A photographic workflow is important to professional photographers. Not being a professional photographer, I don’t need one. And yet, I tweak mine constantly, and never seem to get it right. With so many good options, I just end up confused.

Given the number of forum threads and blog posts surrounding the whole workflow topic, it seems I’m not alone in my confusion. I thought it might be useful to write about some of the things I’ve tried, if only as a way to help myself sort it all out.

The Pieces

There are a number of steps that all should work together in glorious harmony.

• Ingest from card
• Cull, Keyword, Label
• Raw conversion
• Cataloging
• Uploads (Flickr, etc)
• Archiving

Most people are covered by simply plugging in their card, letting iPhoto or whatever import the files, and that’s it. Not me, oh no. I have to complicate everything. And I’ve tried everything: Aperture, Lightroom, Photo Mechanic, Photoshop, Nikon Capture NX, Bibble Pro, iView Media Pro, DxO and on and on.

All of these apps are great, and that’s the problem. Things change rapidly, but as of today at least, here is where I’ve landed.

Photo Mechanic

Photo Mechanic from Camera Bits is awesome. It’s not cheap at around $150, since all it does is copy files off my card and display thumbnails. Okay that’s not really all it does, but it’s still expensive. And it’s not what it does that rocks, it’s how it does it. PM and I clicked immediately. I hate keywording in Aperture and Lightroom. I love doing it in PM. Can’t explain it other than it seems to think like me.

The other advantage for me (shooting Raw with a D300) is that PM displays the embedded JPEG from the camera where things like Lightroom render their own, and it’s not the same. I’ll explain later.

So PM handles ingesting, renaming, culling, labeling, uploading to PhotoShelter and browsing. The author has plans to add cataloging, so that may end up being all I need for handling files.

Nikon Capture NX2

Nikon’s Capture NX2 is awful at first, with a slow and downright weird UI. I thought I’d have uninstalled it immediately but since I had a 60 day trial I played with it some. As it turns out NX does things I (personally) can’t or won’t do in something like Photoshop. Control Points are fantastic. The other benefit is that NX can read the D300 camera setting directly, giving me a head start when Raw processing. All of the local adjustments are non-destructive, the conversions are widely thought to be the best there is for Nikon files, and versions, ICMP and JPEG previews are all stored nicely in the original NEF file. Clean and dandy. I’ve gotten over the UI, but it’s still too slow.

Photoshelter Personal Archive

I know, there’s Flickr, SmugMug and whoknowswhatall for storing and sharing images. I use them all. Right now, my favorite is Photoshelter. They recently updated their offering to include easy site customization and offered a free 30-day trial. I’m a sucker for 30-day trials. I really like the way Photoshelter works. Smugmug is great (I’ve been with them for a long time), and much cheaper, but I find keeping things organized there to be cumbersome. Again, it’s one of those things where something either clicks or it doesn’t. Photoshelter clicks. Also Photo Mechanic has deep, built-in integration with Photoshelter, no plugin required. I’m starting to put things out there, a few at a time. See “images.jackbaty.com”:http://images.jackbaty.com/

So this is where I’ve ended up. I change things around a lot, but for now, this works. I’m missing a decent cataloger, but PM is presumably adding that before long and considering how much I like what it already does, I’ll wait.

Why not Aperture or Lightroom? Good question. I have both. I like both. And they both are a pretty good end-to-end solution. Maybe that’s what I don’t like. I like smaller, specific tools. The all-in-one nature of Aperture and Lightroom is off-putting for me. Feels like too many eggs in one basket, but more likely it’s just a feel thing.

The Workflow

Here’s how it goes.

Ingest, Cull, Label and Keyword using Photo Mechanic. PM will rename and apply IPTC profiles to inbound images. It also copies each file to a second drive (a Drobo) as a backup. I make a quick pass though each image and “Tag” keepers. After 2 passes, I delete everything not tagged. Then I add keywords and rate the remaining images. One more pass to add ratings (stars) and that bit is complete.

I keep all files in directories based on date with a summary. Looks something like this…

Once things are culled, I open any image that needs tweaking in Capture NX2, make my edits, and save a version directly into the original Raw NEF file (no silly sidecar files for me!) After all edits are complete, I filter only images with one or more stars, then upload them directly from Photo Mechanic to Photoshelter for online archiving. Some of these are then published to galleries. One or two might then be exported for Flickr or emailed to family.

That’s it. Not so bad, eh?

I recently upgraded my copy of “Tinderbox”:http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ to 4.5.3 - a minor release. After the last few updates, this one seemed almost a non-event. I never know what to expect with each new Tinderbox version, but there’s always something useful. Once I dug into the 4.5.3 update I found my initial impression to be mistaken. It turns out this release has a few nice additions. My favorite happens to be the ability to assign badges or prototypes to multiple selected notes simultaneously. I didn’t even know I wanted to do that, but there it is, and it’s useful.

One of the amazing things about Mark Bernstein’s development process is the way in which new features are added. At first glance new features can seem rather haphazardly tossed in, and yet after a few minutes of use everything tends to make complete sense. These little things sure do add up. Mark himself describes this in his “blog post announcing Tinderbox 4.5.3”:http://www.markbernstein.org/Oct0801/Tinderbox453.html and I agree completely.

Each Tinderbox release comes embedded with a small (Tinderbox) document containing release notes. Here’s one from this latest version…

A nice touch.

I take pictures of my dogs. Can’t help it. Here are a few recent shots, for your viewing pleasure.

Domingo Corpus is a talented musician and a great guy. We saw he and his band play a dinner show last night at The Vernier in Port Huron. Really good stuff, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my girlfriend’s brother in law.

You can hear more on his “MySpace page”:http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid;=81908124.

Here’s a taste, it’s called Namaste [audio:Namaste.mp3]

How could I have forgotten to mention what might be the simplest yet still useful note taking app around - “Notational Velocity”:http://notational.net/. I know, you think they’re all the same. Most are, but Notational Velocity isn’t. It may not be immediately apparent why it’s different, but for those of you who strive for small, light, simple and powerful, there’s nothing like it. It hasn’t been updated in years, but doesn’t feel like it needs to be. An Intel version would be nice though.

The unusual mix of a single window interface, modeless operation, instant search and a clever blending of the search and add functions has given the app an almost cult following. Sometimes simple is better.

Reading RSS feeds consumes a significant amount of my spare time. Recently I noticed a change in my attitude toward feeds. Lots of mumbling under my breath. “Stupid” “Enough already!” “Been there.” Taking a step back I noticed my subscription list sucked. Okay that’s not true exactly, but I did realize that I’m not interested in the same things I was a year ago. My feed list needs an overhaul!

Time to start over. I’ve just unsubscribed from every single feed in Google Reader. 312 of them. No more “12 best Wordpress Themes” or “How to use Social Networks” or “10 ways to Rounded Corners using CSS” or “Ruby tips and tricks” or “Top 5 GTD Apps for OS X.”

I’m now on the lookout for good blogs about photography, film, art, writing, science and so on. You know, stuff about life.

My first real camera was the Canon AE-1 my parents bought me in 1982. Since then I’ve gone through a few others: Nikon N6006, Olympus point and shoots, a Leica M6 and finally a series of Canon dSLRs from the original Rebel to a 1Ds. I’ve invested rather heavily in Canon lenses and associated gadgets.

Recently, I decided that I wanted a new, serious camera. The plan was to hold out for the 5DMkII. While waiting I kept running into articles raving about the new Nikons. Apparently, with the new D3, D300 and D700, low noise at high ISOs was no longer exclusively a Canon thing. They (the Nikon guys) would go on and on about the superior focusing and flash metering and whatever.

The new 5D was announced recently, and I was disappointed. The only compelling new feature of the new model? Video. No real improvement to the focusing system, metering, etc.

Screw that, I bought a D300.

So it would seem I’m now a Nikon Guy. Someday I’ll take some photos with it.

We’ve been trying “Yammer”:http://yammer.com/ at “the office”:http://fusionary.com/ for short notes and intra-office updates. Yammer asks “What are you working on?” Fair question, but I already log my daily activity in a “Daybook”:http://jackbaty.com/2008/07/tinderbox-as-a-daybook/ using Tinderbox so I thought it would save time if I could post those entries as updates directly to Yammer.

Easy, here’s how I did it. The whole process took me less than 15 minutes from concept to completion.

First, I created an Agent which collects any note containing a tag labeled “YM.”

When the agent runs, it first calls out to a shell command which uses curl to post the note’s title to Yammer via Yammer’s API. Here’s the action run by the Agent.

` Result=runCommand(“/usr/bin/curl -H ‘Accept: text/plain’ -d ‘body=”+urlEncode($Name)+”’ -u myusername:mypassword https://www.yammer.com/api/v1/messages/”); Tags=$Tags-“YM”;

`

After the shell command, it removes the “YM” tag from the note, preventing subsequent runs of the agent from picking it up and posting the same note again.

To easily add the “YM” tag to a note, I created a Stamp.

Wrapping it all up, to send a note to Yammer, I simply select the note and choose “Send to Yammer” from the menu and whoop, there it is.

This makes me happy.

The world would look better to me were this Onion article true.

bq. In deference to the memory of Wallace, whose writing on alienation, sadness, and corporate sponsorship made him the author of the century in stock car racing circles and whom NASCAR chairman Brian France called “perhaps the greatest American writer to emerge in recent memory, and definitely our most human,” officials would not comment on how points, and therefore this year’s championship, would be determined. At least for the moment, drivers found it hard to think about the Sprint Cup.

[via 3QuarksDaily]

An Egyptian police orchestra ends up lost and spending the night in a small Israeli town. That’s pretty much all there is to The Band’s Visit. Do not miss it. It’s quiet, charming, funny, and one of the best movies I’ve seen in a while.