The wisdom of workflow

The wisdom of workflow

In each of the journeys that shape our lives, we will almost certainly experience an epiphany moment.

Joining the camera club at high school introduced me to something that I might otherwise never have experienced — the darkroom. And what the darkroom taught me about myself and my hobby, has ended up being more important than anything I learned about the actual developing and printing process itself. In a nutshell, I was beginning to understand the shape of my own creative philosophy and on the road to knowing what photography means to me.

Understand what drives your passion.

Only once you truly understand what it is that drives your passion for photography, are you able to best invest the time, money and effort needed to achieve your goals.

The after-school-hours I spent in the darkroom as an adolescent, taught me two things: first, that I had a neediness for being in control of the whole creative process — from taking the shot to making the print; and, second, that the single most important element in my photography was getting the shot exactly as I’d planned it — in camera, not in the darkroom.

I saw then that the first lesson was simply a step towards achieving the far more important second one. In other words, my interest in the darkroom was not an extension of my passion for photography but a tool that fed back into it. My images only made me happy if what I saw projected beneath the enlarger met my original expectation. Consequently, I would scrutinise the contact sheets to understand why some shots had not turned out as anticipated and then use that knowledge to go back out and get the shot right.

Understanding that my greatest strength was a natural eye for composition told me that I needed to concentrate my efforts on getting a better grasp of the theoretical and physical workings of the camera itself. It was only then, through combining my inherent feel for aesthetics with a newfound pragmatic knowledge, that my photography progressed to a higher level. The quest to forever improve my technical know-how remains with me to the present day and is the reason for believing that workflow is not something that starts when we introduce a memory card to a computer but which starts long before we even shoot the first frame. It is a process rooted in planning & preparation, in equipment selection, and even in the clothes that we wear — arriving on location with the wrong gear or wearing the wrong clothes does not bode well for the quality of the images that will emerge.

Use a workflow that stimulates rather than stifles your creativity.

Those lessons were learnt in the days of wet film, chemicals and darkness. Naturally, the advent of digital photography has introduced changes to the ways in which we work — not, I hope, in the way that we compose our pictures but in what happens to them after they leave the camera. This is the part of workflow that is commonly called post-processing.

It may seem a little farfetched to suggest that our method of workflow might, in some way, compromise our creative philosophy; particularly if you are equating workflow with post-processing. But, if that were the case, there wouldn’t be such a confusing array of hardware and software available for us to choose from. Some of those products are designed to perform very specific tasks. Others attempt to be end-to-end solutions. Even the producers of the latter category understand that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all workflow, which is why they add support for those specialist products as plugins.

With so many products to choose from, my advice is to evaluate and select the tools that work with you, not against you — i.e. don’t change your workflow to fit the product, choose the product that fits your workflow.

Parting shot

As usual, this article is a philosophical reflection rather than a technical discourse but, that said, I thought there might be some interest in outlining the choices that I made to support the post-processing elements of my own workflow; these are listed below:

  • Nikon Transfer 2, for managing the camera upload process. NT2 gives me full control of the image import process and automatically launches Capture One 12 to provide a seamless workflow.
  • Phase One – Capture One 12, for cataloguing, lens correction, white balance checking, exposure checking and level checking. This application includes support for adding a wide range of custom adjustments if required.
  • Binartem – Qimage One, for printing. This is a specialist application that not only provides high-end support for ICC profiles but also supports full batch processing of the entire print process. If you are producing fine-art images for exhibition or sale then this is the product to choose.

There is one factor that affects nearly all of our choices in life, and that is budget. In my experience, this choice, too, is predominantly a philosophical one — but that is a subject that deserves an entirely separate contemplation.

Nigel Fawcett

One of the many benefits of being retired is that I get to spend so much more time in the great outdoors, not only as a photographer but in exercising one of my other great passions — hill walking. This is a particularly good fit when one’s photography centres around nature and the landscape. There can be few better places to do that than here in the beautiful mountains of Tuscany.