Photography tips from our workshop in Lisbon, Portugal

James Dockery, coordinating editor for ESPN, talks with David White and Amanda Ross about how to improve their photos and showing them on the camera some settings that made a difference. [Fuji X-E2, 18-55mm, ISO 6400, ƒ/6.4, 1/90] 

We have been having to address some digital workflow issues this week with a few students. After going through this I thought you as a reader of the blog might enjoy hearing what problems many were having and how to avoid them.

Free Space

The number one issue we had with many of the students was the amount of free space they had on their laptops. They had no room to add software, photos and video due to being so full.

Good rule of thumb is to have about 20% of free space on your hard drive.

Filling your hard drive until it's almost full is just recipe for a disaster. First, your computer needs some free space for creating swap space to manage memory use. Even when you have adequate RAM, the operating system will reserve some space at startup for memory swap space. In addition, individual applications usually use some disk space for temporary storage.

On a Macbook Pro go to the hard drive. Highlight it and then hit ⌘-I and it will show you the free space on your computer.

More free space is great but try to have a minimum of 20% free. This is a good place to read about my workflow for photos if you want to know what to do.

Here James Dockery, Amanda Ross and Jeff Raymond are in downtown Lisbon waiting to eat at Restaurante Cabacas. [Fuji X-E2, 18-55mm, ISO 6400, ƒ/9, 1/2.5, flash is bounced across the alley into the wall to help fill in on their faces] 

Shoot, Edit, Review & Shoot Again

The ideal way to do a story is to shoot it and then review your work. After editing all the work see what is missing and then schedule more time to go back and shoot some more.

All our students have spent time with their subjects and then everyone has gone back to shoot even more photos and video to improve their story.

Amanda Ross is shooting and reviewing what she is doing as she goes. [Fuji X-E2, 55-200mm, ISO 25600,  ƒ/3.7,  1/60]

Crank the ISO up

When you are out shooting street scene at night, crank your ISO up so you capture the moment. If you have a Fuji X-E2 you can shoot at ISO 25600 and still get OK quality photos. Yes there is a little noise, but you will be surprised at what you can get at high ISO on some of the newer cameras.

The photo of the lady with the camera above is shot at ISO 25600. Then the photo below is shot at ISO 400 in the middle of the day. Yes the noise is non-existent at ISO 400 but I can live with the quality of the 25600, especially when the choice is no photo at all in this low of light.

[Fuji X-E2, 18-55mm, ISO 400, ƒ/7.1, 1/800] 

Shoot Textures

When you travel just shoot the textures you find. You can use these later for title slides or backgrounds for lower third title slides.

[Fuji X-E2, 55-200mm, ISO 800, ƒ/4, 1/500]