in case you're interested...

equipment

work flow

Most of the photos shown on this site were taken with a digital SLR. Early photos were taken with a film SLR and the negatives scanned in.

My present equipment is:

• Canon 5D and 10D digital single lens reflexes
• Canon 16-35mm L
• Canon 28-135mm IS
• Canon 50mm 1.8
• Sigma 70-300mm apo
• 2 x 4meg Compact Flash cards
• Canon Speedlite flash gun

I chose a Canon when I went digital because I had previously owned Canon film cameras and the lenses all fitted. Back to top.

Workflow.

I usually shoot in RAW format as this gives me the most options for later processing. The main exception is when know I am going to use the images purely for uploading to a web site in which case I use best quality JPEG.

I then auto download images from the CF card via a USB2 card reader using Downloader Pro from Breeze Systems. Images are saved into a date stamped folder inside another folder named after the camera - Downloader Pro does all this automatically.

The images are stored in an I-Match database from Phototools. It is opened automatically by Downloader Pro. From here I enter IPTC information for each image - title, categories, keywords, etc. I-Match is not the easiest application to use but it is a professional database for very large amounts of images and is infinitely customisable - it will do what ever you want, unlike most applications which force you to do what they want.

Apart from my normal back up routine, when I have about 4.5 GB of RAW images (roughly 800 images) I back them up to DVD and transfer them to a second 120GB hard disk on a removable caddy. This means I can store the images somewhere else in case of fire or theft as well as have them always instantly available.

Photoshop CS2 is used for converting selected RAW images to TIFF and then for adjusting levels, cropping, etc and also for batch operations such as web page photo galleries.

Fred Miranda's Photoshop plug-ins are used for for sharpening (better than un-sharp mask), stair interpolation and noise reduction. Back to top.