Quality vs Quantity

It’s Sunday evening and I’m in the office. Sad eh? Nurses, police and firemen are working now, why shouldn’t I? The phone’s not ringing and the music is on so I can just quietly get on with the mammoth task confronting me; editing.

 

There is one inescapable fact that I think all photographers struggle to come to terms with; for every hour spent behind the lens in the Drakensberg Mountains you can count on at least the same time if not more spent hunched in front of the computer dealing with the resultant exposures. So, having just spent five weeks shooting in South Africa lets just contemplate what sort of time I’m going to need to edit the 8GB of images sat on my portable hard drive. That 80 GB represents many full memory cards, which have already been filleted. The light was good, so I was shooting most days both morning and evening. My average session lasted maybe two hours. A few days were lost to travel and indifferent weather but not many, so we’re probably talking about some 120 hours of productive shooting. My heart is sinking looking at these numbers. Based on my rule of thumb I’ll need to spend all day for the next 3 weeks to clear this lot. And just to complicate matters I hadn’t caught up before I left, there are still autumnal shoots from Snowdonia, Ireland and Dorset to edit. Oh, and I’m off to Switzerland tomorrow, with the camera gear of course; more RAW files to add to the pile.

 

It’s clear that I’m not keeping up. What can be done?

 

Option 1: Stop taking pictures. Hmmm, well clearly that would give me time to catch up. Many photographers faced with the same dilemma unconsciously fall into this trap. But I am a photographer. If I’m not out shooting I’m half a person, writing and talking about what I used to do. This is not an option.

 

Option 2: Work harder. Sacrifice relationships, family life, friendships and health on the altar of photography. Ignore all other complications and commitments in life and become a complete photoworkaholic spending endless hours at the editing coalface to clear the RAW Mountain. Well, this is a better option than the previous. But spending all day every day editing isn’t feasible, it drives you stark raving mad. Do too much in one go and I start making bad decisions and loose the enthusiasm for the pictures, along with the will to live.

 

Option 3: Copy all the images to one big folder; go to Select All then Delete. Et voila, problem dealt with. You can have a life, remain married, be a balanced sociable normal person and go out shooting more pictures.

 

It doesn’t seem like much of a menu of options. Actually though, all is not lost. There is a nugget of an idea in each of these options that will start to ease my load. It all boils down to the core issue of quantity vs quality.

 

It is so, so easy with digital cameras to shoot a lot of images. I try not to, I’m selective in the field about what I shoot, if a shot is not working there’s no point in persisting. It will only clog up your memory card and demand precious time later. But of course from every good photo situation there will be a range of options resulting in variants of a shot with slightly different compositions and light. As the light changes I’ll work the situation until the light is either too harsh or has sunk below the horizon. When I come to edit these variants it’s tempting to process them all, ending up with maybe 10 versions of essentially the same shot, but this is very wasteful of precious editing time. Choosing the best and just working on that one is the way to go. It’s not always obvious, and sometimes I’ll need to work on a few before I can decide, but I strive all the time to just concentrate on the winner. If I’m editing an evening session where the light just got better and better I’ll start at the end and work back, deleting the earlier images where the light wasn’t so good, and vice versa for a dawn session. It all comes down to spotting the winner and ignoring the rest. It saves me time and after all I‘d sooner have one good picture than ten average ones.

 

Clearly making brutal decisions is necessary. Actually having a bit of a backlog is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m now editing pictures I shot two months ago and am being particularly ruthless with the delete key. If a whole shoot didn’t come together despite your best efforts; bin it. Making that decision immediately after returning from exposing would be just too bitter a pill to swallow, but two months later I can be completely dispassionate. It happens, more times than you can imagine.

 

The other big consideration to think about is how much time is being spent on each picture. Many of my images have the crucial tweaks of curves and levels done at the RAW processing stage, go through to Photoshop for fine tuning. My time on them will be maybe ten minutes each. But some require merging of exposures, multiple conversions of the RAW file and all sorts of messing about with layers. These sorts of things can easily take up an hour on one image. I have to be reasonably confident its time well spent, that the image will be worth it. But of course the less of this the better, clearly getting it right in camera saves time. Grad filters, exposure, composition, lighting; good camera technique saves time in editing.

 

But, whichever way I dress it up; I have a mountain to climb. I do actually enjoy editing when those images I put so many miles, blood, sweat and tears into come to fruition. But there will be some long days in front of the computer.

 

Signed copies of David’s book ‘Waiting for the Light’ and his DVD ‘Chasing the Light’ the ultimate guide to landscape photography, are also available to buy online from David Noton's website.