage. Backups. Ugh. With today's cheap drives its an easier thing to do. But I made(And still have) stacks of DVD's several feet high. Honestly I'm not enthralled with the basic external hard drive for a backup either. I have a NAS that is setup with RAID 1 which is when drives are mirrored, so if one fails then the other takes over. I'll give a review on its setup at some point. But always backup. Redundancy is your friend. If the media made the cut, and found its way into your archive than you should back it up.

So Take the picture.(Use a Canon Camera with L series lens for best results). Pull picture from camera(I use Lightroom and store according to date -Names can get very hard to go through). Begin rating. (I used to save everything., now I'm more picky and handy with the delete key). Do light editing on keepers. Fire up Photoshop for any final editing. FTP, Email, or DVD the resulting images to client or print. And initialize backups.

Easy money. Just don't ask me about video. Because your workflow just got slower :)