Last weekend I had the honor of being the primary photographer for 30 Hour Day, a first-of-its-kind charity telethon held entirely online as opposed to traditional broadcast media. I was in the studio taking photos as well as processing and uploading selected photos to Flickr. Clients love quick turnaround, and by putting the photos online it gave telethon viewers a glimpse “behind the scenes” into the people and workings of the studio.
I got some questions both from people in the studio as well as online about my workflow and how I quickly pushed photos to Flickr and Twitter. As background information, I was shooting with a pair of cameras using CF cards. I had my MacBook Pro with a card reader and Lightroom. I use Jeffrey Friedl’s Lightroom Export plugin for Flickr. Here’s how I did it:
- Every hour or two, I’d offload files from the CF cards onto my computer and import them into Lightroom.
- During the import, Lightroom was automatically assigning event-specific keywords as well as adding my copyright info to the EXIF data.
- All of the photos were then placed into a Lightroom collection for the event.
- A generic description for the event was added to every photo – in this case “From the studio at 30 Hour Day”
- I’d quickly go through the collection, rating each photo with one, two, or three stars. One-star photos aren’t good, two-star photos are okay but not my best work, and three-star photos are those that are candidates for uploading. Lightroom tip: if you turn on Caps Lock while rating photos, you’ll jump to the next photo as soon as you hit the number on your keyboard.
- After rating, use the Library Filter to only show images in the collection that are three stars.
- Go through the three-star images and make Develop adjustments to the ones I was going to publish. For the most part I wasn’t making any substantial edits, mainly white balance adjustments and the occasional exposure adjustment (either global or with the adjustment brush). I was probably spending 30 seconds (or less) per image on average.
- After making Develop module adjustments on an image, when it was ready to publish I’d label it with the green label (using the keyboard shortcut – the 8 key – to make this quick).
- I created a Smart Collection with the following criteria, used throughout the event as I processed photos:
- In the 30 Hour Day collection
- Rating at least 3 stars
- Color label is green
- Has not been uploaded to Flickr (this is a custom property set by the export plugin)
- Go through each of the photos in the Smart Collection (to be uploaded) and give them a title.
- After each batch, upload the photos to Flickr, placing them in appropriate groups.
- While exporting, use the plugin’s option to send out a tweet – include the event’s hashtag (in this case #30hd) and a link to my Flickr photoset for the event.
With this system I was able to quickly and easily get photos online from the studio in a fast manner that also pushed the photos to Flickr and Twitter.
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