14" MacBook Pro M1 - Street Photography Workflow
Hello everyone and welcome to the blog where I will share with you my photography workflow using the new MacBook Pro 14 inch as my main and only device. If you’re new here, my name is Roman and I am a London based street and travel photographer and on this channel I talk about photography, travel and the odd bit of tech here and there.
For the last 6 months or so I have been using a 12.9 iPad Pro for all my photo editing, organising, sharing and backing up. Prior to that I was on a 16 inch MacBook Pro for years. However for the last 10 days I have been working on the new 14 inch MacBook Pro and have migrated my workflow to this device. In this blog I share the gear, software and general methodology of the workflow. Before going any further let me just say that this video is aimed at people who do photography as a hobby or anyone who wants to keep the most minimal and simple workflow. This is not aimed at people whop store every raw file they ever take or wedding photographers who need to deal with 10000 images every weekend. Although this workflow could work, for that I just don’t think it would be very efficient for such high volume of data.
Gear
Let’s start with the MacBook of course. This is the 14 inch and the 2nd one up in the pre-built configs which in the UK goes for £2400. This comes with the 10 core M1 Pro, 16gb of ram and 1TB SSD. To be honest I did want to get the specced out one with the best chip and all the ram but it was sold out everywhere. However after using this for 10 days I am no longer sure I really need it… but that’s for another video. I got the 14 inch simply because I will be travelling a lot with this and it will spend more time being used in my bed, airports or train stations than on a desk. It also very nicely fits into my small 16L day bag like a glove. I then have a 512gb iPhone 13 Pro Max which I use as my pocket computer for when I don’t have my laptop with me. In terms of dongles I am so happy that this is no longer the case…. However I still have 3. First one is a small USB A to USB C Anker adaptor in case I need to plug an old USB device in. I think have an Anker ethernet to USB C dongle which is mostly for some hotels where they have the ethernet cable for better internet. Finally I have a small SD card to lighting dongle which is for importing photos to my phone. Next up I have this Wacom bluetooth graphics tablet which I use for any intricate pen related tasks such as masking, drawing or cleaning up a photo. As for storage I have a Sandisk 2tb Extreme Pro SSD which acts as my main photo library and a WD 4tb HDD which is a long term backup drive that lives at home and gets updated every few months or so. Finally we have power and charging. For this I have this huge Anker battery pack. This can give my MacBook a full charge. We also have a small tanker charger for my phone and a bunch of these braided Anker cables. As for the power brick I use this Minix 60 watt thing. It does take longer to charge the MacBook but given that I only really charge overnight it’s not an issue. I know they have now made a 100 watt version so need to check that out. As much as I love magsafe and fast charging of the original brick, it is not very travel friendly.
Software
My main editing, cataloging and backup software is Lightroom. Specifically the cloud version and not classic. I personally find the cloud version to have almost all of the classic features but without bloat, with better performance and a more minimal and easy interface. I also have Lightroom on my phone that’s all synched up. I have the 1TB of storage option and after 4 years of photos I am only using about half of it. For £10 its a bargain. I then use Affinity Photo for all re-touching and more photoshop kind of tasks. I love affinity photo as it’s like photoshop but without the bloat, much better optimised and easier to use…. and cheaper. Finally I have the apple iCloud photos app for storing all my final images. On my phone I have an app called darkroom that I use for adding white borders and an app called unfold which lets me make stories.
Library Storage & Organisation
Let’s start with the library and I have just one. Before I used to split it by year but since I am very strict on photos I keep, there is no point. Furthermore Lightroom automatically makes subfolders based on year so all good. The library is simply split by country - town / location / event. There is a separate folder for people and random things like thumbnails and what not. The library along with smart previews lives on my Mac and the originals live on my SSD. When I edit photos I would usually plug my SSD and edit away however If I don’t have it with me, then I can just use the smart previews and download the original from the cloud. Equally if I import new photos and I don’t have my SSD, then it will store them locally until I launch LR with the SSD plugged in and it will automatically move the photos. To set all this up, simply go into the local storage menu in preferences and you can set it up like you see it on the screen now. When it comes to my phone, I also store a copy of smart previews locally and just download any photo I want to edit. Although I don’t really edit on the phone and it’s there just in case.
Importing, Culling & Editing
For the most part I will import straight into the MacBook with the SSD attached. If I am coming home from a shoot and I don’t have my laptop and I have some time on the train to kill, then I will import into Lightroom on my phone. Either way before I import I will always pause sync so that I don’t sync photos which I don’t need. Once imported, I go through the files and reject the ones I don’t like. The rejected files are then deleted. I then do another pass but this time apply one of my presets just to give it a rough direction. Anything I don’t like also gets rejected and deleted. At this point I will empty the trash and turn sync back on. I give it a few hours before coming back to do the final edits. If the photos need cleaning up or more intricate edits, then I will open them up as full size TIFF files in Affinity photo. The finished file is then imported back into LR and grouped into a stack with the original. Final step is to rate and keyword the photo.
Backup
As it stands, I already have a pretty solid backup with the files being in the cloud and on the SSD. However if Adobe Cloud crashes or corrupts, the physical copies on my SSD are not organised as it is automatically done by Lightroom. So although they are there, it looks like a complete mess. This is where the HDD comes in handy. I simply make a folder structure identical to my library and export the original RAW file + settings in that folder. I update it once a month or so. So should the worst happen, I am all covered.
Exporting & Sharing
Once I am done with the photos, I will export a full size JPEG and import it into the Apple Photos iCloud Library which has the same structure as Lightroom. I use this library as another layer of backup to final images but mostly because it is easy and quick to share. When it comes to sharing on social media, I will do it direct from my laptop or airdrop the final jpegs to my phone. From then on I will use the Darkroom app to add white borders and the unfold app to make a nice IG story.