I spend a lot of time talking and teaching about digital workflow. And when I'm out shooting, I try to live what I teach. If you follow my blog entries, you'll know that this is the time of year I do one of my larger jobs, and workflow is the key to it.

For the last several years I've helped the Youth Symphony of Kansas City (which my son Nathan plays cello in) by shooting group photos of their many different groups. Normally I do this during the holiday concert series, which was this past weekend. For the group shots the key is light. That means I haul in three big AC-powered strobes, run power cables and mount them on tall light stands. I also set up a small studio in the hallway outside and offer to shoot portraits of the individual players.

Three groups have rehearsals in the afternoon followed by a concert, then three more that evening. I shoot candids (with the strobes) during the twenty-minute practices, then the group shots. When it's time for the concert, I turn off and lower the strobes and retreat to the hallway. That's when I'm able to start getting the real work done.

As they play, I download the photos into my laptop (a Lenovo T61) using Photo Mechanic (www.camerabits.com) and get them sorted by groups. Next I select the best candids (from rehearsal) and group shots. Then I go through the candids and use Photo Mechanic to set an 8 X 10 crop on each one, then save them out to a separate folder. If I needed to make any tonal or color changes, I'd use Lightroom (Adobe), but since I created a custom white balance for my strobes and metered them carefully, the images don't need any adjustments. I'm done with this by the time the concert's over, at which time I start shooting the portraits.

For the portraits, I use two smaller AC-powered Sunpak strobes with umbrellas and a cloth backdrop to have a clean background. To keep things simple I only do one pose per child, and can get a kid in and out in under two minutes. Once those are done, I've got an hour before the second set of rehearsals and concerts (the other three groups). That gives me time to - you guessed it - download, select and crop the portraits.

I follow the same process for the second concert series, shooting candids as they rehearse, then group shots, prep those during the concert and then individual portraits afterwards. When it's all over I pack up and head home, where I prep the last batch of portraits.

The final step is to upload the photos to a gallery on Printroom. I was able do that about three hours after the last concert ended. Parents know to check the Youth Symphony's website for a link, and they can browse and order whatever they want from Printroom. The day after they were posted, the orders started coming in.

One man stopped by while I was working in the hallway to talk about being a photographer. Earlier in life he'd done this full-time, and said he hated all the work it took to manage the film and negatives, keep track of names of kids and deal with the whole mess of taking orders and then printing and filling those orders. I agreed, that was awful. I used to do that too. But that was then and this is now. With digital and a good workflow, I can shoot, prep, upload and be done with the whole project the same day. Honestly, the hardest part of the whole thing was the three trips it took to carry all the lights, stands and gear in and out!