One thing I’ve been wanting to share here are a few workflow tips on photographing sports for your kids. These are things I’ve worked into my PhotoFlow over time and they really save me time and stress – especially when shooting photos to share with the team.

1. Workflow Starts Before The Game (Setting Up To Sync)

If you are shooting with an SLR there are a few things you can do to make your post-processing seamless. Basketball is shot in different gyms with different lighting so getting a good white balance is critical. One of the tricks I use is to zoom in on anything white around the court (most often it is a piece of a players uniform), switch to manual focus and blur the image then take a shot. I then will set the custom white balance with that shot.

After downloading photos into Lightroom I select the Previous Import collection on the left pane. Then I use the white eyedropper tool in Develop mode to set the white balance of the photo. Pressing “G” to switch back to Library mode I then press CTRL/CMD+A to select all the photos from the game and then press Sync Settings on the lower right of the right library pane.  I choose white balance and Synchronize and the white balance is corrected for all the photos.

You will find the Sync settings in Lightroom to truly be a major timesaver. There are times when I still have to fine tune develop settings but more often than not this gives me exactly what I need.

2. Store The Season’s Photos in One Computer Folder

3. Delete

4. Keyword Players with Number & Name

I learned this one the hard way. Try shooting photos of an entire season – that’s 20+ Varsity games with about 50 photos a game. Then try to share those photos with parents in a way that is meaningful for each player. Chances are a disk with over 1000 images is just too overwhelming to get through.

This year I got smart and started a keyword category with the team name and then added each player as a sub-keyword with #-Lastname_firstname. Most teams will have a written program with the player’s names and numbers which is a great help in building these keywords/tags.

I know some will ask why I put the number first and there is a good reason! When you are key wording your photos, you will find that it is much easier and faster to keyword according to number – especially with new players you don’t recognize early in the season. Most photos will show the uniform and player number, making the process of key wording a breeze.

Now there are also sports where players don’t have numbers – in that case I just keyword in a “lastname_firstname” or “firstname_lastname” fashion. Choose whichever is easier for you to recognize as you keyword.

5. Star Ratings

My usual workflow goes something like this – sync, delete, key wording, basic editing. During my final pass I then add star ratings to my photos. This is something that has literally saved me hours of searching. 1 star means the photo gets uploaded to the team Facebook page. 2 stars means it is in the running for a great individual shot (I often share these with our local newspaper). 3 stars means it goes into my personal portfolio of favorite images.

Star ratings come in especially helpful when administration, coaches and media call for images of a particular player. They also come in handy for the coaches’ annual photo book and senior night spotlights. When you have around 300 images of some of your top players it makes it so easy to filter down to the best images to share.

6. Get Help When Choosing Photos

I often will get my daughter’s opinion when going through the first pass to delete photos. While I tend to look at the images from a technical perspective, she has the player’s perspective and can easily spot photos they will love.  It’s always good to get a second opinion from a peer of your photo subjects.

7. Share on Facebook

One of my favorite tools for sharing is Facebook. Create albums based on individual games and share. Set the album privacy to public and then share the albums on the team’s Facebook page. Players and parents will tag their girls and the comments are a fun way to share stories behind the photos written by the players. Lightroom’s interface with Facebook allows you download these comments. Generally I only copy comments that are most relevant and add them to the caption field for the photo.

8. Create a Keyword and Sub-Keywords for Teams Played

This is something I implemented late in the last season and wished I had done it earlier. With a Teams Played keyword and then sub-keywords for the names of the teams you can easily filter photos. This comes in especially handy when trying to gather good photos from several games instead of just one. It is also fun when you have a longstanding team rivalry and can provide past photos for the two teams quickly.

9. Don’t Forget Coaches and Refs

Some of my favorite photos are of coaches and referees doing their thing. Coaches hold a special place in hearts of players – you don’t want to miss opportunities to include them in the season’s photo collection.

I also recommend including referees – they seriously add so much to the game. It is also great to get both the coach and referee in a shot that shows the tension of the game:

I must confess I have a keyword called “Refs” and when games get particularly stressful because of lots of bad calls, I photograph the refs making them. Honestly it is a coping mechanism. I call it my game therapy because taking a photo of the ref is much better than yelling at the ref or running on the court to tell him where to go… but I digress.

10. Export to Share

The final step of this workflow happens at the end of the season. Filter to a player, press CTRL/CMD +A to select all the photos and then choose File > Export then export to a file folder on your desktop named for each individual player. When finished with all the players’ individual folders, filter down to photos by game and export to individual folders for each game. Finally, burn photos for each player including their individual folder and the game folders. It really is that simple.

I also usually create a coaches book which includes layouts for each player and letters to the coaches – without this workflow it wouldn’t be possible – but I’ll save the how-to on that for another post.

Whew! That’s a lot of info in one post but hopefully it is helpful. Now I’m running off to get packed! Any suggestions on locations for great photos in Vegas? I’m all ears!

Today we get to talk about one of the coolest things about digital, and that is printing.  There is nothing like seeing your digital creations in print and paper. When it comes to digital you have so many options.

First is printing using your own printer – which is totally doable – however probably one of the most expensive – we’ll get to that later in the post.  For now, we will focus on printing services:

My favorite layout printing service is Persnickety Prints.  Their quality is wonderful and the attention to detail that goes into every order for the prices is wonderful!  You can learn more about them here.

Another way to print your layouts is in books – my favorite is Shutterfly.  There are many others who offer this service, all with their own pros and cons.  Stephanie of The Daily Digi wrote an awesome review of several different publishers that I highly recommend here.

For my quick gifts and cards, I often find myself going to Costco for prints.  Probably because I am the most familiar with their online upload process and I am always there picking something up for our family – it is convenient and easy for me to start something and finish it completely only hours later – I love that!

The great thing about digital is that you can always size your layouts any size you need – so you can print at pretty much any photo center – Walmart included.

As for printing your layouts yourself, personally I find myself doing this less and less except for quick projects.  For my personal layouts – I use an HP B8550.  It isn’t the workhorse or quite as vivid as my Epson R1800 was, but my ink is less expensive because I can buy XL size tanks, and for quick projects here and there, it works wonderfully.  Also, after switching to Mac and having the performance of my Epson drop dramatically, I am not a huge Epson fan any more.  In fact, I am not much of a printing it yourself fan any longer as you can have higher quality prints for far less money from a photo retailer.

So that’s me – now for you.  Readers, where are your favorite places to print?  Do share!

One of the things I love about my workflow is that all of my Adobe programs work together.  Trying to represent that visually is somewhat challenging.  So imagine my surprise when I saw slides last week on Julianne Kost’s blog that explain it…

And just a few illustrations of workflow in Lightroom…

Adding Photoshop/Elements to the mix…

The best part about Lightroom?  When I make enhancements in Photoshop, Lightroom tracks the changes when I save the file – it doesn’t get better than that!

Except when it comes to output.  Once everything is tracked in Lightroom (it happens seamlessly without adding steps to my workflow), I have several options for output – and they are all easy to do.  No more creating several versions and saving them for different things in different folders – i.e. blog, Flickr, etc.  I do it all from within Lightroom!

Again, props and thanks to Julianne for sharing these slides.

A few other difficulties – the low light in the auditorium, rules against flash photography and forgetting to turn off the image stabilization on my zoom lens because I was using a tripod….that and the high ISO required made things just a tad bit fuzzy…

However, the most interesting thing was that out of 820 images take for the event, I only kept 80 of them.  Even more interesting is that only 8 of those images made it into the 2 star “I should probably scrapbook this” range.

I love that digital photography gives me the ability to literally take hundreds of images for an event quickly.  I also love that the X key in Lightroom allows me to quickly flag images that are duplicates or don’t seem scrap worthy – literally in seconds.  I love that I no longer fear the delete key in my photo editing – all in all it took me an hour to process those images – I love that my workflow is working!

How about you – what percentage of your images are you keep these days?