Photowalk 44 of 52 - Historic Dover

Photowalk 44 of 52 - Historic Dover - POTW, originally uploaded by dm|ze.

Photowalk 44 of 52 - Historic Dover

So I went to Dover for this walk knowing that I wanted to get some shots of the historic buildings and stuff here.

I got a big surprise though...

See more pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/dmize/


I happened upon a little festival or something where people where dressed from the 1800's. Wow, what a find.. looking back a vaguely remember hearing something about this but didn't really pay attention. There were some pretty cool characters here. My favorite two were the wood worker and the metal worker. You can see both of them in a my shots on flickr. I really tried to compose these well and I think I did a good job. When composing I tried very hard to not get tourists and vehicles in the shots. I used curves in rawstudio to process the raw files for each and then did simple edits (crops, straighten, sharpening) in gimp. I'm still working on my entire workflow, I feel like its a process that will always evolve as things change.

My current workflow after taking the pictures are....
- Download the pictures to my hard drive using Picasa 3.8 (running using wine in Ubuntu linux) during this picasa automagically deletes downloaded pictures from the card.
- My folders are labeled as YYYY_MM_DD (EVENT - LOCATION)
- Then I go through with Picasa to see my shots. (Hopefully I delete ones that are so far beyond repair that I would never do anything with them. Sadly I don't always do this so a fair amount of blurred shots are backed up on DVDs)
- I'm currently shooting almost entirely RAW so I may go through and star the ones. Until picasa allows me to select and export or copy the raw files to another "working" folder I will not use the export function in picasa. If I shot JPG then it's not big deal I will select the ones I like and want to further edit or upload and export them to my "working" folder.
- For my RAWs I currently will use one of the various RAW processors I have on my machine. I used rawstudio for these and I liked how they turned out. The program does have some quirks but nothing is perfect.
- I will process the ones I want and put them to my "working" folder.
- Now I open them in gimp apply the edits that will get me to my vision. Add my watermark, most of the time, and sharpen.
- Then I will save that as an xcf (Gimp native file, similar to psd file)
- Then I will save as a JPG file for possible prints
- Then I will scale it down to another JPG for web uploads

I know there are probably some areas that I could make a little more efficient and I will eventually. I really wish gimp could do macros because that alone would make my life a lot easier. Anyone want to share their workflow... do it in the comments.

Thanks for reading and check out more of my photos on my flickr