A few weeks ago I got a call asking if I could shoot the NCAA Division 2 Tennis championships in Kansas City May 13th. A few singles and doubles matches for men and women. No problem, should be fun to do. At least that's what I thought. What I'd find out was that the real schedule was a bit more complicated, and would require some careful workflow planning.

The assignment was to shoot all the matches for both men and women, and the awards ceremonies afterwards. All images would need to be captioned, clearly identifying every player and the match they were playing. Fifteen photos would have to be transmitted to an ftp site that day when the event was over, and a DVD shipped Monday morning with everything.

First challenge? Well, it turned out that there were three doubles matches, followed by six (SIX!) singles matches. Oh, and double that, since both men and women were playing. Eighteen matches in all. Of course there were no printed rosters, and in tennis, no one wears numbers (and often not even a team uniform). Arriving thirty-minutes before the start, I spent that time writing down the players' names for each team, and which matches they were playing. When the matches started at 10am, I started shooting.

I knew there would be two big challenges. One was keeping the matches separated during shooting, so I wouldn't have to spend time sorting them out later. The second would be in identifying all the players. To solve the first, I decided to label eleven CompactFlash cards - nine for the matches and one each for pre-tournament introductions and the trophy presentation. As far as clearly identifying, I made a note of something unique about each player (white visor, red racquet, pink bandana, etc.).

When the women's tourney finished, there was a twenty-minute break before the men's began. That gave me time to run to my car, grab the laptop from the trunk and download the images shot so far. Each card was downloaded into a separate folder named for that match. Shooting JPEGs, I was able to get everything downloaded and back to the courts for the start of the men's matches. Whew!

Same routine again for the men, with the added fun that two of the singles matches were tied after two sets, so a third had to be played. It was all over around 6:30pm, so off I went running to drive home. During the thirty-minute trip, with the laptop in the seat next to me, I was able to get all the men's matches downloaded by the time I pulled into the garage.

Now it was time to take care of the captioning. Using Photo Mechanic (www.camerabits.com), I wrote a caption for each match that identified all the players involved and batch applied it to that group of images. After doing that 18 times I was ready to choose my selects. Marking the best photos, I copied them to a separate folder. Narrowing that selection down to 15, I then re-named them according to the client's request and added extra information to those individual captions. The final step was to crop and save them out as new files, then transmit to the ftp site. Done. And all in just a 13-hour day!

Despite all the work, I can't imagine having to do this with film. Actually, I can, because that's exactly what I used to do. The processing, identifying and captioning, as well as scanning selects and transmitting, would have easily taken me into a second day. With a well-planned digital workflow even a monster assignment like this can be handled in one day. The key always comes down to workflow. Whether it's the family vacation or the Olympics, take some time to think about the steps you'll use to organize your photos, from download to naming and sorting. It makes all the difference between saving time and losing time (or worse, photos).