My other half & I run a stained glass business - not leaded lights or sun catchers, but full works church windows & public art commissions. The basic techniques we use are nearly a thousand years old. We have electric & gas kilns now and better glass cutters but basically if a stained glass worker was time machined from 1100 AD & dropped into our studio we could have him up to working speed in a couple of days.
This is in gobsmacking contrast to the constant evolution of digital imaging hardware & software. I remember learning a very convoluted capture sharpening routine which I recorded as an action. It improved my images but took quite a bit of understanding. A couple of years later it was made obsolete by four sliders in ACR which did the same job better. This isn't a complaint, it's just difficult not to contrast it with the techniques & tools that Deb & I learnt over twenty years ago which we'll use for the rest of our working lives.
Having said that, PS, Lightroom & Illustrator have become invaluable to our work. I've used Illustrator to lay out cutlines ( the templates we cut the glass from ) for 5 metre high sets of windows with geometric elements running between the lights. We get these printed up on a large format plotter & they're accurate to within about .75mm per metre which is fine for our requirements & probably more accurate than we could achieve manually. In the past this would have involved hiring a space with a large smooth floor area ( village hall or suchlike ).
PS / Lightroom are also brilliant for preparing / resizing artwork & also for photomontaging images of window sections together to check for mistakes & inconsistencies in colour etc. ( Large windows are made in sections & it's often difficult or impossible to see the whole window as one before installation ).
Digital cameras have been wonderful for photographing our work for portfolio use: I spent over a decade shooting rolls of bracketed slides & throwing two thirds of them away ( stained glass can be a bit of a bugger to expose correctly ). On occasions we'd shoot neg film & 50% of the time the prints would come back overexposed and / or wrongly cut because the labs equipment was fooled by the dark areas in the images. Photography was such a royal PITA that I never wanted to do any personal work with a camera.
So we've ended up using a combo of medieval & 21st century tech in our work to our advantage.
But I absolutely empathise with the writer's position. I feel like the amount of time I've spent learning to use software, relearning to use software when it's upgraded, sorting out incompatibilities, / crashes / backups / new hardware has been to my detriment as an artist: If you're mired in all this shit you're not drawing or taking photos.
Deb hasn't bothered with all of this digital stuff, has instead concentrated on developing the art & craft she trained in & has a creative career: I on the other hand haven't had any design work or done any exhibitions for over a decade ( not that I was ever destined to be any kind of artistic genius anyway - haven't quite got the talent ).
I've helped a few artist friends out with digital imaging stuff & they commented on how 'clever' I am. My response is usually, 'I'm not clever I'm a ***ing idiot'.
Yours ambivalently
Graeme
PS I frequent this forum quite a bit & lurk on the Online Photographer. After a while you notice how many of the regulars are from tech, esp software backgrounds rather than art / craft based ones.
