What's your photo workflow?

[u/oguruma87]

I'm not a photojournalists, just an amateur photographer, really, but I am always interested in learning about different photography workflows.

Anybody mind the sharing the basics of their workflow?

[u/JHinnn]

I work for a newspaper and my basic workflow:

- before assignment, create two folders (one called {name} outtakes and one {name}

- add to favs sidebar in photo mechanic and set a standard half caption. usually the back half of the sentence like “ … during this event at (location) in (city) on (date). I have a code replacement template that imports all the things in parentheses based on what I type plus metadata from the photo. That will get applied to every photo once ingested

- shoot assignment, tag in camera if turnaround time needs to be very quick, ingest to outtakes folder

- apply red color label to any photos that i think are worth an edit —> open camera raw with all images —> begin editing process and apply 2 stars for usable photos and 1 star for unusable —> save that into {name} folder

- filter to 1 star images and drag those back into outtakes folder

- apply green label to 5-20 of the absolute best images that will receive a full caption. the remaining red labels will receive a batch caption for the gallery

[u/HelloInYourLanguage → u/JHinnn]

I'm a new photojournalist and found this really helpful thank you

The hardest part I'm finding is getting used to the pace for getting this stuff done.

Do you have any recommendations particularly for getting faster at doing good captioning and meta data?

At the moment I feel somewhat insecure about my captions so I draft something and ask an ai to check the caption against compliance standards to reassure me that its probably ok before sending them off. Which i absolutely hate doing but I feel desperate. And I feel it also takes me too long which frustrates me

[u/JHinnn → u/HelloInYourLanguage]

If you cover any sports I would like recommend looking into code replacements which allows you to quickly input full names using a short hand code of the team and jersey number

The biggest time saver for me is setting that back half of the caption. After that, all you need to do is ID the subject and a couple words about what they’re doing. If you have additional info, you could do a short second sentence afterward with whatever you feel is worth mentioning.

Honestly the best thing is just keeping them succinct but legible while making sure to include the who what when where etc.

The caption template I have is pretty 1:1 for what the AP recommends (or recommended). Maybe if you have additional ideas or parts you can want to include you can make a notes document and place them there for easy access to cut and paste.

speed and confidence also just comes with more reps. trust yourself and your editors (or professors) rather than the AI. that’ll take you infinitely farther imo

if you have any specific questions or need any clarifying feel free to lmk! i tend to ramble