Portrait Day Wednesday: Wrapping the Shoot and Moving Onto Workflow

Good Late Morning Everybody,
Hey gang, I've got some good news for all photographers who live in the Las Vegas area and also great state of Hawaii. LaDawn I have been looking at the DWUC Fall schedule and are planning to add Las Vegas and Honolulu on to the back end of our Digital WakeUp Call tour. I'll keep you posted as to times and dates. Just thought you would like to know.

I think we're ready for another episode in the continuing saga of "Booking, Shooting, and Selling the Family Portrait." Today I want to give you a peek at our studio workflow.

By the way gang, I was just curious. I don't get many comments on these posts and I was wondering if I was wasting our readers time with this series. I'm literally covering every aspect of the process with a fine tooth comb and am trying not to miss anything. Why don't you drop a note in the comment section and let me know your thoughts and feelings if this series should continue. Thanks, -- David

Either way, hit the "Read More..." link below for the rest of the story.

Here we go...

Wrapping the Shoot and Moving Onto Workflow
I think we've covered the bases pretty thoroughly on the "booking" and "shooting" part of our portrait series so far. Today I'd like to introduce a little bit of our portrait workflow.
After we wrap the shoot, I let the clients know just how well the portrait session went.

One thing that struck me over the years is that if you bring your own excitement and enthusiasm to the session and share that with your clients, they will sense those emotions and mirror that in their own excitement for the portrait session. What happens is that we are building great expectations for the finished result for our clients. They have a good time, we had a good time, we know we captured some great images, and we previewed a few of them on the camera for them. They can't wait to see the finished result. I let the clients know that my studio will be calling to make an appointment for them to come by to see their images and we say our "goodbyes".

The next step for me is to download the 200-250+ images into the computer and rename them. Typically, my naming nomenclature goes like this. If I was photographing the Smith family portrait then I'm going to number those images from "0001_SmithP09" to say "0150_SmithP09". (P for Portrait)There are occasionally times when I have a second camera going to cover the peripheral spontaneous moments of the shoot. The second set of images is numbered sequentially as well with it’s starting number being 1+ the ending number of the main family portrait session.

By the time we photographed the family in for example the three different settings within the park, and break the family members into the various groups like we discussed on last week's post [link], I've got quite a number of images to work with. Typically a session will include 200 to 250+ images.

After all the images are numbered and placed in what I'll call the "Parent" folder on our computer, the images of then imported in the Lightroom. The "Parent" folder is where we store all the images and any other folders associated with the client order.

Okay, let's put on the brakes just for a minute. What I'm going to mention next is the most important part of our workflow for my studio. Are you ready -- read my lips. I create a separate Lightroom catalog for each portrait session. In fact, I create a separate Lightroom catalog for each client order.

The reason for this is simple. In my studio we have five workstations. Everybody has a job to do whether it be editing the images, fine tuning images in Lightroom, doing the final retouching and enhancement on those images or design. Since the images need to be on the various work stations in my studio, it only makes sense that I create a separate light room catalog for each order.

Why? As you know, Lightroom doesn't like to work across the network -- in fact it doesn't work across a network at all:~( It is one of the major shortcoming in the program but, our "work around" has been to create a separate Lightroom catalog for each job. We simply copy and paste the Lightroom catalog to the employee's workstation that needs to be completing the next step of the order. When we are finished working on that particular client's order, that Lightroom catalog is then replaced into the client's "Parent" folder where all the source images reside. This really makes life easy and overcomes the Lightroom network issue. Here is a link to a previous post on the same subject.

Once I rename the images, create the new Lightroom catalog, and import those images into Lightroom they are ready for the next step. The next step is to edit those images. Once edited, I'll place these images into their own separate Collection. This Collection is titled "1. Presentation". I preface the catalog name with #1 because I wanted it to "float" to the top of my Catalog names. It's just easier to find that way.

I have a few more steps to complete before we are ready to make the presentation to our clients. I'll reserve that for next week's post.

That wraps things for today. Check in tomorrow for a "way cool" Business day Thursday. I'll see you then, -David