While reading through this exercise I immediately envisaged where the major pitfalls would have occurred formerly for me when starting a project like this long one. In the past I would have taken all the photos over the extended period for the project and then processed almost all of the photos that I had loosely edited at the end or at least in a haphazard fashion . Although I would keep some of the workflow the same, ie the editing out of shots I felt were (very) technically unsound before processing, most of my workflow would be revised.
The one, main feature my new workflow for longer projects (like this) would encompass would definitely be the inclusion of a photo-organiser such as Adobe Photoshop Elements Organiser, which was included with Adobe Photoshop Elements 11. This software had already been quite a revelation for me in the time-limited project and I was sure it would make this project a lot more efficient.
I decided to combine this exercise with the fourth exercise and therefore plan to incorporate further detail into my workflow concerning the editing stage of the process.
So my workflow for the second and fourth exercises for a longer project would be the following:
1. Decide on a theme or topic, which lasted for a sufficient amount of time and with which I could adapt my workflow to - my initial thoughts were street photography in the city of London. The aim of the project would be capturing a wide range of people along one major street in London.
2. Make a loose plan of how long the project would last, including how many photographs I intended to capture and how frequently I would be taking these shots.
3. Make sure the camera's battery(s) were charged before each shooting session and, more importantly than with the first exercise, that there was sufficient space on the memory card(s) for the planned amount of photos to be taken (in raw + jpeg). Also research the weather for possible days I might be doing the street photography as I would be more comfortable with strong lighting.
3. Start the street photography but for the first session be very aware of any mistakes being made and possible improvements to the photography/workflow, which could be written down in a notepad (stored with a pen inside the camera bag).
4. After the first session make notes back at home about the photography for future sessions. Label any obvious photos with major technical errors as I look at the images for the first time on the organiser.
5. Then start editing the photos I have taken the same day to make the 'selects'. This is in stark contrast to what I would have done as mentioned above (editing and processing all at the end or in an unorganised way). This would also be very loose editing, based upon aesthetic quality.
6. When the selects had been made I would go through these files and decide upon several I really was pleased with. However, I would use different tags/labels to those I didn't like (so I could come back to them if I changed my mind). The main portion of this would be through the organising software I had found so useful with the previous exercise (ie tagging or labelling). The remaining files I was keen on would be the 'first selects', while those I didn't care for would be 'seconds'.
7. After completing steps 4, 5 and 6 I would try to repeat this process for each session for the duration of the project and leave the more clinical editing until I was pleased with the number and quality of photographs.
8. Then after some time I would come back to the first selects and make a final selection compared to the 'seconds'. It would probably help to leave a gap between this and the previous stage so I could look at the images more objectively. This would occur after I had taken what I felt were enough 'quality' shots for the project.
9. I would process the final selects inside of Photoshop Elements' editor. Processing would consist of only a few changes like cropping, saturation and exposure of the raw files as I saw fit.
10. Finally I would back up all the files to the external hard drive and then upload the final, processed images onto this blog. From these I would select two of these images that I deemed the 'strongest'.
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