Workshop Experience : Photography Studies College Week #11
Week 11 Wednesday saw a more in-depth session in the digital lab around catalogs and presenting work externally for commercial use. Lightroom makes all of this very very easy of course.
I have recently changed my workflow and now use LR CC in unison with Phase Ones' Media Pro catalog software.
So now I import through LR (hate the new update and import sequence - luckily you can go in to preferences and get rid of it.
Much babble online about how many people are hating the latest Adobe update ...). Where was I. Do your importing into LR, do your Develop needs, then I do three things differently now:
1. With all the import images that I have edited and made as I need them, I export these as hi res JPEGS in to Media Pro in the same folder name (but diff location) as the LR folder name.
2. I then export the entire LR folder as a catalog to an eternal storage device for a full back up copy if you like of that folder in catalog format (previews, RAW, etc)
3. I then remove the folder from LR. So if I am up to date, my LR folder structure is completely empty as I have converted all the images I want to keep as hi res JPEgs and I have saved all images per folder as a catalog. All done and nice and clean. And of course LR just hums with all my develop wrk as it isn't trying to sort and keep large folder structures of images.
That way i have an additional copy of all the images I have taken, and then in Media Pro i just have a folder structure of all hi res JPEGs that I can sort through very easily (much easier than LR as LR is not a catalog piece of software) and I can create photoessays, catalogs, JPEG's i like then export them to wherever I need them to go. It works really well.
Whilst Media Pro is a little clunky for me ( I am still getting used to it) whats great is that you can create as many "catalog sets" as you like for any particular project your re working on (e.g. Landscape Series or Job for Newspaper or Mum's 70th) and you simply drag the thumbnail from the Media Pro preview of your catalog, and a copy and reference to said image is now placed under the catalog name. So you can build up these catalog sets as you go, then wen it comes to decide and finish, you simply go through these thumbs and select which ones you want to include, package them up, and either print them, or export them or do whatever you need to do with them. A great way to continually sort through your images and select the best ones suited for the job at hand, Really very efficient and good. Must thank Thorsten von Overgaard for his direction on this one !
On Thursday with Lucia we jumped into our second last composition category, that of Rhythm and Movement.
To get us in to the vibe we watched an awesome interpretative dance video to the sounds of Bolero - quiet amazing.
This category is all about Pattern, Rhythm, Resonance, Line, Movement - slightly repetitive elements that direct the eye through the frame.
Shape, position, size, density, direction, colour and interval are all tools that are used to achieve this composition type - very much what any book on Gestalt Theory gets stuck well in to.
We looked at works from Martha Rosler, Brook Andrew, Jeff Wall and others.
A fairly difficult aspect of composition as the key is to get the arrangement such that it leads the eye through the frame strongly. Practise here we come !
Image 1 : Aerial using DJI P3, Image 2 : Canon 6d 50mm, Image 3 : Leica M240 50mm