Assignment One: Workflow

The purpose of this Assignment was to demonstrate what I had learned from the unit around Workflow. As I had discovered whilst doing the exercises during this unit, in the past I had paid little attention to workflow but instead using a 'suck and see' approach. The unit has helped me to become more disciplined in this regard as well as explore some of the workflow functionality that is available (and which I had more or less ignored!) in Adobe Photoshop Elements.

The workflow that I worked to for this assignment is below - each step is numbered and my comments and observations as I progressed through each step are alongside each of these.

1. Choose Topic: I selected a location called Stump Beach which is on the Gulf Coast in Florida close to Englewood. We had planned a holiday to Florida and Stump Beach is a place that I have visited several times before and which I thought would be a great subject for this assignment. Stump Beach is made up of a number of dead trees which are on the beach; presumably at some point the beach has been 'constructed' which has allowed the sea to come up and kill off the roots of the trees. In the past, the Beach consisted of many more dead trees and at high tide was impassable but following the BP oil disaster in the Gulf a few years back, the number of stumps seems to have been cleared presumably to allow vehicle access to clean the oil from the beaches. The location is relatively secluded and has the combination of a tidal sea and clear skies. I wanted to pick a day, however, when there was some cloud in the sky to add interest. In addition, there was a relatively strong breeze which also helped to create stronger waves onto the beach. In terms of timing, the images were taken late morning; I would have preferred to have gone out earlier but the clouds helped to diffuse the bright sunshine.

2. Camera and Equipment Check: Despite being on holiday, I had packed probably more lenses than I really needed for the holiday but I wanted to limit the lenses that I took on the beach. As a result, I took my standard lens (24mm - 105mm) and a wide angle lens (10mm- 20mm). I also made sure that my camera battery was fully charged and that I had a spare battery as well as an empty memory card.

3. Photoshoot: The shoot went well with plenty of opportunity to get some images that I believed I would be happy with. The sun was bright at times and this made it difficult to review the images as I was taking them and I made a conscious decision not to edit any images on the fly but rather leave this until I returned back to the villa. I did also find some elements that I was not expecting including a dead fish's head stuck to a tree stump which conjured up images of  'The Lord of the Flies'. I tried a number of shots through the fish's eye but these didn't really work.

4. Create folder and transfer images: Back at the villa, I created a folder entitled 'Assignment One' and a sub-folder within that folder called 'Final Selections'. I transferred all the images taken on the beach into the main 'Assignment One' folder.

5. Selections: Using Adobe Elements Organiser facility and the star rating, I set up a rating system as follows:

• * = discard (out of focus image / did not achieve what I wanted)
• ** = possible inclusion - for further review
• *** = most likely for inclusion in final set
• **** = second selects (for use after first and subsequent sortings)
• ***** = final selects (for use after first and subsequent sortings)

Images were sorted into the first three groups followed by a review of the three star images which were then either moved into the one star (discard) group or the five star (final select) groups. Similarly, I conducted the same exercise with the two star (further review) group moving those to potentially keep into the four star (second selects) group. A second trawl and sort of the four and five star groups left me with a final set of images which I then transferred into the Final Selects sub folder.

6. Processing: I included this step in the workflow for straightening/cropping/enhancing any of the final selects but, on this occasion, I chose not to process further any of the images as I was very happy with the output.

7. Final Preparation: This final step was to convert all the Final Selects images into smaller files for Flikr. (This step could also be used for publishing onto a web gallery or preparation for printing.)

As a consequence of this assignment, I recognise that workflow is very personal. I will have my own way of selecting potential topics for future pieces of work and those choices alone will be subject to my own interests as well as the opportunities that present themselves to me to conduct a shoot. My use of the Adobe Elements rating system is also very personal using three of the five stars available to conduct a series of selection 'passes' and the final, four and five star, groupings for my ultimate decisions.

One other element that I realise was missing was labelling my images. I tend not to do this - rightly or wrongly - but do try and keep up a system of folders, sub-folders and sub-sub-folders to group images and make them (relatively) easy to locate. I recognise that this could be better and will look at this again!

It is very likely that as I progress through the course that I will amend and adapt the workflow above to make it more pertinent to what I am trying to do but, as mentioned at the beginning, this has been great for helping me set up a personal discipline.

The final set of images can be found on my Flikr site which is at http://www.flikr.com/ but the following was my favorite:

Mark Moorton / April 2012