OCA Digital Photographic Practice: Part 1 Workflow: Your own Workflow 1

Project : A sequence of actions

Exercise: Your own Workflow 1

So here we go part 3 of my OCA Journey. I think getting started is sometimes quite difficult, well it seems to be for me. I think you can easily fall into the trap of over thinking what needs to be done instead of letting the process flow naturally which is kind of what happens after you have completed a few of the exercises.

So workflow, its strange to see this as the first exercise on part 3 of my course (could have quite easily been part 1 or 2) I think to some extent most people have either consciously or subconsciously developed and adapted their own workflow to meet their own needs to produce various sets of images.

I certainly already had my own workflow that has so far served me pretty well and to be honest is not far off what the book describes.

I will briefly describe my workflow from preparation through to finished image.

Plan - this would involve planning what and where I am going to shoot, may involve a recce to find a suitable location or involve obtaining permission to shoot at a particular place. might also involve determining lighting conditions and possible suitable shooting locations in a particular area. All of this work would be carried out prior to any of the next steps.

Equipment Check - this includes check all settings are zeroed on camera, memory cards have been formatted batteries are fully charged, lens's cleaned, spare batteries and memory cards packed or available close to hand.
Photo shoot - as per your plan in the first step. Ensure you have obtained all pictures required before finishing the shoot.
Upload pictures to Storage device and/or Computer.
Import photos into Lightroom as 'copy as DNG' files into a different working directory to the original files (applicable to raw files)
First sift of images remove any unusable or unrecoverable images
Second Sift, Select images that mach your criteria in your initial plan.
Process and retouch if required selected images and export out of Lightroom to a safe location.
Use images for required purpose, whether its for web display or providing them to a third party etc.
Ensure images are always backed up.

So now I have talked about my specific workflow how did I use this to tackle the first exercise?

As I alluded to earlier it is sometime difficult to get started pick a subject matter or find inspiration etc.
With this exercise my inspiration actually came from my daughter.

She came home and started telling me about an Easter egg competition they were doing at school and how they needed to decorate eggs in any design they wanted. I vaguely remember seeing some designs at the school the previous year and had an idea of what she was after. After talking through various ideas with Tilly (my daughter)she decided that she wanted to recreate a classroom with the children being the eggs.
I thought that this would make a fun and ideal first subject to practice the first exercise.

After a few days of building the school with my daughter it was ready to be photographed.

I had planned what I had wanted to shoot the location was easy,

I prepared my equipment, selected lenses, readied flash units and tripod.

Photographed Eggdrake & Yolkganby Free-range school for around 20 Minutes selecting various heights and distances and even using different lenses to get the pictures I was after.

Once completed I followed my workflow through uploading images to producing the final set.

Was this workflow suitable for the shoot

I think it was, I had decided what and where I was going to shoot from the initial brief. The process itself I think worked very well, the only problem I ran into was because of the lens I had selected initially (70mm 2.8 Macro on a 4/3rd sensor) got me a little bit closer than I had anticipated.
But having a different lens on hand as per my planning I was able to adapt and produce a series of images that were suitable for the assignment.

Initial shoot photos, post production