About Time

Huawei E5330

Having recently upgraded to a smart phone it only seemed sensible that I upgrade from a rather dodgy “3” Dongle, which works more less as and when it feels like it, frequently showing zero signal which connected & sending images, then minutes later showing full strength signal whilst dropping the connection, so a cheap mifi is the order of the day, meaning that I also am not tying up a valuable USB port whilst wiring images.

My Workflow

I have been asked by several newbie photographers in the last few weeks and months about post capture work flow and compression of images, in readiness for wiring.

Images: Files Size and Compression

Having cropped, adjusted the levels and sharpened you image, the next most important element is to compress it to a size that is feasible to wire to your Agency or Newspaper.

Image Captioning

Image selection prior to wiring is critical, take time to choose the images that best tell the story that you are covering. Images should be sharp, and accurately exposed.

On occasions you will find that papers will use muzzy poorly exposed images, if the content is strong enough. There are occasions were perfect high quality images are not possible to get, shooting through shop windows, car windows, or shooting by available street lights at night means that images are going to be very noisy and very probably a bit soft.

What are Histograms?

Sample Histogram

Histograms are not widely understood, but taking a few moments to learn about them can improve your photography significantly. Histograms can show you immediately whether your images are overexposed, underexposed, or just right, and help you to make any necessary changes when re-shooting a scene.

Post Capture Workflow

I have been asked by several newbie press photographers in the last few weeks and months about post capture work flow and compression of images, in readiness for wiring. Whilst Image Compression is dealt with elsewhere in this blog, I shall cover some of my practices for image processing.

Image Size, File Size and Compression.

Having cropped, adjusted the levels and sharpened you image, the next most important element is to compress it to a size that is feasible to wire to your Agency or Newspaper.

Firstly lets define a couple of terms that we will use through this page, just to save some confusion later on.

• File Size relates to the amount of hard disk space a compressed image will occupy.
• Image Size relates to the number of pixels in the image, by which Photoshop will determine the image size in Mb ie 3504×2336 pixels is approximately 23.4Mb.