It goes something like this... Girl Meets Boy, Boy Asks Girl Out, yada yada... Boy Asks Girl a Question...
Kidding. Well I mean yeah, that's how a wedding happens (basically :D), but I'm into something a little cooler... Wedding photoshoot, anyone? So I met with the awesome mentor yesterday, Oct. 29, and he filled me in on everything that goes on in the studio, nutshell version. Holy crap, mindblown. so. freaking. organized.
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Yo, it's Amy and it's Nov. 27. I most definitely put off finishing this blog post, oops? Anyways, so I left off on how organized Studio563 is... uhm yeah. They're really organized. So after a wedding, where hundreds, if not more, photos are taken, everything's uploaded to the computer and converted from RAW files to JPEGS. All of the files are named by year, date, event/client, photographer (in that order). Every little detail is plotted out - the files are named by year so month and date names don't get confusing (111 could be January 11 or November 1, for example).
Next the photographer will view all the images through this program that lets him color-code tag the photos he wants to keep. Then all the tagged images are filtered into categories something along the lines of "Pre-Reception, Reception, Post-Reception, Ceremony, Post-Ceremony, and Details." Detail shots would be the cool artistic shots with shoes, jewelry, etc. They're probably my favorite photos to view. :D Teaser images may be put onto the photographer's Studio563 blog, to "keep the clients happy" and showcase Studio563 on the web. (or give a silly procrastinator like me photos to look through when I'm avoiding euro notes...)
Photos with similar lighting/locations are mass-edited in Adobe Lightroom, with maybe 10% of photos edited with Photoshop. Most photo edits for weddings are outsourced, with profit built into client fees, and outsourcing for profit, in Eric's words, is the best thing I, or anyone, could do in a business.
With yet another nifty program, photos are resized and uploaded to an online gallery for clients to select to buy. Studio 563 also offers professional photo albums, etc. and if that was the case, the photographer would have been working on the album cover throughout the photo editing process.
Tying the whole process together is a magicalll whiteboard. This magical whiteboard is divided into two sections: the top refers to wedding photoshoots, the bottom, family shoots, senior pics, etc. Categories for each step of the process, from camera to finished product, are listed, and as a photographer finishes say, tagging or editing or even uploading pics to a blog, he or she writes his/her initials to keep track of what needs to be done. So yeah, organization insanity. Every part of the process is tracked, and every part of the process has reason and logic behind it.
I asked Eric where this system came from, and he told me that when he and fellow photographer Andy founded Studio563, they sat down and planned their system all at once. Talk about impressive. Andy had heard about a similar system at a photographer's seminar, and he and Eric adapted it for themselves. Eric could not stress enough how important it was for a studio to have some sort of method behind everything, and all I could think of was "no kidding? and why had I never thought about the logistics of these things..."
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On the same day, Eric also showed be the basics of using my dSLR. Still have yet to find time to experiment. But the basics of it all is that the the aperture, the amount of light that goes through the lens; shutter speed, which determines how much blur; and ISO, the measurement of the camera's sensitivity to light are all in a balancing act that a photographer controls to achieve a desired effect.
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Back to the whole discussion on photography degrees. Another point Eric made is that he felt a lot of times, photography majors get burnt out, and this art we're all supposed to love becomes a chore. I wanted to put what he said somewhere, it holds truth.
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FINALLY DONE WITH THIS BLOGPOST. BYEBYE.
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