I took a few gigs worth of pics this vacation. Nothing new there. The strange thing this time, only a tiny fraction of them have made it out into the wild – 99.9% are languishing in a unloved corner of my hard disk waiting to be freed. Heck, looked at even.
Why is this?
A couple of years ago it would be a straight line from camera to my website, flickr, CD to shove into DVD player, they would be emailed, printed, more than likely the same night they were taken.
Now I have to photoshop each one. I shoot in RAW and balance/edit/tweak – I can’t just shoot off some thumbnails to family, oh no. The cloning tool comes out to remove stray twigs and candy wrappers, pixels are shaved using the crop tool.
Madness!
These are holiday snaps, not the cover of Time magazine. But still I mess and fuss.
What is wrong with me?
Am I alone in this affliction?
15 Comments
Mike:
Ouch! I am sooo glad digital shots are free
I find it depends on what the images are destined for. I usually only publish one photo daily on my photoblog which means a heck of a lot of photos build up waiting to see the light of day there, but if it’s holiday snaps or party shots I’ll run them through Bibble or Gthumb, make a gallery and upload them somewhere private. The daily photo has to be either really good, or sometimes I’m stuck for a photo and I’ll put any sort of rubbish up there. The daily grind gets a bit much sometimes!
Whenever there’s a conference or public gathering I’ll generally process the lot of them quickly and upload to flickr in a group such as Barcamp Ireland or WordCamp 2006.
Different images have different needs.
ha, i thought it was just me.
i attribute it in my case to having shot on film for a long time before moving to digital. at the beginning it was the most frustrating thing to shoot several rolls of 36 exposure film and wait the obligatory time to have it developed only to find that a very small percentage were keepers. over time i put more thought into each shot when the negative was made and i’d go home confident that i’d captured what i’d intended before the roll was developed. soon i didn’t feel like i was “wasting” money on film.
when i moved to digital, i kept the same habits. now my percentage of keepers versus archivers is still high which reduces the amount of time i spend sifting through all of them to find keepers. so even though i tend to have a lot more images to post-process after a shoot, tools like Lightroom help me get through it quickly. i’ve always been of the “if you’re going to do something, may as well do it right” mentality. so i say there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the “hand crafted” feel of photography – even with snapshots.
No, you’re not alone
I think it helps to take a P&S with you for random snaps and just have fun with the camera without worrying about perfection. Forget all you’ve learn with the dSLR
I feel your pain. I think it has something to do with pride in your work. When you start showing off your good stuff, you feel like you have to live up to your own previous work. This is just a guess, by the way. I’m no psychologist.
Anyways, I’m also slowly but surely falling into the same habits. I have a website just for my personal & family shots so I can share them with all the long-distance family members. I used to just resize them and throw them up on the site. Now it takes me quite a while to do all the edits, keywords, descriptions, etc. The pictures look better than they ever have, but I’m probably the only one who notices — or cares.
i have the same problem. It use to be a straight line for me too. I used to have the photos up on my website on the same day, talk about efficiency. Now, I’m not likely to have any photos up until at least 2 weeks after. But I think the transition came when I moved to DSLRs. I use to have a Sony point and shoot. But since I’ve moved up the DSLR, I’m more concerned about composition, focus, lighting etc… With PnS, the point was to document the event. With SLR, you’re trying to get good photos. I think that’s the difference…
I’m glad it’s not just me, thanks guys
Perhaps a point and shoot would do it, I need to break this obsessive “got to be just right” cycle
Me too. I can spend ages tweaking, quite often deciding to take another look the next day as I’m not quite sure which of the two versions is best, and similar. Used to be far faster than this – a crop and “I’m feeling lucky” in Picasa and that was all I needed. Now I feel bad about not geotagging them, but there’s only so much time in the day…
Sort of got the same. Or had the same.
To avoid this first thing I do is run all pictures straight through a RAW converter and convert them to JPG.
I then find that the most beautiful pictures gets processed more properly and the rest basically lives happily ever after as JPG.
The actual finalising of images and get them printed does take a v e r y l o n g t i m e in my case even though my girldfriend keeps chasing me around
I used to have same affliction, but now I’m cured when talked about holiday snaps.
First step in achieving this I bought cheapest point and shoot camera I could find and took it when going on holidays. My DSLR is only used in “more importand” events. At first I had to edit these point-and-shoot pics too before I send them to be printed on paper. Process was usually very time consuming and sometimes it took a year to get pictures on paper. But as I said now I’m cured. My medicine was to tell my wife to send all vacation photos forwards to be printed… Actually I am still unable to be so straightforward… so I guess I’m not cured after all, I’ve just found medicine
I went through this a few years ago when I started to shoot with my DSLR, the cure? Shoot better. If you can control your lighting, do a custom white balance and shoot away. Don’t shoot everything in RAW, shoot JPG, nothing wrong with it for most things. Nail your exposures and think about what you are taking a photo of before you hit the shutter release. I started shooting film, back when it cost money to screw up and learn how to shoot. Going digital allowed me to screw up more and become a horribly sloppy shooter. I’m not going back and taking time to think about every shot.
My other passion is my Yashica Mat 124G medium format TLR camera. When film costs $8-12 a roll and another $10 to process it, all for 12 shots (average of about $2 / shot), you become very picky with what you take a photo of.
I suffer from this on varying degrees based on the subject. If it is a holiday or vacation then I’m prone to be less picky on image selection, but I will fuss over color correction and cropping. There are two things that have changed for me to be less picky: 1) I think my shooting is consistently better requiring less tweaking. 2) I’ve set up a set of Photoshop actions that enable me to churn through the post-processing faster. Nothing has changed in my selectiveness for photoshoots that I pursue for the art of photography. I’ll forever be selective and meticulous in regard to color correcting and perfecting the image. Fun post. Glad I found it.
Same with me, I went on holiday, and I got back, put all my photos on my hard drive, and haven’t even looked at any yet. Since then, I’ve taken more photos which I keep putting on the hard drive, and so one day I’m going to have to go through thousands of photos at once.
I have just bought Photoshop Lightroom and it has helped me a lot, it makes turning RAW files into decent images for export to flickr or printing very straightforward and reasonably fast.
I know exactly what you’re talking about, and the same thing goes for me as well. I’m a control [over the end result] freak too. On the one hand, careful and thoughtful selection of the images you shoot is a good thing — no one’s eve canceled the “if you get a couple of good shots from a couple dozens, you should be happy” rule. So it’s fine you don’t upload/share everything you shoot. But on the other hand it might be an indication that we don’t take the process of shooting pictures enough thought and attention, knowing in the back of your mind that you can correct it the big way in post-p.
And I try to force myself take a moment and make sure the framing is just right, and I don’t have anything in the pic I might wanna remove/crop out later, but then I almost always get so involved into snapping shots and trying to not miss a moment, that I forget about it all.