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| Cloudy Sky #1 |
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| Cloudy Sky #3 |
Way back at the turn of the century I was running around with a huge film SLR that was manual everything. I loved that camera and the way it taught me about light, metering, aperture, ISO and speed. I had to think through each shot, meticulously checking the light meter and making adjustments as needed. As slow as that process was, my photography was intentional and careful. (Not to mention that every shot was one less on the roll of 36!).
Digital, on the other hand, is fast. While my camera's burst rate of 3.7 frames a second is slow by many top-of-the-line dslr's today, I can still fill gigabytes of photos on my memory card in a surprisingly short time. It's great that it doesn't cost me any money, but it does cost me time.
Diving back into photography is diving back into a creative workflow that is often overwhelming with no clear end in sight. Culling photos takes intention and the subtle differences in composition and light can have me flipping back and forth for ages. I realise that I will be better off becoming far more ruthless in the photos I end up keeping.
Then how do I go about post-processing? I've come to settle on some basic starting points, which helps. But each individual photo could set me back an hour deciding on the endless digital sliders I'm faced with in RawTherapee. I find myself exporting three or four versions of the same photo to decide which one I like best.
For now, I'm experimenting by doing as little individual photo post-processing as possible, using settings across a camera roll that matches that particular shoot. It's not perfect, but it does save me time.
I may decide to simply shoot JPG, or RAW+JPG just to save me time. That way I can always go back to the RAW file later if I want a different result.