Igor PDML-StR wrote:
Yes, I hate digital photography!
There are aspects of film photography that I love, particularly the
rhythm of shooting. However I love digital.
With a digital camera, I am producing to many photographs to be able to
deal with.
Even though I take photographs only a few days a month, they come in
"bursts" of several hundreds, and then I don't have time to select and
process them.
Speaking of which, I missed you and Jane at SFLX this weekend. It's a
shame that you didn't have a flight to miss on Saturday, Gordon
Webster's band was completely off the hook. It was amazing.
I'm facing 2700 frames from this weekend. I wasn't going to do much
shooting, but did want to get some photos for people. Friday night, one
of the organizers asked if I was going to be shooting all weekend. I
said that I had been planning on getting a few but was planning on
mostly dancing. He said that if I took photos, he'd see what he could
arrange with the other photographer about refunding some of my
registration, which he did last night.
The money made a little bit of difference, but the sign of being
appreciated really made me feel nice.
For event photos, I have the "facebook photos" which don't have to be as
excellent photographically, but which are mostly so the people at the
event has photos of themselves to remember the event by, or to show off
to their friends.
Out of that, I'll select the "flickr photos" which are the ones that
generally stand on their own merits for someone who wasn't at the event.
The key to my process is to take several passes as quickly as possible
to narrow the photos down to a manageable number.
I import everything into lightroom. I'll then do basic sorting into
directories. If I'm photographing a band, I try to put all the photos
of each musician in a separate directory, so that later I can easily
compare them with each other. Also, when I process photos into jpegs,
that means that photos of each person end up on a disk where they can
easily be found.
At this step I may do some mass adjustment for white balance, exposure,
autotoning. I also may do mass tagging, like a tag for the event, or
the location.
My rating system is
1: The photo is completely ruined technically, there is nothing that can
be recovered.
2: meh. There is nothing technically wrong with this photo, but nothing
artistically right with it. Unless you happen to be the person in the
photo and it happens to be the only photo of you at the event and you'll
take anything.
3: Good enough technically and artistically to consider putting on the web.
4: Good enough to pay a couple dollars to get a print of.
5: One of my absolute best photos ever. I don't think I've rated any
photos a 5 yet.
The goal of the first couple of passes is to narrow down as many photos
as quickly as possible.
I will have lightroom process everything to 1:1 previews because those
load the fastest. I had the machine do that last night while I was
sleeping.
On my first pass, I set lightroom to only show unrated (0 stars) photos.
I take a very quick pass rating photos 1 or 3. If there is any question
whether a photo is a 2 or a 3 I just rate it a 3 and move to the next.
I'd rather get a false positive and look at it again than spend time
looking at it.
At the end, everything left is rated a 2.
My next pass, I go through and select the best photos from the ones
previously selected. I may downgrade a few to 2 stars. At this point
I've seen everything and know about much better photos that may be later
in the set. Sometimes at this step I start at the end and work my way
back.
I'll use the P key (and sometimes the X key) at this point to make my
selections. I may make a second quick pass, using the U key to drop
some of the selected photos out.
Once I have this selection, I highlight all the selected photos, make a
collection and use the U key to unpick everything.
I may repeat this cycle a couple of times, as long as I can go through
and make decisions quickly. I might do some mass adjustments of photos,
as in select a bunch similarlry misexposed or with bad color balance,
make a group adjustment and reprocess the previews.
Each time I end up with a more select subset of photos to make a
collection of. Occasionally, I'll delete the keepers from the
collection of the previous iteration to give me best, better, good etc.
particularly if the photos are of someone that may be looking for
different things than I (how well they are doing a particular move
rather than how artistic the photo).
When I've got the group of photos to a manageable size, I'll then go
through and quickly do individual adjustments, mostly cropping and fine
tweaking of exposure. I may also unpick photos at this point. Ideally
I'm down to under 20% of my original photos, with many of them similar
shots.
At this point I can go through and find the best of several similar
shots (the musician from a particular angle, the dancers doing a
particular move), and can easily trim out a significant fraction.
After that, I can spend the time doing finer, more fussy adjustments.
Somewhere along the line, generally before the "fussy adjustment" phase,
I'll separate out the "post to facebook" and the "post to flickr"
photos, because most people just want a decent photo of them dancing
etc. and won't appreciate the extra minute that you spend on fussy
adjustments, so it's not worth the extra hour or so doing fussy
adjustments for every photo. I have to keep in mind that my "customers"
are mostly people that want a decent snapshot of them having fun.
Back in the earlier film era (20+ years), when I was shooting B&W, I had
a similar situation with a backlog (but on a different scale), - since I
was developing and printing myself. So, I switched to slides - I was
getting the film developed at a shop.
(Then, when minilabs became accessible for me, I started doing color
prints, - as it was easy to take the film and get the prints.)
Now, I feel myself in some way similarly to the situation I had
20-some years ago (albeit on a different level of everything), -
swamped with the amount of photographs taken and not having enough time
to process them.
If it hurts every time that you press the shutter, you press it less
often. You have a lot less photos to throw away, and a lot fewer similar
photos to select from. You also miss a lot of amazing action shots
because you aren't willing to take the risk of a bad shot. You also
aren't as willing to keep trying different subtle changes to see what
difference they make in the final product.
Do they have a treatment for photogolism?
Yes, take up painting.
I wonder how other people on the list deal with the photos they take,
especially those who take many photos.
Regards,
Igor
--
Larry Colen l...@red4est.com (postbox on min4est)
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