About workflow - or, how to process 100,000 photographs

Road, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Lychnis viscaria, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Wild strawberry, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

As I wrote here on Friday, I have taken over 100,000 photographs with the LX3 which I bought in September, 2008, just after it became available in shops.

I was asked about the workflow: how I process hundreds of images daily (well, on the average about 150 images per day). Simplicity, that is the recipe.

In the beginning I was doing quite a lot of post-processing to the images, but I have more or less stopped that since the last few months. Occasionally I correct the color balance (this is often necessary with artificial light), but that is rare. Every once in a while I may change exposure or contrast a little bit afterwards, like in the first image here, where I slightly decreased the exposure to make the image better match the actual situation. But I don't do it often, I try to get the photograph right in the camera.

When I look at some of my older photographs, for example some from 2008, I tend to dislike the heavy post-processing. (There are some exceptions, though.)

Nowadays I transfer the images to iPhoto on my iMac using an usb card reader, and then I go fast through the images deleting about 90-95 percent of them. Then I go through the remaining images once again and delete some more. Then I upload the images to Flickr and name them there.

Below you see how it looks in the beginning of the process. Yesterday I had 244 images, and of the 28 shown here I deleted all but two.



Although I haven't been buying new cameras all the time, I have had quite a few cameras before the LX3. As I have previously discussed, I'm serious about buying cameras, and do a lot of work beforehand.

My first own camera was a Minolta XG-1, an aperture-priority SLR, but before that I was allowed to use a family camera, a Canon Canonet QL 17 GIII. And afterwards I have used numerous small film cameras, even an APS format camera (does anyone remember that still).

Before the LX3 I had a Canon Digital Ixus 400 for several years, but the lens got stuck, and thus I started to look for another camera. And after checking out the LX3 in a shop, I bought it, even though no "serious" reviews of the camera had been published yet.