One Game at a Time

Last night I posted several pictures from the lacrosse tournament I covered over the weekend. However, all of the pictures captured the Bowie players. I took a lot of pictures this weekend, and I wanted to get some up on the blog as quickly as possible. So I took the pictures I cropped for the Bowie Blade and posted them on my blog. This posting focuses on some of the other pictures I took of the other teams.

As I mentioned yesterday, I had a lot of fun shooting this event. There was lots of action, the weather was great, and my camera performed very well. I still can't get over how well those EN-EL3E batteries held up!

Today a coworker who's interested in photography asked me about my "workflow". I've heard several photographers discuss this topic, and I shared my workflow with him. This is it in a nutshell...

When I get home I take my CF card and put it into a card reader attached to my Windows computer. I despise Windows... I really really despise it. But I use Windows because Explorer can rotate images quite easily. All of my vertically oriented shots have the EXIF flags set for rotation, but I've found that few applications honor that flag. Most importantly, my hosting software (Gallery) doesn't support it. Nor does Microsoft Photo Editor and IE (which most people use when looking at my pictures).

After I load my pictures onto my Windows computer's C drive I copy them to my Linux file server. Then I go over to my MacBook Pro and NFS mount my file server. With my pictures showing up in the finder I navigate to the folder and run "open *.JPG". This takes a bit to load, but I'm able to look at all my pictures one by one. Then I crop...

When I crop in Preview I'm able to save the picture as a PNG. I drop it into my Documents folder. After I finish cropping I write my blog, and lastly I review my pictures for which ones I want to attach to my post.

My friend suggested using PHPture, or SmugMug.com, but I'm not sure how practical that will be for me. I don't like keeping my image files locally on my laptop because my backup system doesn't cover my laptop in depth. I like keeping them on my RAID-5 file server where they are mirrored nightly and weekly (both locally and offsite), and dumped nightly to a NFS mount. And my files are large enough that uploading them to a hosting service would be prohibitively expensive. My shoot this weekend of the lacrosse tournament resulted in 4GB of files. There's no way I can upload that over my cable modem!

My workflow clearly isn't ideal... I'd like to avoid Windows if at all possible, but I'd rather not have to use Aperture to perform the rotations. Awhile back I wrote a Python program that used PIL to perform the rotations, but it degraded the quality. I'd like to find some easy ways to rotate my files without losing quality. If I could do that under OSX I'd be very happy.

Anyhow... I'm interested in what workflows other photographers use and what they like/dislike about them. I'm sure there are tools out there that I'm unaware of... Maybe through your comments I'll find out about some!