Every type of digital photographer has some kind of workflow for his shots. Most of us from the IT industry will understand the term workflow but my parents would definitely not. So in layman terms its the entire process of producing photographs. The sequence of steps can be classified as:
- Capture/Shoot: This is the step where you would take your favourite camera and start taking pictures…or start shooting….pictures of course.
- Copying/Transfer: After you have taken your shots, then you would transfer them from your camera’s memory stick to a secondary storage. Since the prices of storage are coming down, now one can easily think of getting higher capcity (>1TB) disks to store all your work. Of course as you take more, you storage needs also will increase.
- Processing: Wait a min! why is there any need of processing? This is a digital photo right? All I need to do is just copy to my computer and share it. For the most part its true. But as you starting concentrating on the composition of your photos, you tend to notice that they all need some work either in correcting something or enhancing the image. Whatever it is, you would do your processing using your favorite image processing software.
- Presentation: Once you are satisfied with the photo, then you got to show it to others to enjoy. There are so many options to choose and the most common and the easiest is to upload your photos to a publicly sharing photo site (e.g, Flickr, Picasa, shutterfly etc)
There is a debate among photographers as to whether their work needs any processing on them. If you are more of a purist then you won’t like the idea of doing any kind of processing and would want to get the best shot in the camera itself. But for somebody like me who is just starting out, I would definitely would have to use some kind of processing to enhance/correct my photos. The problem is with the cost of those software. They are very expensive and doesn’t justify my purchase right now. So I’m going to stick with GNU Image Manipulation Program; a free tool to get the job done. I don’t know what all it can do, but currently my needs would be just to crop and resize the photos. I guess as I start taking more pictures, I might understand other options available for editing my photos, but until then I’m happy just cropping them 🙂
For presentation, I’ll have to stick with Flickr as I’ve been in love with it right from the time I joined Y! It would have been nice to upload them here, but since I don’t know much about web designs, I’ll make a mess out of it. So its a lot easier for me to upload them there and post the links here 🙂
It’s also a good idea to have the photos digitally watermarked. Some more tips on processing may be useful. I resize generally to 800*600 pixels
True. But its more with people who actually have good shots. With my current shots, I don’t expect anybody to steal it (even if I pay them 🙂
Well,The master “Ritzy” has already spoken..and in my knowledge , he is the best amateur photographer I know :-)Sudhi, no worries, you will be added to the list of “best” too..once you get the D90 in your handGood start though !