I feel like I am from another universe. I grew up spending time composing the image, taking notes about what you thought during the capture, etc. Very 'ansel adams'y approach - the zones of exposure, the composition, etc. But I think this process evolved from the nature of the tools of photography - crafting a large plate to put in a view camera was an expensive and time consuming proposition. This philosophy extended to software in the form of photoshop. You could massage and change and image to bring out the qualities that inspired you to capture it. But digital photgraphy has further allowed a change in the process. Faster processing and orders of magnitude more storage.
People now take thousands of photos. Then they are culled. It's so different - the sense of building an image can be lost so easily by the seductive easiness of capturing another photo. For me, the problem is maintaining focus-with so many images, the ideal I was trying to capture can get blurred. When you transfer a thousand images from your camera to your computer, how do you scan them all to see which ones might be worth investing time in to fix? do you look at the icons in the finder/explorer window? review them in iphoto first?
And then when you think there's one worth trying to fix, do you open up photoshop and start to tweak.? In a way, photoshop is amazing. It allows me to use a photograph as a crystal to seed the imagination. Even in a pile of crap you can find a diamond and use photoshop to polish it. or put another way, to some people, the photograph file is just the beginning of the final image. My problem is that by the time i get to photoshop, i am way far away from the moment of capture - in another place and time. and I have two orders of magnitude more images to review - so it is easy to forget the essential qualities that made me take the picture.
I guess this is where Lightroom is supposed to come to the rescue.
LR is FAST and can get you to a decision point about a photo quickly. IF you can remember what it was you were thinking at the time. I remember when Nikon came out with the D1 and the D100. There was a little button for audio recording on the battery grip and I remember thinking - 'what the hell is that for? I am not making a movie'. But then I realized that it was probably for annotating your thoughts. Still, who has the time to listen to all that, process the words and remember what you wee thinking?
And so I write to ask some of you who have adapted to this brave new world, how do you remember what you were looking for in a photo when you are drowning in so many images? Or do you not really care about that anymore? Is it all about making an image that grabs your attention when you are back home at your desk at your computer?
I am trying to use this ability to capture thousands of images but I am finding it hard to use-my human brain wants to go back to the 19th century way of building an image. I find a disconnect between the moment of capture and the final image now. There are so many starting images and so many variables I can fiddle with afterwards. Today I see photographs printed that photographers in the wet darkroom only imagined making in their wet dreams- creamy smooth textures, eye popping saturation, and dreamy grungy effects that are more drawing/painting than photography. Clearly, the new technology allows for some fantastic images. But I am lost in translation.
