Does Digitial Truly Make You a Better Photographer?
I’ve been playing with the Adobe Lightroom tool lately, mainly because I have a lot of pictures to manage. When it comes to sports photography, you end up taking hundreds of pictures a game. Even with 6 fps you get close to that critical moment, but many times just a bit off. A typical high school basketball season lasts for three months with roughly two games a week, rarely with a night off. Some of you are doing the math right now, let me save you some time: the season isn’t over yet and I have 1,872 pictures. That’s a lot to go through. I thought that in order to help me out I needed a system to weed out the not quite good enough and get a top 10 for each game, and then from there further refine to the top however many I decide. That task proved ridiculous when I used Photoshop Elements, but to be fair it really wasn’t designed for the purpose.
I’m happy to report that Adobe Lightroom is a very powerful and useful tool for your digital photography needs. I really don’t need a full Photoshop package, and at $650 US it’s a little out of reach anyways. Lightroom is a more manageable $299 US, which is still on the expensive side but it does everything I need—including the light touch ups I do for color correction and cropping. Aperture is equally powerful from what I hear, and based on whatever you get comfortable with first you tend to like. O’Reilly sponsored a week long review of an Aperture user learning and using Lightroom and vice versa. The result is both authors had legitimate reasons for their preferences, and neither was wanting to switch… Even though they gave the other app mad props and even recognized when things were done better. Bottom line is that whatever fits the way you do things, that’s what you want. Both have free 30 day evaluations, so take advantage of it and properly decide.
The main point wasn’t a comparison of Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements, or Picassa. The point was whether the claims of digital camera salesmen hold up. It also affects how we design user interfaces, but more on that later. The salesman will tell you how digital provides “instant feedback”, “lots more room than a roll of film”, “you can always fix it later”, etc. Sure, my DSLR provides instant feedback but I find that annoying, so I turn that feature off. I have to concentrate on what’s going on around me, not the toy in my hand. I need to be ready for a fast break, a drive to the basket, a beautiful no-look pass. I’ll miss it if I’m constantly distracted by that screen shining off of my cheekbone. Sure, it’s convenient to not have to change rolls in the middle of a game, but I tend to take too many pictures—most of which are good, but not great. I found that when I was using film I would budget 36 pictures per quarter (one roll per quarter), and that worked. Of course, scanning them to manage them was a pain. Now I have anywhere between 175 to 300 pictures in a game. I’m more wasteful instead of better. Of course, fixing it later is a major pain. I’d rather get it right, or at least really close at the time I take the picture.
Lastly, we have to really think about what the purpose of photography is. It’s to have pictures. You know these images on hard paper with a nice finish… I find that when you have 90% of the pictures you take never see paper, you have to wonder if you really need to manage the pictures. If it really wasn’t memorable, then why hold on to it? I’m sure you can tell me many reasons why, but these are legitimate questions you have to answer. The big one, of course, is what is the purpose of what I’m doing? Why is it that I have so many pictures to manage, but there’s no actual picture? Who’s going to look at these and actually enjoy them? People only have so much attention span, so a top 20 might be the limit of someone’s attention span for a slide show.
The bottom line is that better disciplines make you a better photographer, not better gadgets. If you can’t appreciate what a feature can do for you, you don’t need it. Far too much attention has been placed on the gadgets on not on helping someone do what they really want to do. If the idea is to focus on photography, then get out of the user’s way and let them do what they want to do—and no more.
In the analog world, the focus has always been on the hard picture. If you have to print the pictures yourself, you’ll be a lot more conservative about what you believe is worth taking. There’s a fair amount of work involved in getting a good print. It’s rewarding work, but work nonetheless. People have discovered that they are more drastic with their adjustments in the analog world than they are in the digital world, and the picture is better for it. I think a large part of that has to do with the delayed feedback. As we make changes in the digital world, we see every little thing and intermediate step immediately, and the more drastic changes scare us, so we don’t complete what we were originally thinking. In the analog world, you make the changes and prepare everything you need at once without seeing it appear in front of you. When you develop the print, you are pretty happy with the work you did. In a way, the instant feedback hurts more than it helps.
