Plan the photoshoot: pick the best equipment, see how others are doing it, try to draw inspiration from them.
Take the photos in RAW format with Burst mode on (5+ FPS), so that the best moments are more likely to be captured, and even when some photos are a little blurry, I could usually find a photo in that batch that is sharp enough. (Tips 1: long-focus lens with large aperture makes it very easy to take good photos. It is my belief that beginners should start from there, and gradually progress to photos with more complex compositions). (Tips 2: Make sure that the exposure is correct, and ISO is as low as possible. When shooting moving objects, to get the image sharp, the “reciprocal rule” (which states that the shutter speed should be “1” over the focal length of the lens) may not be sufficient; I may need to use a faster shutter speed. Check the photos at 100% crop after you take them, and adjust the parameters accordingly).
Use “Photo Mechanic” to cull and import the photos. Photo Mechanic is my favourite software because it is fast and reliable. Every day I may take 3000 photos (due to the burst mode, shutter count can be very high). I will pick 50 - 100 photos that I want to keep with Photo Mechanic, and then discard all other photos. I can’t keep every photo that I take. It will cost too much to store them, and they just become rubbish, and they obscure the good photos. (P.S. when I don’t have a card reader, I connect my Nikon Z6 to my Mac with a type-c cable, then use “Image Capture” software to import all NEF files to a staging directory, and run Photo Mechanic from there. It’s slower but still works)
I import all the photos I decide to keep into Lightroom.
I crop the photos and try to find the best composition for each photo.
I do coloring and effects in Lightroom, to find the best look for each photo. (Lightroom presets can be very helpful here, you can quickly try a lot of the presets and find some inspirations. There are places to buy a lot of LR presets for a minimal price, such as Taobao).
Use Lightroom Lens Correction to correct the lens distortion; apply noise reduction and sharpening.
Add local adjustments to the photos, such as adding vignette, or adding a gradient filter to darken the sky. Do some dodge & burn here. Also, the AI Masking feature in the latest versions of Lightroom is very useful. It can automatically detect the subject in the photo, so that you apply local adjustments to the subject only. If you “sync” your edits to other photos, the AI Masking will be applied to those photos as well, the mask created by AI Masking will be automatically re-calculated for each photo.
Sync the edits to other photos in that batch, so that I will only need to do minor adjustments and cropping to the other photos in that batch.
Save RAW photos and XMP files to directory named in the format of /Catalog/2022/2022-01-01/.
Export JPEG photos to directory named in the format of /Export/2022/2022-01-01-some-description/.
If there are some particularly good photos, I will export them in TIFF format, and do further retouching in Photoshop, Topaz Labs, Luminar Neo, Portrait Pro, etc. (I don’t do this very often, because it is very time-consuming.) (If you use Photoshop, get a stylus like the Wacom Intuos.)
Back up the photo library (/Catalog and /Export) periodically. 3-2-1 backup strategy is to be observed. Do not back up your library to external hard drives as you may lose them some day, or they could fail. Do not back up your library to cloud services such as pan.baidu.com either as these services are very unreliable, and they could restrict your access to your data any time they deem appropriate. I back up my data to my NAS (with RAID configuration) first, then I periodically back them up to two hard drives (I set up a reminder that repeats every six months to do the backup). These two hard drives are “cold,” meaning they are not normally plugged in, and they are stored in protective cases, in order to extend their lifespan. I put one disk in a safe place at my home, and another in a safe place at my workplace. I use https://github.com/KevinWang15/dirsync (a tool I created myself) to do incremental backup from my NAS to the hard drive. dirsync is an off-site data backup solution that is efficient, incremental and can prevent data degradation, ideal for tasks like these.