Build your Routines

As a photographer routine as are very important for me and should be to every photographer, I am never going to tell anyone what their routines should be as they should be personal. When I am teaching, I do talk about some of mine as examples, but I hope that people develop their own to suite the way that want to work.

I would divide my routines into several different sections’ equipment, shooting and editing.

Equipment

I am not going to talk a lot about Equipment as I have talked about storage and organisation in a previous post but it is easier to make sure that it is kept organised if you have routine. But things like my packing is always done in two stages to make sure that I have more than enough batteries charged.

This also includes routine for setting up my studio to make sure that I have everything that I want will be on hand when needed during a shoot.

Shooting

It is important to take out stress from shooting so that it can be enjoyed and gives better results. These can be from little quick routines that you run through to get the correct setting for the shoot. To more complex routines like setting up lights during the shoot.

For me the most important routine is one I bet a lot of people will miss and that is running through stages to make sure that a model or cosplayer is happy and guided through the hole shoot.

Editing

 This is the area that I see the most mistakes on and it can lead to a lot of waisted time to the loss of valuable images. When looking at and building your own routine you need to keep in mind if the software you use overwrite your photos. Even through you must build your own routine it should follow the same patten ingest, cull/choose, edit and finished product.

Ingest

When you get the images, it is best to get them make sure that they are backed up before anything else is done. I also will keep that memory card to one side until I have at least completed the cull so that I can confirm that everything is ok.

Cull/Choose

The is the stage that most people miss and if you do not have a good system for culling then you be losing a lot of time. There are a couple of things that can effect how you feel about photos but one of the worst things is the high of just after the shoot.

I always want to see the shoot after but I know that I will like too many of them so I will do a first cull just after the shoot. I will always follow this up with a second one a couple of days later after I had the time to reflect from the shoot. The only time that I do not do a second cull is for something like news work and that will go through other people and by its nature dose not need much editing and normally in batches.

Edit

Once we have the images that you want to edit, then working with them. With edits make sure you know what bits need to be done at the beginning so that other parts of the edit don’t have to be re-done.

Finished Product

There are a couple of things to do with finished edits from making sure that they are safe and ready to be displayed in the correct way. If you providing images to other people you need to make sure that it is consistent as not to give disappointment that can affect your reputation.