Spring/Early Summer Portraits & Production Process?
I can not believe that it is almost August? Why does Summer go faster than any other season?
So many sessions and so few posted to my blog. Ideally I would like to blog about each individual session but time does not allow. Here are a sampling of images,mostly from late Spring and early Summer. Most of these are actually just proofs, meaning they have not been digitally enhanced yet.My proof galleries already have the images sized correctly for the internet so it is the easiest place for me to pull the blog images from.
What does it mean that they have not been digitally enhanced yet? (STOP HERE and skip to the pics IF you aren't ready to fall asleep from boredom reading this blog post.) Well let me explain my production process (not what I planned on doing in this blog but why not). After each session I first back up all the images to a DVD (I learned the hard way to do it after each session and not wait). The next thing I do is go through the images and take out the ones that are obviously not keepers (closed eyes, odd faces, etc.), then I go through again to discard images that are similar to other ones, then again to try to get it down to a manageble number for my clients, then again to crop the ones I like in a way that best presents the image. Ocassionally, if time permits, I select a few of my favorites and spend some time enhancing them.yada, yada...are you really interested?
After that I save the images in another file and then I process them to go in an online gallery for my clients. It's time consuming but worth it. Even after all of that I am still left with a large number of images. I tend show my clients more images than most photographers do because I have a hard time getting rid of those "moments" and there are so many in a session. This is good and bad! Good because the clients get to see a lot, bad because it makes it hard for them to choose! It is the source of my one common complaint... "There are too many good images to pick from! How am I going to choose!". I think I hear that from about 80% of my clients. Not a bad complaint to get!! Regardless, I am working on improving it! yada, yada...you're still reading this?
Another not so great result of showing so many images is that I really don't have time to digitally enhance each image in photoshop. I depend on the clients to trust me that what they order will look much better when they receive their prints than what they see online. Besides, most people don't color calibrate their monitors so what they see is not what they will look like anyway! So, basically I save detail work for the images the client orders. I open up in Photoshop all the images they order, then I spend a fair amount of time going into detail touching up blemishes, enchancing the color, contrast, adding vignetes, softening skin, and adding contrast, sharpness and light to eyes, etc. This is not a skill I acquired over night. I actually hired a tutor three years ago to teach me and the rest of it has been learned through experience. I also have a little help from the countless "actions" I have purchased for photoshop.yada, yada, I tend to ramble as you can see...
When all of that is complete, I upload the images to my lab via a special web based program. My labs of choice are in California and Indiana. When the lab is finished they ship them to me via Fed Ex or UPS and I review the prints. Sometimes I see things that were not visible on my monitor and back to work I go with more touch ups and reordering the prints. This is just part of the cost of production. Sometimes I am also not happy with the color or contrast the lab applied and I send a request for reprints. You can not believe how much impact the lab can have on the final print! Try sending one digital image to different labs and see what you get back! They will all be different! It is extremely important which lab you use! The professional labs that we (professional photographers) use have not only the top of line papers and equiptment but also extremely talented and well trained employees that know what they are doing! Not the same can be said for some of the consumer labs! yada, yada, I can't believe anybody would read this long post!
TMI??? Sorry, I thought some poeple would be interested to know what goes on between the session and receiving the prints. My point in sharing this is to explain why I am qualifying these images as "proofs".
OK, yada yada Andrea, no need to explain so much, just show your pics!
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This is getting to be a rediculously long blog! Plus it is getting late! I still have a lot more galleries to go through to find images for the posting. My plan is to put together another blog post with images from the rest of my Spring/Summer sessions. There's more to come....
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