How To Do A Professional Assignment – Step Five

How To Do A Professional Assignment – Step Five

by William Lulow

If I’m doing a studio portrait, after I’ve shot about 40 – 50 frames (after I’ve shown the subject some of the images), we then decide to look at the images on the computer in the office. I use Adobe Bridge to create a file folder of the images and bring them up on the screen one by one. Together with the client, we make some preliminary selects. If we both are satisfied with the initial “take,” I will then pick a few the client likes best and bring them into Photoshop for some basic cropping and editing, including some retouching. If the client really likes a specific shot, I will then make an 8×10 print of the frame so they have something to hold in their hands. I believe it is important to see what the shot looks like printed. We used to make printed contact sheets in the days of film and I think too many photographers just view images on the computer without ever printing them out. I usually give the client two or three 8×10 prints that they can leave with, in addition to a flash drive with all the images and a folder designated with the final photographs. Many people are familiar with some type of image editing software these days, so I certainly don’t resize all images from a shoot. But I will resize most of the selects. If the client wants the image for a website or other web use, I usually give them a smaller version of the 8×10 that is suitable for inserting in a website.

If the client is an agency or magazine, I usually send them the entire shoot un-edited via FTP or Dropbox. They have art departments and specialists who are far better at retouching and digital manipulations than I am. I do, however, remove any obvious mistakes like blank frames or ones that are not exposed correctly, bad expressions, blinks, etc.

As I have mentioned previously, I then store all the files on one of my external drives as well as my iCloud account. Any off premise storage of important image files is preferable to those on premises, but in over thirty years of doing business, I still have a few of my original negatives dating back to the 1970s.

Lately, I have been using Adobe Bridge for selecting and imprinting of metadata on each file. I find it a bit less cumbersome than Adobe Lightroom and the integration into Photoshop is really seamless. Just as an aside, I recently upgraded my computer’s memory from 8GB RAM to 16GB and the difference in how fast each image loads is incredible. Probably goes without saying, but if you do a fair amount of image manipulations, the greater the memory, the better. I could probably use 32GB but 16GB seems to be working very well.

Here are a few of my external hard drives.

So, that takes care of my workflow. I can usually find an image fairly quickly with my storage system. Everything is saved in folders first by date, then by name. If the shoot happened over ten or fifteen years ago, it might take me a minute to find it, but I have found that typing a name in the search bar usually does the trick. The next step is to make sure the job is invoiced and that the bills are sent out promptly. Most agencies usually take 30 days to pay. I usually ask private clients and smaller companies to pay upon receipt of the images.