David Bergman on Workflow

I recently had the chance to see, renowned concert/sports photographer, David Bergman talk about how he uses Aperture to cull unwanted images and enhance and correct the selects from a shoot. Surprisingly, his daily workflow is not much different than what I have come up with, aside from the fact that I don't use Aperture (mostly because of the fact that it will not run on my Powerbook G4) and he has way more photos and selects to deal with. However, when I had a beta copy of Lightroom (which did run on my Powerbook), it is what I found to work quite well.

Anyway, the basic workflow is the following:

1. Import your entire shoot and add metadata to all the images. copyright info, short summary perhaps of the shoot. This is useful for quick searches through the library later in life. The copyright information, obviously can just save some legal hassle later.
2. Glance at every photo and give it a 1 star rating if it's something that might have potential.
3. Filter out your view to only shots that have 1 star. By this time, you've probably cut the number of shots down by at least half, if not more.
4. Relook at the 1 star images and give it a 2nd star if and only if it's worth spending more time on. You can use a bit more time to decide this, and for similar shots select only the best of them.
5. Filter out your view to only shots that have 2 stars. Now, here is where David's approach is a bit different. He relooks and filters to 3 stars and reserves 4 and 5 stars for exceptionally good photos he wants to use in his portfolio. I on the other hand am not on the same caliber as him and would have next to no shots left if I went to 3 stars, let alone 4 or 5.
6. Correct

After you make your initial selects, which should be a small fraction of the images you shot initially, it's time to make some corrections, crop and perform other edits (in Photoshop or wherever). The next part, for me, is bad because it allows for too much experimenting. For David, his formula works great and it's something I might try when I get some more computing power to power the free copy of Aperture Apple gave me for attending David's talk (Thanks Apple!).

David has sort of a set formula for the sliders and tools he touches and hardly ever strays from it, but makes sure to always correct the white balance first. Then he'll adjust the exposure as needed, possibly warm up the temperature a bit (on the photo, his office is air conditioned) and then turn on the visual display of highlights and black points. He'll then decide what's appropriate for the scene and use the recovery tool to get back some highlights and similarly with the black points.

At this point, the initial image should look pretty good and he'll decide whether or not he wants to use the settings from this picture as the settings for others and if so he'll apply them to the others and continue on. He'll then crop and, if necessary, add a slight vignette.

My correction flow is a lot different, and it's the part of his presentation that I took the most away from. It's possible to get great photographs by doing very little extra work. I used to go through all the sliders and experiment, but I now know it's not necessary, so I'll just not touch them.

You'd never think such a simple flow would work, but it seems to, and I saw him perform it right before my very eyes.