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.

I can't say I'm a big fan of the his site's design, but Jim Russi's surf photography portfolio is amazing.

Gregory Crewdson TV Interview

I happened to catch part of an interview with surrealist photographer Gregory Crewdson, on CBS Sunday Morning. The interview, as of right now, is in their videos section titled "Portrait Of A Photographer (6:59)."

Philadelphia Trash the Dress

Brides in Philadelphia that are looking to do a Trash the Dress session, might wanna take a look at the work of Allebach Photography in Philadelphia. They have more examples of their work on their blog, but I have a feeling they haven't done an "extreme" session yet with total dress trashing. Oh, and they really liked tattooed brides.

Scott Spitzer Photography

Philadelphia Photographer, Scott Spitzer is a co-worker at my new job. He's got a good portfolio online to check out, and is someone who will get his brain picked more than once while I'm working with him for sure.

Andrej Belic has a great underwater photography portfolio.

Pete Radocaj, our in-house photographer at work, has posted about Product Photography and It’s Importance in eCommerce on our company's blog.

Top Photography Blogs

If you're just learning about digital photography (or film) in your spare time, as I am, or are a full time studio shooter, traveler, or other paid camera-slinger you undoubtably subscribe to some photography magazines. I for one keep getting Outdoor Photographer even though my subscription ran out; thanks! I also subscribe to ShutterBug. I find that ShutterBug is insightful for thinking about new techniques and equipment to buy, whilst Outdoor Photographer is mostly just inspiring with some sprinkles of technique. Both magazines, I think are geared more towards learning than say, American Photo or any of those artsy or journalism ones. (Note: I love "artsy" photography, I just don't subscribe.)

However, the purpose of this blog isn't necessarily to point out good magazines that you can get in print, although I guess that might not be a bad idea for a future article about off-screen learning, but in fact it is about the numerous resources of the World Wide Web. There are many great blogs out there that update their content much more regularly than I, and in fact with much more insightful and useful tips and articles. That isn't to say that you should stop reading Photub of course. If you've been a reader of Photub for any length of time, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The blogs that I am listing in this post, are blogs that I consider great additions to your RSS subscriptions—those blogs that probably have enough new content for books or bi-monthly magazines in themselves:

In no particular order...

1. The Online Photographer: The Online Photographer packs a wallop of new commentary, reviews, techniques and personal adventures into a blog that is updated fairly frequently.
2. Photocritic: Perhaps one of my favorite blogs, is this one. The authors always have something interesting to share, and do a good job presenting it. The critiques that are occassionally done are quite helpful to new and upcoming photographers, and the DIY attitude helps create some really useful and fun tools. Of note is the DIY Pringles can macro lens, that I have been wanting to try out.
3. Strobist: Everything you'd ever want or need to know about effective flash photography is right here in this blog. Literally courses of information are contained on the pages of this blog. It's also not all about flash photography. Consider the recent series about Flickr and what it can do for your photography career. Insightful articles, interesting topics and amazing techniques make this truely one of the best photography blogs on the internet.
4. Photojojo: While not really a blog per se, Photojojo's unique style and unique media (email newsletter), make it in a class of it's own. I include it in this list because they do have an RSS feed, making it "blog like." I have just one complaint about Photojojo and that is that they often seem to post stuff late, after it's already been posted elsewhere. Nevertheless, Photojojo has knocked my socks off more than a few times with interesting ideas, it's creative writing style and overall growth.
5. Digital Photography School: Anyone looking for tips can always find something at DPS. Choose a "Random Tip" or read them all. It's easily becoming an encyclopedia of techniques, buying tips, etc. for the beginner, casual student and the advanced amateur.
6. Andy Frazer's Night Photography Blog: Taking pictures at night can yeild some extremely interesting results, but not many will give you insight on creating breathtaking images at night without the flash. Andy Frazer does. You'll see lots of examples of compelling night imagery, if nothing else.
7. After Capture: The only site listed here, that actually is a monthly publication, actually has a decent blog. The blog talks, interestingly enough, about post production of your images. Becomming a "post production prince" might not happen overnight, but it'll probably happen faster with the reading of some of the articles here.
8. DIYPhotography.net: Face it, photography equipment is expensive, and we see time and time again, that a cheap light tent provides excellent results. DIYPhotography.net is all about creating cheap equipment to aide in the creation of great photographs. It's a wonderful collection and continues to grow.

The web is full of great content, and with RSS being used by nearly everyone, there certainly isn't any reason (other than time) that you can't be informed of the latest photography happenings, techniques and ideas every 15 or 20 minutes. Surely there are other great blogs out there that I did not address, but these are the ones I read on a semi-daily basis. If you think your blog should be on this list, please submit it for review, and I'll take a look.

Arin Ahnell

Photographer, Arin Ahnell makes use of gels on his flash units while taking pictures at night. Check the gallery featuring his favorite shots.

Galleries to Look At

greyscalegorilla, which happens to be an amazing photo blog, has been posting only portraits for the last couple of weeks. They're incredible, as are most of his pictures.

Art Department

Posts have been short lately and I apologize, but here's one more which features a ton of amazing photos from recognizable photographers. Art Department's photo section will no doubt seem familiar once you get into it. In fact, I bet you'll right away recognize Steven McCurry's link image.

Another great interface, again in creativeness.

Perhaps one of the greatest flash gallery interfaces ever.

Update: I should have stated that it's great in a creative sense, not necessarily a usability sense.

Jason King's photography is beautiful.

Capturing Gaza's Hell

"I want to show the daily life of the people of Gaza, through their personal environment." Time photographer, Alexandra Boulat, on the challenges of documenting an ongoing conflict.

Hunter S. Thompson Gallery

I can't claim to know much about Hunter S. Thompson, and my lack of knowledge is apparent since I didn't know he took photographs. This exhibition started December 2, 2006 and goes til January 20th, 2007. If you're in California, maybe you want to check it out for yourself.