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!
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
