My Rock Photography Digital Workflow (yours if you want)

Welcome to the final part of my rock photography series of articles. You may wish to also visit these

Rock Photography and Concert Pictures: Part 1
Rock Photography and Concert Pictures: Part 2
Rock Photography and Concert Pictures: Part 3
Rock Photography and Concert Pictures: Part 4
Rock Photography Tips
Rock Photography Equipment

Whatever you do with your rock  photography or the bands you shoot, or how you take concert pictures, your working arrangement or even how good your concert pictures are, you MUST get yourself a digital workflow.

By this I mean a pattern or set of processes by which you work. A way of dealing with your files from shutter click to print.

Once I started shooting more than periodically it became clear that I needed to establish some kind of strategy and process myself.

This took forever because as I shot more and more I realised that there were alternative eventualities that I hadnt considered and that I was not familiar with Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW.

These two fabulous tools offered functions which made things much simpler. But I needed to work out what it was doing and build that into the process. Now I have done this, I find things effortless and simpler to locate any version of any image.

The software I use is Adobe Photoshop CS4 Design Premium Editon which includes Camera RAW, Bridge and so on which despite being expensive was my choice because of other features offered. I could have spent less.

If CS4 isn't for you you could go for Adobe Lightroom or even Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 or Elements 8.

Just make sure your raw files are supported for which you should visit the Adobe website. New codecs are being added all the time. It generally only tends to be the brand new cameras on the market which are problematic and even then not for very long. but check anyway.

Ingesting and backing up concert pictures

Two intrinsicaly linked processes

Besides just shooting rock  photography you should utilise some good old fashioned housekeeping functions too..

Ingestion is getting your images off the card and into your system, computer or network, backing them up at the same time . These two processes are linked and to separate them is just adding work.

As a successful web designer and manager in my previous career I know that the most important of all things is to ensure that you have backup. You WILL need to call on them.

As a rule of thumb presume that if your concert pictures don't exist in three places simultaneously, then they dont exist at all. Anyone who' has had a hard drive failure will confirm this. This is always a VERY stressful time and getting it right and included in your regular functions cannot be underestimated.

Remember, whatever takes you're machine out of service may also see to your backups too.

One of the simplest ways of ensuring you have a disaster proof backup is an online solution. But if you're creating 21megabyte concert pictures as RAW files, like me, then you are looking at hundreds of gigs worth of storage. This solution is a non runner.

Personally I opted for two network drives and periodically creating backup DVD's forr particular projects. I may have solved the difficulty but this was difficult mainly because of my wish to be thorough and flexible. I tried my laptop and/or my desktop as solutions because it meant I could take it with me too but the laptop soon filled up and just as well. Keeping the two in sync was al nightmare despite how methodical I thought I was being.

Certain images went into the laptop, some on the desktop and throw into this the formal backup drive of a Freecom Ethernet drive and the nightmare became a horror story.

My rock photography backup and ingestion solution 

How I store my concert pictures and use a workflow that works.

I decided all images were to be ingested at the same place and the backup would happe at this time. This was to be the desktop machine through Adobe Bridge which was set up to convert the concert pictures files to DNG's with the XMP file inside them. It also creates a backup on the network drive and once complete removes the originals from the memory card.

I have ANOTHER external drive (a USB2 connected 1Terrabyte Western Digital Drive) as a backup of the desktop machine's converted DNG/XMP files which is carrie dout after this process, manually once any adjustments have taken place, backing up the XMP information such as graduated filters, colour adjustment info, ratings and production output files.

The process

1) Concert images shot and recorded onto a  Sandisk CompactFlash Extreme III 4GB Memory Card (CR2 files and small Jpegs)

2) Ingestion
a. Ingested into computer and converted to Adobe DNG files
b. Backup up original CR2 files onto FreeCom Network Drive
c. Original Files deleted from Card (saves potential deletion errors later)

3) Corrections and adjustments

4) Backup DNG and XMP info, accompanying the RAW files and PSD's or Production Jpegs on to the super fast USB2 Western Digital Drive.

5) Create DVD's of concert images..

This process can be used for many applications beyond rock photography. However the folder structure I use is particular to that of recording concert pictures from shoot to print.

Folder Structures for Live Music Photography 

A solution for nesting folders for simpler everything.

I shoot different bands in different places on different dates and sometimes more than 1 together. this is how I structure my folders to represent this behaviour.

This is my way of doing things, refined over the past year or so and causually because of the automated output process of photoshop. Its my way, if you dont feel it works for you then I would love to hear some suggestions for improvement.

----- My Pictures
----- ----- Live Music Photography
----- ----- ----- Euphoria
----- ----- ----- ----- 22 25_09_09_White_Horse_Ardingly
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_Prod
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_shot
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW_Held
----- ----- ----- ----- 2022 27_09_09_PITP_East_Grinstead
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- jpeg_Prod
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_shot
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW_Held
----- ----- ----- Speak and Spell
----- ----- ----- ----- 22 15_04_09_Brighton_Electrofest
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Set-Collection_1
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_Prod
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_shot
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW_Held
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Set-Collection_2
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_Prod
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_shot
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW_Held
----- ----- ----- The Last Carnival
----- ----- ----- ----- Claire Hall_09_10_09
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_Prod
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_shot
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW_Held
----- ----- ----- ----- 22 27_09_09_PITP_East_Grinstead
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_Prod
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_shot
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- RAW_Held

You will see that 'The Last Carnival' played at the 'PITP' festival, just like Euphoria, did plus other gigs listed for those bands (I actually have a lot more but no point in putting them down here) and that Speak and Spell did two sets at the Brighton Electrofest.

Folders within each 'performance' folder 

the 4 core folders I store

So each band has a folder, each gig has a folder inside that band folder and then there are 4 more folders. The beauty of this is you can just add extra folders if if you create any other type of files such as layered TIFFs or PSD's. It's going to remain a logical file structure for Live Music Photography.
----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_Prod
----- ----- ----- ----- Jpeg_shot
----- ----- ----- ----- RAW
----- ----- ----- ----- RAW_Held

Jpeg_Prod. This is for the Production Jpegs%u2026 Photoshop can be set to output batched of files as Jpegs into this folder, it will also create a subfolder within it. I find it useful to rename the subfolders according to what size files you have. I always create a web version and this is JPEG_600_600. Meaning that the file is no bigger in any dimension that 600 pixels.
Jpeg_shot. This is where you put the cameras own small Jpeg that it creates. You may need these for 'contact' sheet purposes to show.
RAW. This is where you put your RAW files to start with and where they are when you make your adjustments and write the XMP files (if it creates separate XMP's). Remember these in here are DNG's for me because I convert while I ingest.
RAW_held. For the images which you reject or do not want to use (eg a star rating of 2/3 or less, put them in here out of the way. The reason for this is when Photoshop does a batch process you need to point it to a folder, obviously you don't want your not so good images in there, so you put them in here.

The structures I use for any other type of photography will change as necessary, but if I need to find a file I can use this quite simply and it hasn't failed me yet. Of course you can do a lot of stuff in bridge using collections and meta tags, but you cant beat having the whole strategy built on a solid foundation to start with. What's more if you want to burn DVD's or back up bits or all of it, you just grab the relevant folder and off you go

In addition to the 'Live Music' Folder in 'My Pictures' I have another the 'Live Music Portfolio'

----- My Pictures
----- ----- Live Music Photography
----- ----- Live Music Portfolio
----- ----- ----- Held back from portfolio
----- ----- ----- jpeg

This is where I put the output Jpegs that I actually want to select to show people. I dump all the potentials in 'Held Back From Portfolio' and drag the few successful images in to the Jpeg folder (it doesn't at the moment but it will be further segregated into folders for different sizes of images (eg for their purpose) but at the moment is just web.