Posts

Film Photo Workflow


2012-06-12 • 01:03:00

Handsom, Doctor Popular

  1. Take a photo
  2. Finish a roll (30 minutes - 3 months)
  3. Try to remember to label roll with load and finish date (only done it once)
  4. Develop roll (a night at Noisebridge), or hand off to Photoworks (a few days)
  5. Wearing gloves, load film into scanning trays, cleaning off all dust then using canned air just to be safe
  6. Scan roll with VueScan on an Epson V700 (30 - 90 minutes depending on how anal I am)
  7. Scan again because I missed some setting within VueScan because of how horribly complicated it is
  8. Apply exiftool metadata changes for camera body type, and lens
  9. Place photos somewhere in a directory structure that makes sense to me
  10. Boot up Windows virtual machine and start Lightroom
  11. Import photos placed in the right spot into Lightroom
  12. During import also stamp into the EXIF my name, contact info, site, and Creative Commons license
  13. Make sure photos imported chronologically
  14. Track down film manufacturer, make, ISO, film codes, and tag all information into each photo (15 minutes)
  15. Make a first pass of picks, only update those from this point
  16. Bring up Google Latitude history, my calendar and digital photos I took along the same time frame
  17. Attempt to remember where specifically I took each photo
  18. Using Latitude approximate the time stamp for each photo and update EXIF (60 - 120 minutes)
  19. Target by hand exact geo location of each photo with the jfGPS plugin, because Latitude is inaccurate and only updates every 15 minutes (60 minutes)
  20. Reverse geoencode city, state, country data into EXIF
  21. Make a second pass of picks, only update those from this point
  22. Rotate photos to proper orientation
  23. Mass apply 2:3 aspect ratio
  24. Crop, tilt (30 minutes)
  25. Third pass of picks
  26. Dust/scratch/artifact removal (60 minutes)
  27. Development corrections, colors, tone curve
  28. Noise reduction or sharpening
  29. Artsy farsty color isolation and other things I tend to avoid in film (60 minutes)
  30. Fourth pass of picks
  31. Add content tags for names of people in photos, landmarks, objects, colors, spirit animals, hate, anger (60 minutes)
  32. Add snarky titles with odd capitalization and captions that only make sense to me (15 minutes)
  33. Double check that photos contain the proper metadata, including Creative Commons license information, geo data, film type, camera, and anything else that'll get stuffed into the EXIF
  34. Fifth, final pass of picks
  35. Create a "collection" in Lightroom with time stamp of first photo taken and toss photos in there
  36. If other photos exist (digital, other rolls) taken at the same event/date, check time stamps make sense and photos appear correctly when chronologically ordered (60 minutes)
  37. Last minute dust removal and other developing things (15 minutes)
  38. Using jfFlickr plugin prepare photos for Flickr upload with film, camera, lens, geo location data also included as (machine) tags and Creative Commons info in caption
  39. Export and upload to Flickr
  40. Babysit the upload, while compulsively hitting refresh on the Activity page to see if anyone favorited anything yet (60 minutes)
  41. Check photos to find the two with spelling errors or screwed up tags or wrong geo location, correct it in Lightroom, resend metadata only (15 minutes)
  42. Resend metadata to update "Photo" link in the Creative Commons license info in the caption to actually point to the same page
  43. Create a new Flickr set for the photos with proper time stamp of first photo taken, throw photos in there
  44. Review the photos and criticize myself about nothing more than just having to see these photos over and over again for the past week and being completely sick of them (30 minutes)
  45. Dump some of the better photos into a couple random Flickr Groups for posterity (15 minutes)
  46. Make a post on this site with a hand full of photos I liked from the roll and a link back to the set on Flickr (60 minutes)
  47. Tweet and Google+ about the post
  48. Compulsively watch the Activity page (for the next couple of days)
  49. Become frustrated with this garbage that has taken so long that it's 5 in the morning now and there's no one around that gives two shits about the photos I've posted (again for the next couple of days)
  50. Get disgruntled over this masochistic photography workflow I've created for myself (extra minutes if I vocalize it to others over IM)
  51. Resolve to cry and masturbate on the floor of a cold and dark closet, never wanting to ever pick up a camera again (two bottles of wine later)
  52. Months pass
  53. Photo backlog spans over a year
  54. Feel like I'm creatively dying and need to improve something (end up at a bar)
  55. Select a couple rolls of high speed black and white and toss my film camera in my bag, because it'll some how make me feel good to carry around that extra weight with me for a few weeks, like a dead body rolled up in a carpet representing the alternative time line where I pick up meth and become a wedding photographer
  56. Take a photo

Or I can just take a crappy looking photo with my Android, 'chop the shit out of it, push it to Flickr within the same day, and just remind myself that no one looks at photos bigger than a 640px resolution and that online photography is a sham, like with the one above.



Rubin Starset