When I became interested in photography, digital cameras weren’t nearly as affordable as they are now. When shooting film, I was always careful about exposure and composition, as well as being aware of how much I’ve shot. This made editing down my work less time consuming. It easy to see now that digital has completely changed that. In fact, digital has actually made me work more, but it’s yielded better results.
With film, I’d shoot, drop the film off at a lab and for the next few days I could shoot more, meet clients, archive my work or just relax. When I was done shooting I had time to do whatever I wanted. Working digitally, I’m busier than ever.
In my film days, a typical portrait shoot would end up as two rolls of 36 exposures; a mere 72 frames. I was careful to pay attention to composition and exposure settings before pressing the shutter release. I took my time shooting and self-edited ahead of the final process. Most shoots took between 90 minutes and two hours. When I began working digitally, I spent the same amount of time shooting but finished with hundreds more images.
The time I used to enjoy while having film processed is now spent post-processing digital files. It wasn’t long before I realized that for every hour spent shooting, another hour was spent editing. Cropping, rotating, color adjustments, sharpening, highlight and shadow details, the options are endless with digital, but they all take time.
For me, digital photography has enabled me to learn new techniques faster and shoot thousands more photos then I ever would on film. Most of the post-processing done when I first moved to digital was simply weeding out poorly shot photographs; under or overexposed, poorly composed pictures. Put simply: sloppy photography
Adobe Photoshop, circa 2003, could only handle one RAW file at a time. As Photoshop evolved, batch editing became more standardized, but I was still fighting one major problem. I used to make clients happy within 72 shots, two rolls of film. Why on earth should I shoot 5 times that amount to give them the best 40-60? I slowly regressed back to shooting more selectively, choosing shots, nailing exposures and not living by the very common photographer mantra of, “I’ll just fix it later in post-production.”
When Lightroom finally came out, it seemed to have been created just for me. I utilize the Library function to quickly view all photos from a shoot and flag them if they work. The Develop screen is where I can sort the flagged images and begin editing. One of my favorite tools in Lightroom is the Synchronize option that quickly applies the edits of one image to any number of the set.
The combination of selective shooting and Lightroom has cut my post-processing time by 75% and yields me better photographs. I still use Photoshop for certain actions or effects mainly severe blemish removal and facial touch-ups, but I’m proud to say that I’m happy with the majority of what I shoot, for every shoot.
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