It took me roughly five minutes to convert this from color to black and white and then adjust the contrast and tonality to my liking. If it grows on me over time I may go back and spend and extra ten. Would it be a better photograph if I had spent five hours on it? I'll never know. I just don't have that kind of time.
One of the most important aspects of digital photography is how you manage your workflow—that is, how you structure the flow of work involved in producing a digital photograph.
“Producing a digital photograph” can mean different things to different photographers. For some it means ending up with a Photoshop file that has a minimum of six layers, backed up onto three different media and printed at 11 x 17 inches on an inkjet printer. For others it simply means printing the JPEGs from their memory card at the local drug store.
Some of those who do the former often sneer at those who do the latter because, after all, any “real” photographer knows how essential it is to shoot raw, use Lightroom or Aperture for global adjustments, and then move the best images into Photoshop for local adjustments and fine-tuning, with perhaps a few special filters and curves applied for good measure.
To this my response is that it’s possible, just possible, that there is no strict relationship between the time you spend on your photos and the ultimate quality of said photos. You could work for hours to improve a mediocre photograph only to end up with an improved version of a mediocre photograph.
This could be worth the time and effort if you were doing it as a learning exercise. If not, you might want to ask yourself if there might be a better way. Digital cameras and computers are, after all, supposed to be labor-saving devices. Why not use them to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to produce photographs?
For example, instead of shooting raw, then converting the images to JPEGs for printing or distribution, why not set your camera to raw+JPEG and let you camera do the conversions for you? To make the JPEGs look good you’d have to get your white balance and exposure right from the start, but this too saves you time in the long run.
Other time-savers include automating the process of ingesting, naming and storing your image files, assigning metadata, and sorting the best from the rest. Anything you do often that takes more time than you’d like is a good candidate for automating. Look at it this way: The less time you spend sitting in front of your computer, the more you can spend shooting, or maybe even interacting with other people. You don’t have to use your camera or be social, of course. It’s just a suggestion.
I find if I like it I'll go with it. Too much messing ain't helpful. If I don't like it later I can do it again. All the malarkey about the fine print's well and good, but in the end it's just a matter of taste — and the creator's is the most important.
Posted by: Mike | June 01, 2009 at 04:38 AM
"Other time-savers include automating the process of ingesting, naming and storing your image files, assigning metadata, and sorting the best from the rest."
I've found a great system. My wife likes organizing photographs in Lightroom a LOT more than I do. So I let her do it. She snags off and tags all the family photos and snapshots, then tags anything that looks like I was trying to do "art" separately for me to look through.
Posted by: Lou Doench | June 01, 2009 at 03:00 PM
"My wife likes organizing photographs in Lightroom a LOT more than I do. So I let her do it."
You are a lucky man. (But of course you know this.) For the rest of us, finding a wife (or husband) who enjoys organizing photos in Lightroom would be a difficult and time-consuming search in and of itself.
Posted by: Gordon Lewis | June 01, 2009 at 04:11 PM
Thanks for these words. I think it's a lifelong process of finding our personal tools of trade. The most important part is to increase our abilities. I try hard to improve my photographing skills, getting better and open up new processes and understanding to myself. As long as I have the will to do so I will get fulfillment while shooting photos.
bye and thanks,
Sebastian
Posted by: Sebastian | June 01, 2009 at 05:58 PM
Thank you for a new dose of common sense. Sometimes I feel depressed to see how distant I am from some people out there in the Internet forums. I would need ages to get my photos up to their standards. Maybe they like photography because they just like computers.
An hour shooting (photos) in the streets is so much fun.
Keep on the good work!
Posted by: Jose Luis | June 02, 2009 at 07:21 PM
Yes, Gordon. Yes :-)
Posted by: Miserere | June 03, 2009 at 03:35 PM
Gordon, your post reminds me of one of David Vestal's insightful dicta, "good pictures are easy to print." His point was that if you are struggling in the darkroom to print a shot (this was many years before the digital era) you should just move on to another negative, or go back out and make a better picture.
With digital capture for me the simple route is to shoot raw and tweak the files in ACR. If I can't get it right in a couple minutes with the ACR sliders and curve, then the capture wasn't any good in the first place. The only time Photoshop itself gets opened up is when I run automated batches to purpose the raw files (there's a batch to prepare shots for my blogs, a batch to prepare files for printing at 10x15 or 15x22, etc). For me this is simpler than trying to make in-camera jpg files serve my various purposes, but I wholeheartedly agree with the main thrust of your post. Getting it right in the first place beats trying to fix weak seeing later on. I was always distrustful of 'darkroom wizardry' in the old days, and seriously suspect that any capture needing six layers of corrections wasn't shot right in the first place.
Posted by: Carl Weese | June 06, 2009 at 08:17 PM
"Getting it right in the first place beats trying to fix weak seeing later on."
Amen, brother! This particular post was motivated by the amazing number of photos I see these days where the photographer obviously spent a lot of time in Photoshop "improving" what was, in my opinion, not worth the effort.
I used to be a story editor on several sitcoms. The parallel analogy in this field is the writer who spends hours adding contrived jokes to a script while ignoring or being completely unaware of the absurdities happening right in front of his eyes. Don't get me wrong: Imagination is a wonderful thing, but without being rooted in awareness it can get mighty frothy, mighty quick.
Posted by: Gordon Lewis | June 07, 2009 at 10:44 PM