At the family Christmas party, my brother's father-in-law (there's
gotta be a shorter way to say that) asked about my photography and
whether I did it for money, and I commented that if I were any good
at the _marketing_, I'd do it for money. He asked me to round up
a sampling of my work and he'd see whether he could do anything
to help with the marketing angle. So I've been going through a lot
of my recent-ish backlog, picking out portfolio-worthy shots to edit
into shape. (When I go back home, I'll fire up the scanner; here
at Mom's house, I'm going by what I have on hand on CF cards, CD,
and cluttering up my laptop's hard drive.)
The first step, of course, is to decide which photos are worth
spending any time on. I'm also trying to get some of these folders
of photos moved off onto CD to free up space on the laptop. So I'm
going through lots of images, deciding which to copy (well, hard-link)
to the "possible portfolio candidates" folder to take a closer look
at later and maybe fire up GIMP on.
And it strikes me that when I'm going through a collection of photos
where I tried different angles and lighting on the same subject, or
where I shot lots of frames of some event, that culling the duds and
picking out which of the good shots to consider redundant ... was a
whole lot easier when I was sorting through a stack of 4x6 glossy
proofs that I could easily shuffle, look at in twos and threes next
to each other, etc. I haven't found an approach yet that feels
anywhere near as smooth or natural on the computer.
And that's even before we get into the whole business with corrections
and adjustments the folks at the lab did for me when I was paying
somebody to develop and print. (OTOH, an awful lot of film from the
last couple of years before I got the *istD is still in the freezer
waiting for me to be able to afford to have somebody develop and print
it, so even though digital is a lot more work, I'm actually _seeing_
what I've shot instead of tossing it in the freezer to hopefully see
someday.)
At the aforementioned Christmas party, folks saw me shooting with a
Fancy Camera (i.e. not a P&S, and with a big ol' flash unit stuck on
the shoe), and asked when they'd see the pictures. So I made an
effort to winnow that evening's shots and tweak (crop/levels/etc.)
the good ones in time to hand a CD to my brother two days later when
I knew he'd be stopping by. I didn't keep close track, but it was
something like 16 hours of editing for one party worth (three or
four hours) of mostly casual shooting[*].
I'm sure I'll get faster at this as I go on. But I suspect that
choosing a subject, composing the shot, working out lighting, and
operating the camera will all continue to count as The Easy Part.
(Maybe I need to team up with somebody who doesn't like taking
photos but loves editing them, and whose aesthetic closely resembles
mine.) In the meantime, I guess I ought to crawl through the
mailing list archives for advice on digital workflow and tools that
I skipped over before.
Anyhow, I just felt a need to whine about how long this instant
technology is taking me. Now to get back to editing instead of
whining for a while ...
-- Glenn
[*] I did go into Serious Photographer mode to try to capture the
smokestack on the cardboard-box "hotel" my nepphew made out of the
box a gigantic flat-screen television had come in -- my brother
stuck a humidifier inside so the mist would come out the chimney
and look like smoke.
--
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