Discussion: Workflow - What to do with 1400 pictures from one parade.

Sorting through all the parade photos has really made me look at my workflow.  I mean, I took 1400 photos during the three hours of the parade.  I'm pretty sure no one wants to see all 1400 of them.  And even once I bring it down to something that approaches a manageable number, I'd have to break them into groups for posting.

Some I knew were crap when I took them.  Others I knew were 'markers' of sorts for me.  Pictures of the signs and things so that I could reference groups by names later.  But they weren't pictures that I needed to worry about cropping and editing to show anyone.

So the first pass in my particular workflow, is on my iPad.  Once I take a card full of pictures, I put all the shots on my iPad and delete the ones that are absolutely garbage.  After I'm down to the shots that bear a good look, I move them onto my computer.

Once I'd done all that, I was down from 1400 to a little over 1000.  So the good news is, my shooting is getting better.  There was a time where 'getting rid of the total garbage' meant throwing out at *least* half of my shots.  This wasn't quite a third.

Then I started sorting them out by topic.  I tend not to like to blog an event simply chronologically.  If people wanted to see the parade in order, they could, you know, go to the parade.

So I broke the 1000 pictures down into 16 folders.  While I was sorting them out I was trying to winnow down the shots actually worth sharing, so I also had another folder of 'unsorted' shots, that were either the marker shots or duplicates or 'I thought this would be a good shot to share, but maybe not in comparison to a million other things.'

That folder was a little over 600 shots.  So Now I'm at 400 that are reasonably useful in 16 folders.

But some of the folders like, "Outfits or the lack thereof" still end up with about 110 photos.  I mean, this is Chicago's Gay Pride Parade.  It's *all* about what people are (or aren't) wearing!   Which means breaking them down into even further folders.  In this case there were six, with anywhere from 5 to 30 shots on a given theme.

Which means some of those folders of 30 will either need to be broken down into multiple posts or just plain thinned out.

Which all just goes to show that any given event can contain a really ridiculous amount of work before you even get to the cropping, correcting and posting part!

So what does your workflow look like?  How do you manage the ridiculous number of pictures we can now take for 'free' (compared to the days of film and developing on paper)?  When you have 1000 pictures (literally), how do you manage, store and share them all?

Okay, tomorrow... more actual pictures of outfits or the lack thereof.

I Think I've Photographed Everything That Moves in Chicago

So, I've been away for a bit.  I haven't left home, but my internet time got a little derailed by a few things.  Most notably I had a houseguest for the past 8 days.  She wanted to see Chicago.  Since I see Chicago through the lens of a camera, I took her to my favorite shooting grounds.  In a week we covered The South Pond, Lincoln Park Zoo, The Shedd Aquarium, The Field Museum, The North Pond, The Chicago Botanical Gardens and the Magic Hedge.  And right before that I went with a group to shoot "The Bean" and Buckingham Fountain downtown and went out to Willowbrook to retrieve the tripod I left out there.

I have roughly a million photos to deal with now.

Doing all this shooting in such a short time has made me think about a lot of things.  Chiefly about my workflow.  If you're unfamiliar with the term, workflow in photography is the system a photographer uses to get their pictures off the camera and in whatever final form they want them in.  In my case I want them ready to publish on this blog.  Other people want to get them printed or produced in books.  Whatever your final form is, the beautiful thing about digital photography is that you can take your raw image (not RAW image - I'm not talking about file format here) and edit it yourself and make the most of what your camera captured.  But after a few hours out with your digital camera you come home and find that you've literally taken 300+ images and... well, NOW what?

In my own workflow I tend to have one less-than-stellar habit.  I race home from any given shoot, move my shots to my harddrive and then go through and sort out the ones I want to at least look in in my editing program from the absolute garbage.

Unfortunately, sometimes I come to a screeching halt right there.  I have tons of shots I know are pretty good, but haven't been edited because I have the attention span of a damselfly. 

Ideally, my workflow would be something like this:

1.) Move the photos to the harddrive.
2.) Sort and label shots with some redeeming value from what I can see in the 'preview' function in the finder.
3.) Sort the decent shots into preliminary groups based on how I want to group them for posts here.
4.) Edit in batches.  Crop and correct color/lighting in each photo in a given group all at once.  This is where I should probably start reducing the number of 'useful' shots pretty judiciously. 
5.) Save both large versions and small (blog-sized) versions of edited shots.
6.) Blog each set once it's been edited.
7.) Back up photos onto a DVD.  I've lost all my shots from 2009 from a dropped external harddrive.  I really should be better about backing up the 1/2T of shots I have on the current external than I am.


I'm curious to know how other photographers handle large numbers of shots.  Back when I was a kid and shooting on film, we didn't have workflow. Not like this.  You took the 24 or 36 shots and then shipped the canister off the the drug store for developing.  If you had your own darkroom, like I did, you may have waited until you had a few rolls to develop so you didn't waste unstable chemicals, but even so, you weren't working with the extreme numbers of shots you can end up with after a week of digital shooting.

So the next oh... many posts will be my shots of spring *finally* deciding to come to Chicago.