My Photo Mechanic Workflow

Screen Shot 2013-11-14 at 10.10.06 PMOver the past three blog posts, I shared why I use Photo Mechanic. So I thought it might be helpful to share how I actually use Photo Mechanic in my workflow.

First, I take the time well before each shoot to do some prep work. I create the rosters for each team in TextEdit. Any text editor will work. The creation of this roster file is easy. I give it a header say: //Pleasant Valley Football Roster 2013  Then I create the shortcuts starting with the team name. The format is the shortcut first, a tab, and then the full name. So it looks like this:
pv     Pleasant Valley
p1     Player Name1
p2     Player Name2 …etc.

I save this text file, open Photo Mechanic, go to the menu and select: Edit, Settings, and Set Code Replacements. This brings up a dialog box and all I have to to do is add the new shortcut file I made in TextEdit. I do this for both teams and have my shortcuts ready to go!

The second prep item is to setup the ingest and IPTC information including folder name and filename. I actually use a short folder and filename such as FB131115, which stands for Football and the date of the game with the year, month, and day. Then I add a custom suffix that includes the time each photo was captured. It looks like this: {iptchour24}-{iptcminute}-{iptcsecond} The reason I do this is because I use two cameras during a game. One is on a monopod attached to my 200-400mm lens and the other is over my shoulder with an R-Strap attached to my 70-200mm lens. When I ingest the photos into Photo Mechanic, they are sorted by filename and placed in the exact order I captured them according to the timestamp.

After the shoot, I place my two flash cards in card readers and have Photo Mechanic ingest them simultaneously. This is another nice feature of Photo Mechanic! Even as the photos are ingesting, I can start looking through the photos to find the best ones to send to my editor. To do this, I use the color coding feature. Unfortunately, Adobe Lightroom does not recognize the selected checkmarks from Photo Mechanic, but it does recognize the color codes! You can choose any colors you want. I use Green for my selects, Blue for photos to send to the editor, and purple for photos that will be sent for a photo gallery. I first go through all the photos in the preview mode and press 3 for the select photos, marking them green. I have the preferences set up so that when I do press 3, the preview mode automatically advances to the next photo. Otherwise, I just press the right arrow. I advance through the entire shoot in this way.

Then, I select only the selects by pressing Option(Alt) and clicking on the green color tab in the lower right corner of the screen of the Contact Sheet in Photo Mechanic. This displays only the photos I marked with the green label. Now, I go through them again, pressing 4 for the very best ones I want to send to my editor for possible publication. This marks them with a blue color. Then I go through each one of these to create captions for each one. This is where Photo Mechanic really shines!

Writing the caption is easy. I first click on the Info button in the Contact Sheet to bring up the photo’s IPTC info dialog box. Then, in the caption box, I start writing my caption. Let’s say that Pleasant Valley’s running back, #28, whose name I may not even know, is the main subject of a photo running into daylight through a hole made by the offensive line. I simply press p28 and his name appears in the caption box! Voila! Isn’t that awesome! This is really handy and a time-saving process for me. There are times when I can’t quite see the player’s full number, so I may have to go back through the series of photos captured at this time to make sure I have the correct number. But this one feature makes Photo Mechanic my goto software for what I do on every sports shoot!

Once all the captions are written, I need to submit them to my editor either via DropBox or FTP. I select the photos to send and then right click and choose Save Selected Photos As. This allows me to save the photos in the size and resolution of my preference. Once they are saved, I send them to my editor and I am almost done.

I then go back to the select (green) photos and select the ones I want to submit for an online gallery at the newspaper by pressing 5 and marking them as purple. I give them a more general caption such as, Pocono Mountain West v. Pleasant Valley November 15, 2013. Then I save them and send them to my editor.

When I get home, I import all the photos into Lightroom. The color codes are maintained, so I flag all these photos and then create Collections for the selects and the photo gallery. I also create a Collection for any photos that were published.

This is my current workflow with Photo Mechanic and Lightroom. It works really well for me solo, though I will occasionally supplement using Mitrefinch tms solution for team management, when working with a team of photographers and/or covering a variety of shots and not wanting duplicates. Communication is always key there! It is fast and efficient, and allows me to quickly sift through all my photos and send the best ones to my editor for publication. Pretty sweet!

 

Baseball Photo Shoot

The weather is breaking into spring-like weather and the baseball season will soon be under way!

Yesterday I spent the morning photographing the player portraits for their yearly program. It is always fun to be around the players to sense and hear their excitement and witness their enthusiasm on the brink of a new baseball season. This was one day after try-outs were finished so there was a sense of relief in the air but also a real sense of anticipation as well. These boys are ready to put their game on the field!

On a personal note, our son James made the varsity team as a sophomore and we couldn’t be more proud of him! The above photo is James posing for his player profile, which will appear in the baseball program that will be handed out this season.Isn’t that quite a game-face?

 

Behind the Scenes on this Photo Shoot

This year instead of a basic, boring background like a brick wall, I used the team’s newly created logo and made a design to serve as a backdrop to the player profile photos. A few setup steps in Photoshop and the banners were off to the printer to come out as durable vinyl banners. When it arrived I inserted metal grommets into each corner so I could then attach the banner to my two backdrop stands. I set this up in the locker room, which served as my studio for this shoot. The boys were getting their uniforms for the season, which made this a convenient time for the photos to be taken.

I also set up my main light source off to the side of this backdrop at about a 40-degree angle and up high. My SB-900 speedlight was used remotely and I attached it behind an Ezybox to disperse the light over the subjects. This softens the light in a pleasing manner and avoids any hotspots in the photos. I also attached the dome diffuser to further diffuse the light. One test shot and I was ready to go! I really enjoy using Nikon’s off-camera flash setup. It’s quick, easy, and very effective!

Once back in my office, it was time to edit the photo shoot. First, I examined each player’s photos and used Lightroom’s Survey View to quickly narrow down the options and pick the best photo. This was repeated for each player on the Varsity and then the Junior Varsity team. Next it was time to do a few adjustments to the photos. I started on the first photo and then synched these edits across the entire collection to apply them to the rest of the photos. Since my setup was controlled and consistent, my sync was also consistent. I like Lightroom for this kind of process, too!

Finally, I renamed each photograph with the name and number of each player. This will help the layout guys when assembling the baseball program for printing. Now I am sending all the files to a DVD to send in to the school tomorrow.

It’s been a busy weekend but it was fun! The photo shoot went well and I am pleased with the results. I hope the players and their families agree!

 

Wondering how best to proceed…

Sometime next week I will be receiving shipment of a new desktop computer that I will devote exclusively for my photography. I will attach my Drobo to it so I can have all my photographs on the Drobo and my Lightroom catalog on the pc. Currently my photos are on two external hard drives and a few on my laptop.

My question is how to best proceed in moving the photographs over to the Drobo so that Lightroom can find them. Since I’ve done quite a bit of editing already on some of these photos, I am thinking that importing the catalogs is the best way to go.

Have any of you done this before?

I was waiting for the new pc because with Windows 7 I can view the Drobo as one complete disk. With Windows XP there was a 2GB limit for each drive. But now I have to find the best way to get everything over the Drobo and as efficiently as possible. If you have any thoughts on how best to proceed, I’d love to hear from you!

Before and After

Adobe Lightroom 2 is some awesome software! It catalogs my photographs, tracks keywords, and allows me to sort through or find the exact photo I am looking for with just a few clicks or filter parameters. The Library Module alone is worth the price of  this photo software. Frankly I believe there is no easier cataloging software on the market than Lightroom.

Now enter the Develop Module. With the upgrade to 2.x, Lightroom jumped leap years ahead because now localized editing is now possible. The paintbrush and graduated density filter are just two tools that take advantage of local edits. In just a little time the user can be correcting white balance, adjusting the exposure, and cropping to a pleasing ratio. It is amazing!

Take a look at these two photos. The first one was right out of the camera as it was imported into Lightroom. The second photo was after just a few quick edits. What do you think? Doesn’t Lightroom rock?