Photography Workflow

I just had someone ask me through my Flickr account about my photography workflow and sales experience, and I figured I might as well put my response up here for…um…posterity? Ego-stroking? ;)

I’ve not yet started to actually try to shoot for a living (though it’s a nice dream), as school and work take up enough time that I can’t devote myself to my hobby. Still, for what it’s worth, here’s what I can tell you….

What is your photography work flow?

These days, I shoot pretty much everything RAW. I haven’t had the money to upgrade to Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom yet, so I use iPhoto for organization and sorting, Adobe Photoshop for RAW conversion and touchups, and then the Flickr Export plugin for iPhoto to upload everything to Flickr.

The basic process is this:

  1. Shoot (lots!) in RAW (with my camera set to the Adobe RGB color space).
  2. Import into iPhoto.
  3. Name and tag everything (I’m using Bullstorm’s Keyword Manager to help with tag organization and editing, as iPhoto’s built-in keyword management is one of the least useful aspects of an otherwise excellent program).
  4. Do a first run through the shots, tossing what’s probably worth uploading into an album.
  5. Do a second run through the shots. Most of this run is converting the RAW files and doing any touch-ups (which I keep to a minimum, generally little more than exposure and white balance tweaking, occasional cropping, sharpening, and setting the color space to sRGB), but I’ll also make some last decisions on which photos will or won’t be uploaded.
  6. Upload to Flickr, assigning shots to sets or sending to one group during upload. Later set management or submitting photos to more groups is done online through Flickr when I get around to it.
  7. Do a third cull through the shots, selecting the best of the bunch to be printed out.

[Where] or how do you market or promote your work?

I’ve never really actively done much promotion other than uploading things to Flickr and then telling people about it. When I can, I’ll let people involved in an event know about any event photos I’ve taken (sometimes by e-mail, other times through making posts in online communities focusing on an event or artist), or if I can identify and contact the subjects of shots, I’ll try to let them know directly. Other than that, I don’t do a whole lot.

Have you had any success with online promotion or selling your work through a website, if so which ones are you using?

Nothing major here, really. I’ve experimented with some of the services that have popped up online for helping people sell their work, but as I’ve never really taken the time to actively pursue anything, I can’t really report any great sucesses (or failures, really — I may not be selling much, but I don’t see that as failure when I’m not really trying to sell anything).

What few shots I have sold or had used elsewhere have happened more or less through blind luck — people stumbling on a shot through photo searches, deciding I had something that would work for a project, and asking permission to use it.

I have started getting a few people asking me to shoot events, but it’s not something I’ve started charging for yet (while it’s very flattering to have someone ask, I’m not entirely convinced I’m “pro” enough to ask for money…though I’m certainly not going to refuse if any is offered, either!). Right now, I pretty much just chalk it up to learning experiences, with possibilities for future benefit.

And if you can think of any other ideas for a photographer that is ready to start selling his work full time (my goal). I would greatly appreciate it.

Nothing much comes to mind, mostly because I’m not quite heading that direction yet. Good luck on your quest, though!

Photo Drop

Photo Drop

Photo Drop is a slick little Dashboard widget — actually, one of the first that was slick and potentially useful enough for me to download and toss in to my Dashboard, which isn’t exactly the most-used OS X feature on my system. It’s a nice, simple one-trick pony: drag a photo to Photo Drop, set a few quick options for the final look (size, effects, etc.), and you’re done. Plus, it’s free. Not bad!

ImageKind

I’m exploring ImageKind, which gives Flickr members (and others) a convenient way to sell prints of their artwork. It looks interesting so far, though I’ve just spent a few minutes poking around while I’m in between classes.

I’ve set a few photos available to sell — take a look, see what you think. If there’s any particular shots of mine that you’d like to be able to buy (or that you just think should be in there), let me know and I’ll get them added.

We’ll see how this goes….

Flickr: User Interface Overload



User Interface Overload, originally uploaded by djwudi.

On the one hand, I really like the new collections organization structure that Flickr just added. It’s not perfect, but it’s nice to have more control over organizing my photos.

However, the interface is getting…well, cluttered is about the nicest way to put it. By the time I’m looking at one of my sets, I’ve got no less than five different sets of toolbar/breadcrumb buttons above the pictures!

  • Line 1 (constant): The global account options.

  • Line 2 (constant): The main navigation menu bar, where every option (save ‘Home’ and the search field) is a drop-down menu with more options.

  • Line 3 (appears when navigating within collections): The ‘breadcrumb’ trail leading from the user’s main page to the individual set.

  • Line 4 (appears when viewing your own set, not visible for other people): Set-level editing options. 3/5 of the items are dropdown menus.

  • Line 5 (constant): Set-level view options, available to everyone looking at the set.

It’s getting to the point where it’s UI overload — which is doubly grating on a site that’s normally incredibly well-designed and remarkably intuitive to navigate through. By the time all five toolbars appear, not only does it push the photos (which, I believe, are supposed to be the focus of the site) pretty far down the page, but I’m starting to lose track of which options are hidden in which set of menus or links!

Additionally, while the breadcrumb navigation (Line 3) is a necessary addition now that Collections allow you to organize your sets and collections up to five levels deep, it feels kind of abandoned — just shoehorned in somewhere — and quite possibly easily missed. Since that breadcrumb line is the only indication that a set is part of a collection and might have other, related sets ‘nearby,’ it seems that it should be better and more obviously integrated into the overall design. Perhaps somewhere around the set title and Line 5? Over the title, or either under or integrated with Line 5?

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what the best solution might be. This just strikes me as an area where there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Entropy and Breakthrough

I’ve submitted two photos to JPG Magazine for possible inclusion in their next issue, one each for their themes of Entropy and Breakthrough. If you’re a JPG member, click through and toss a vote my way!

Okay…

Um…

Well, the fancy little Javascript boxes are fighting with the CSS in my WordPress theme. This post is just going to look goofy, at best.

That’s also why I’ve got a bunch of silly extra lines put in here to open space up.

Whee!

If you can’t even see the fancy little Javascript boxes (which might be the case on LiveJournal), try just clicking here and here

Aperture

Consider this firmly on my wishlist come Christmastime: not only has Apple just upgraded Aperture to version 1.5, but Frasier Spiers has announced the first beta of an Aperture version of his excellent FlickrExport plugin (I consider the iPhoto version of FlickrExport an unconditional must-have for iPhoto/Flickr integration, along with Ken Ferry’s Keyword Assistant).

Even better, the educational pricing for Aperture is just $150 — half off the standard retail of $299.

It’s not a critical need, but it’s definitely a wishlist item. So pretty…

iTunesNebulus” by Fluke from the album Puppy (2004, 5:57).

Photofront

There’s plenty of toys floating around the ‘net that integrate with Flickr in various ways, but this morning I just found a really nice way to create a very slick gallery style presentation: Photofront. A few clicks create a simple Flash-based photo presentation that can either be hosted on the Photofront site or embedded into your own site as I’ve done. Nicely done!

Photofront Flickr Gallery

iTunesThere’s No Business Like Show Business” by Merman, Ethel from the album Songs and Music from the Diamond Collection (2002, 2:32).

Nikon D80 Revealed

Just a few months after getting my D70s, Nikon’s wrapped up their 20-day teaser campaign by introducing the Nikon D80. Overall, it looks really good — the only thing I see that doesn’t really excite me is that the D80 uses SD rather than Compact Flash (which was one of the reasons I chose the CF-based D70s rather than the SD-based D50), but it makes sense given SD’s dominance of the small camera market.

Brief specs on the D80 (vs D70s):

  • 10 megapixel (6 mp)
  • 3 frames per second, 23 continuous shots (3 FPS, 12 continuous)
  • SD (CF)
  • 11 area AF system (5 area)
  • ISO 100-1600 (200-1600)
  • Upgraded commander mode on the built-in flash
  • Larger, brighter, D200-style viewfinder
  • 2.5″, 230k pixel LCD (2.0″, 130k pixel LCD)
  • EN-EL3e battery (EN-EL3a)
  • MB-D80 battery/portrait grip
  • In-camera retouching (D-lighting, cropping, redeye fix, color).

Looks really, really nice. Given the switch to SD, when it comes time for me to upgrade in a few years I’ll likely be looking at the D200 (or whatever the current camera at that point in Nikon’s lineup is at the time) so I can stick with the CF cards I have now, but the D80 will definitely be fun to play with when it shows up at work. Theoretically, the D80 should be available for sale in September…we’ll see how quickly Nikon can actually get these on to the shelves (the D200, announced in Nov. 2005, has just started showing up regularly on store shelves).

More detailed looks at the D80 are at DP Review, Rob Galbraith DPI and Let’s Go Digital.

Also announced were the AF-S DX 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED (the kit lens for the D80) and the AF-S VR 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF-ED.

iTunesMANYMEN ARE ZOMBIES” by Jadmix from the album jadmix@gmail.com (5:15).