2012 June

LINK TO YESTERDAYS BLOG: MY CONFERENCE WORKFLOW: PRE CONFERENCE

Day One of any conference is always a testing time for the nerves, so I made sure that I turned up to the venue fourty five minutes before the scheduled start of the day. I did a quick hello to the organizer and my contact: before heading upstairs to organize my workspace.

The staff at Mac’s Brewry Bar are uniformly excellent and even though I could tell they were busy they still took the time to help me out find a place to set up my workstation: I ended up setting up next to the bar!

MARK-9009

My workstation is in the main conference room: out of sight of the main speaker (so as not to provide a distraction) but close enough for me to be able to keep an eye on the computer and to be able to do edit and uploads during the day. I set up the computer and connected to the free Waterfront Wi Fi (Thanks Trade Me and Wellington City Council!), loaded up lightroom and connected my card-reader.

Part of my workflow is my back-up system. At any time my images are at risk from being damaged or lost: so I do everything that I can to minimize that risk. My cameras use CF Cards to record images: and I have enough cards to hold 44 gigabytes of data. About every two hours I swap out the cards and download them to my laptop and to a portable hard drive. Once the images are downloaded I remove the harddrive and store it in a secure pouch on my person, then lock down my laptop.

So I now have the images stored in three locations: the hard drive, the CF card, and the laptop, and if something were to happen to any of these things then I still have back ups of those images. When I get an opportunity I convert the images from their native RAW into JPEG, then I upload those images into my secure cloud based storage, and now I have four copies. Finally when I get back to the office: I back up the laptop to a hard drive at home which then gets stored in a fire-proof cabinet, and now I have five copies of that single image, all in different places. Only once I’ve visually confirmed that I have backed up the images from the days shoot do I delete and format the CF cards.

The first day of the conference went the way first days normally do. Coffee was drunk in 70/30 ratio to tea, and all the normal predictable first day niggles occured on cue Even though I didn’t understand half the stuff the speakers were saying I still enjoyed what they had to say, and the lunch (pasta, rices, chicken) was absolutely delicious! In all I edited and posted 430 images to the client gallery, which I uploaded during lulls in proceedings. (Sorry, can’t post any of the images yet! All under embargo)

Tomorrow is the Gala Dinner, so that will prove to be a much longer day than today. So before I go to bed, I go through the same process as yesterday: charging my batteries, formatting the cards, cleaning my lenses, although I’m doing it just a little bit slower and in slightly more pain. Alarm set for 0630!

TOMORROW: THE GALA DINNER AND MY LIGHTROOM WORKFLOW

Shooting a conference has its own unique sets of challenges: and as one of the few photographers in the country who specializes in conference photography I thought I would I would take the opportunity to to show you guys my workflow. I’ve got a three day conference starting tomorrow so this provides a great opportunity to give you an insight to how I work.

Tomorrow is the first day of the conference so I’ve spent quite a bit of today just getting my gear ready. So far eight AA batteries and six camera batteries have all had their turn in the charger. I’ve dutifully checked each of my memory cards to make sure the images on them have been backed up: then I’ve formatted them. I’ve set each of my cameras to their default settings based on the venue (I checked it out this afternoon whilst meeting with the organizers) and I set a couple of the custom user settings to my “flash default” in case I need to switch in a hurry.

This is the gear I’ll be taking with me:

My gear

For those interested in the technical details: I’m taking two camera bodies, my Canon 5D Classic (aka as “The Beauty”), and my Canon 7D (aka as “The Beast.”) I will be using the 70-200mm L on the Classic, and the 17-55mm 2.8 on the 7D as well as the 580exII flash and Rouge Flashbender. I have a couple of spare lenses in my kit bag in case I damage something, and if something catastrophic were to happen I have this guy on speed dial.

Also coming with me tomorrow will be my Thinkpad X220T laptop: and tomorrow I will run through how I use that whilst shooting an event. In the meantime I’m using it to enter the final details for the conference into my Studio Software: VINCENT. Here’s a screenshot:

VINCENT Screenshot

I spent a lot of time looking for a suitable software option for my business but I didn’t find one: so I decided to write my own! Based on Filemaker: I use VINCENT to track my contacts and photoshoots, and generally to make my life easier.

As you can see from the screenshot: every Job and every Photoshoot gets its own unique “tag.” Those tags are how I keep track of every shoot throughout all the other applications I use: the tags go on the invoices and folders and online galleries as well as being appended to every image that I import into the computer.

So the time now is just after midnight: and I’ve just finished checking off my checklists and packing the last of my gear. The alarm is set for six in the morning and I’m getting ready for bed: ready for a ten hour day of shooting tomorrow.

TOMORROW: DAY ONE OF THE CONFERENCE.

I was lucky to spend a couple of days with the Tawa College Stage Crew as they prepared for and performed for the 2012 Stage Challenge this year.
 
Inspired by a couple of real life events: An Emotional Journey tells the tale of a young girl who lost the use of her legs. It was an incredible production produced by a remarkable group of people: and I was honored to be invited to document the event. Thanks Kristi for the invite!