Caption your photos like a pro with Photo Mechanic!

As well as running my successful photography workshop business, I also take photos for press. If, like me, you shoot as a freelancer, you only get paid if your pictures are used online or in print. I think the quicker you can get the photos landing on the picture desk, the more likely you will be used. Everything about my workflow is about turning around quality images fast. Today, I am going to share how I do it.

The key to a fast turnaround is having helpful tools and preparation. This week, I am shooting the run of an interview show, Iain Dale’s All Talk, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Over eight days, there will be 70-minute interviews with famous politicians and entertainers. I’m sure some of you won’t agree with the people being interviewed, but that is lesson one of shooting for the press: You must be impartial and shoot a selection of images that can be used in the papers.

The most important tool is Photo Mechanic. There might be a discussion over the best editing tool for photographers, but almost every professional photographer who sends images to newspapers will use Photo Mechanic. I start my workflow several hours before the shoot by creating a caption template. This will contain the important information that needs to be added to the photo metadata so that the picture desks know what the picture is about, who is in it, who took it, and most importantly for me, how I can get paid when they use it!

To create a template, open Photo Mechanic, go to the Image Menu, and select the option Metadata, open bracket, IPTC, close bracket, Template. You can see here that I already have a template part configured. I file my images through an agency called Alamy, and they have a strict requirement as to how the captions should appear. I make this process fast by using the variables feature in Photo Mechanic.

Anything with curly brackets around it is a variable field. You can see the complete list of fields available by clicking the variable button and then double-clicking on the field to insert it into the template.

In the caption field, Alamy always wants the information in a particular order. The city variable takes its feed from whatever is typed in the City field over here on the right-hand side. If your camera has GPS activated, this info will be populated automatically when the photos are imported into Photo Mechanic. I don’t trust how well my Canon R5 and R6 add this data, so I tend to type it in as the City isn’t going to change when I am shooting at a single venue. The same applies to the country field.

The next three fields relate to the date the picture was taken. The date and time must be correct on your camera, as these fields are taken from the metadata added to the photo as your camera takes the picture.

I’ve then added some free text, the word “pictured,” which is again part of the Alamy requirements. They then want a short description of what is contained in the picture and another short description of the event that I am shooting. The latter will be the same for all the photos from the event, but the former may change depending on what is included in the picture. For this reason, I use two separate fields.

The “scene” field describes what’s in the photo and is dragged in from whatever is typed in the IPTC scene down here. I’ll leave this with a reminder for later. The more generic caption will be taken from the Extended description field so I can fill this in before the event.

I can fill in some other things before shooting, such as the headline field. Alamy requests that the headline be in the following format: a general event description, town/city, and country. As you can see, I am pulling this data from the Event field and the two location fields I have already used.

I can also add keywords automatically to each image. Every one of these is being filled in from data fields. I have included the “persons” field, which is pulled in from the field below. I know that most of the pictures I file will be of the person being interviewed rather than the interviewer, so I’ll add the interviewee to the field before the event.

The final info being added to the metadata template is included in every picture I shoot. These are fields that identify me as the photographer, who I am shooting for, copyright statements, and contact information. We’re ready to shoot, but as I might be shooting more than one event in a day, I always save this template to my hard drive using the Save button at the bottom of the template. So, let’s go and shoot!

Each interview is 70 minutes long, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be shooting for the full 70 minutes. Typically, I’ll have taken enough photos during the first half hour to use different angles, capture different expressions, and essentially tell the story in pictures of what happened. All the time, I check that the shutter speed I am using is fast enough to freeze motion. I also check that the interviewee hasn’t got their eyes shut mid-blink in all the photos. But, I’m not reviewing (or chimping) every picture taken. After I think I have enough in the bag to file, it’s time to start editing.

The first job is to get the photos onto my laptop. I set it up so that when a card is inserted, it automatically opens the Ingest screen. If it hasn’t opened, for example, if you have left the template screen on, you can also use the key press Command and G on a Mac or Control and G on a PC.

I have the Ingest screen set the same way every time, so I only need to change two things. The first is to select the metadata template I want to add to the pictures, and the second is to set the number that the sequence number will start with. I always use 001 as the first number. One of the great things about Photo Mechanic is how quickly it can load pictures onto the laptop and build a workable preview, which allows the next step in the process, culling.

You can’t teach this, and it will only come with practice. I’ll flick through the images as they are being imported to determine whether I am going to edit a picture. It’s worth being overcritical rather than undercritical. Put yourself in the shoes of a picture editor. Will they flick through two hundred shots from an event or twenty? They have time pressures, so, of course, the correct answer is fewer great images rather than more average ones.

If I am going to edit a shot, then I press the T button, which stands for “tagged’ and adds a tick in the bottom corner of the preview. I now need to add the information about what is included in each picture to the Scene field. For this particular set of interviews, there are probably going to be three different contents: either the person being interviewed, the person doing the interview, or both of them together. All I need to do is select each image group, open up the metadata template again, and add the IPTC scene information. Clicking on the ‘Apply Template to Selected button’ adds the updated info to all the images.

Once I have selected all the images to shoot and added the scene information, it’s time to start editing. I choose only the tagged images using this dropdown box to do this. Select all the photos using Command or Control and the A key. Right-click anywhere and take the option Edit Select Photos. I have told Photo Mechanic that my default editor will be Lightroom. The usual import screen in Lightroom opens up. I use the add option to import the photos into Lightroom with the images staying in the same place they were imported onto my laptop in Photo Mechanic.

I often push the ISO to be reasonably high when shooting in a dark venue, like the theatre where these interviews are being played. The first thing I’ll do is to apply some noise reduction. I tend to use DxO Pure Raw for two reasons. The first is it does a great job of removing noise without affecting the sharpness of the image, and secondly, it is lightening fast – much faster than the noise reduction built into Lightroom itself. As an image is processed, it is added to a sub-folder so I can make necessary edits.

It is an adage to get it right in camera, which is true, but there will always be minor tweaks. In this location, I might change the overall exposure, depending on what the subject is wearing. Maybe pull out some of the shadow information and adjust the white balance if necessary. In a controlled lighting environment like these interviews, once I have determined the right edit for the room, it will be the same for the rest of the photos. To help with this, I use the “Copy Settings from Previous” function using option, command and V or alt, control and V on a PC.

I have an export preset set-up to write the edited files to my hard drive. It may surprise you, but newspapers don’t need the largest, best-quality images. I write JPEG files with a 75% quality setting. The longest edge of the image is set to 2000 pixels, and the resolution is 144 pixels per inch. This is good enough to be printed on newsprint or used online, and it also reduces the file size, so it takes less time to send. I write the photos in a folder on my hard drive where all my press images are stored.

Before I send the files to the picture desks, I want to check that the metadata attached still looks OK. It’s usually the case, but nothing annoys the picture desk more than getting a photo without the correct data being attached. I do this through Photo Mechanic, open the folder in a contact sheet, and click the ‘I’ button. I can then scroll quickly through the photos to check that they have the correct information added to the pictures.

When I arrived at the venue, I checked that my laptop was connected to the internet. Logging on to the Alamy upload system, I selected the News option and could then drag the JPEG files from Photo Mechanic into the Upload Images box on the screen. A few seconds later, the images had been sent, so I pressed the Complete button, and that‘s my images with the picture desk.

However, for this shoot, the job isn’t over. I have been asked by a few outlets to send the photos directly to them. It’s worth it for me as Alamy does charge quite a large commission for distributing the images and chasing payments for images used. One day, I might create a video about the pros and cons of Alamy and similar agencies, but that’s not for today. The problem is that in the attached metadata, Alamy is the agency to include in the credit. It also doesn’t tell the other outlets how to pay me.

I have another template in Photo Mechanic that can help change the metadata. I have saved regularly used templates as a Snapshot, which can be accessed by clicking the lightning bolt in the bottom corner. You can see that all it does is change the caption, but this time, I have changed the credit field to Rich Dyson Photography. I have also added a field called Rights Usage Terms. This field contains information about how the images can be used, as well as my bank account information. The only information I need to add is the City and Country so the caption field can pick up this information.

I have selected all the JPEG files just sent to Alamy and then applied this new template to the images. They are then ready to send with amended information attached to them.

This process took the time it took before the interview was completed. I shot the show, added the metadata, selected the images, edited them, and sent them out, all in less than an hour. So, does it work? Well, I guess the proof of the pudding is whether my photos got used. Here’s a selection from last week showing my pictures in print, so I guess it does!

Photo Mechanic is available at https://www.camerabits.com