Photos: Savannah, Bar Photos

One evening most of the group went out to shoot bands in bars. We first went to the 'Warehouse' on River St, and then later to the Jinx where the Train Wrecks played. Shooting in these conditions can be challenging, yet rewarding if you know what you're doing. The important part is to avoid flash, because it's distracting to the band and other patrons, and only creates weird shadows which are hard to control. So the trick is a fast lens and a camera which does perform well under low light conditions. That means shooting at very high ISO yet managing sensor noise to where it doesn't overpower the image. The other problem under these conditions can be auto focus - there may not be enough contrast in the photo for the auto focus to work. That would be easier to overcome at smaller apertures, but not at shallow depth of fields, where the focus has to be spot on. These conditions is one case where the high-end Canon cameras, such as the 5D and 1Ds shine. Their sensors have very little noise even at ISO 3200. And the 1Ds was able to auto focus in most cases if I used the center point and kept it in a higher contrast part of the subject.

We spent a few hours drinking and shooting. As a courtesy we tip the band before we start shooting. And I shot a lot of frames, because there is a higher percentage that won't look as good once downloaded. Either because they're out of focus, the player moved, or the light changed. I think I filled 3 memory cards that night.

That gives me an opportunity to talk about my workflow which can be key when shooting high volume: It's not rare that I come back from a day like this with some 20-30GB of raw files to process.

I travel with my laptop, which is also my main computer and has enough memory and horse power to do good editing on. The first thing I do is to download the files into a local light box folder using a high speed FireWire reader. The local file folder helps in terms of transfer speed. I import them directly into Lightroom doing that, which is a good software to break down a large amount of images efficiently. All the images are named by a custom profile in Lightroom by date, import, and sequence number. I can also attach keyword tags during the import based on location, shoot, etc.

Once all the files are on my Laptop I quickly do one pass through all of them. I use the star ratings and the reject flag. Everything that is out of focus, eyes closed, or has other fatal flaw gets rejected. The other photos - I give a '5' for a hero shot, which is rare. I give a '4' for all the shots which have potential, and I give a '3' for everything else. The rejects are quickly deleted using the Lightroom function. Once I've gone through that, I set my filter for '4' and above and do a second pass through just those images. Now I use the pick flag for those shots that I want to take a closer look at and do some edits in either Lightroom or even Photoshop to develop them. If I have multiple shots of a single subject/scene that have potential, this is where I pick the one I'm going with. Let's say I started out with 800 exposures, I usually reduces this in the first pass to 120 which have potential, and maybe 30 that I will edit.

At this point I change the Lightroom filter to only show me the images with a pick flag set. I go through and adjust each of them using development settings in Lightroom. Sometimes individually or sometimes using cut/paste for global changes in white balance and what not. After doing some adjustments, I may no longer like some of these shots, and I put them back into the bucket by unsetting the pick flag.

Now that I've had a pretty good look at the best of the shots, I do one final pass over the edited pictures using the quick collection. I reset the quick collection and just look at ones which still have the pick flag set and select the few which I will publish / show. That usually is 5 or less images.

At that point it's also a good time to make a backup. I change my filter in Lightroom to show me all images from the shoot which were rated '4' and above. I then do a 'original' file export into a different folder which writes both the CR2 and .xmp file with the LIghtroom settings. I then burn this folder onto a DVD on my laptop. As matter of principle I don't erase my memory cards until after I have a backup complete, so I always have two different copies of each image.

At home I store all my files on a network storage appliance. It's mapped as a share drive and recognized by Lighroom as a folder in the same catalog. Once back home I convert all of the 4 and above images into dng file format and then drag/drop the files into my archive Lightroom folder hierarchy. That's where they're permanently archived. I'll leave the light box folder from the original import around for a few weeks in case I need some extra material, but if I haven't used it within 2 weeks, chances are I never will and it's not worth wasting disk space. At that point all the good stuff is gone from those folders, so I can quickly nuke them without risk or much effort.

At home I also have more time to do more detailed edits. This is when I go through all the keepers from the entire trip (4 and above with pick flag set). I rate them with the 'green', 'yellow', and 'red' color flags for detailed editing. Green are those images which are in final state - that is I have no further edits for now. Yellow are those that I want to work on in Photoshop. And red are those that are worth keeping, but where I decided that they're not editable or usable as show objects. Over time in the evenings I will pick one of the yellow images and work on it, until I either set it to green or red. At any point I can look at either group or combinations by using the color filters in Lightroom.