Updated: 9/6/04; 9:59:29 PM.
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Monday, August 9, 2004


Workflow Notes

I took in excess of 1300 pictures in four days. This number is ludicrously large for one reason: practice. I took an especially large number of shots of performers, which I expect to cull down to a few shots per performer. The spontaneous public environment of a music festival was great practice for me to try to get candid people shots, and to try to figure out how to express what I was seeing in a short period of time. I met with mixed amounts of success, but had a lot of fun regardless. This was really a kind of creative vacation for me; a way to make something and think about things creatively outside of the context of deadlines and feature requests.

I started out carrying all of my lenses in two separate bags, but once it became clear I'd want to haul my chair around to different venues, I cut things down to one bag with the 18-55/f3.5-5.6 (for good versatility in mostly daytime venues) and the 70-200/f4. I discovered that I could get away at night with setting the ISO to 1600 and using a shutter priority of 1/200 to 1/250, and even though the camera complained about underexposure, it worked out fine.

I switched between two cards: a 512MB and a 256MB. I used the Wolverine 20GB drive to get things off the cards, and it's worked like a champ. I did between three to six dumps a day (sometimes I didn't wait for the card to get full, if I figured I was about to start a new, large set that I didn't want to interrupt). The Wolverine's battery easily lasted the day, as well as the import at the end of the day. I usually made it through one camera battery during the day, and just barely scratched the spare.

I also used it to keep all the raw footage organized, even though I'm already radically culling things in the stuff I import into iPhoto. I'll probably burn a DVD or something with the raw, unedited stuff, as well as dumping it onto my bigass 250GB external drive.

I didn't end up shooting much RAW; the Canon tools aren't good enough, and most of the after-the-fact exposure editing can also be achieved up front with suitable setting of ISO (viz the 1/250 / 1600 trick). I'm not savvy enough to deal with white balance issues yet, so I just didn't end up wanting to add the extra step to my flow.

I'm using iPhoto to deal with editing through the morass, with aggressive use of keywords so that I can actually delete things out of my catalog, instead of just out of particular albums.

It was very cool how camera friendly the festival was; I saw a lot of dorks enthusiasts with gear, and was entertained to see that many of the media folks had the same telephoto I did.

I'll probably kill time on the plane with another round of editing, and get some more detailed stories (specifically, all the musicians you hadn't realized how bleak your life was without having heard yet) queued up on the plane. I highly recommend the folk festival; even though the climate was different on each of the four days we were there, it was just an incredible amount of fun. And I have no freaking idea how many bugs will be waiting for me when I finally download my work e-mail tomorrow before getting on the plane, and that ignorance is BLISS.  12:35:25 AM  (comments []  



 
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Last update: 9/6/04; 9:59:29 PM.