Photography is becoming more about editing and post production, and less about the math, expertise, and hassle of capturing an image. Here’s why, in my opinion.
Whenever you’re trying to satisfy a creative need using a tool you don’t understand, or that you haven’t mastered, it can feel like typing with boxing gloves. Imagine having beautiful music stuck in your head- but you don’t have the ability to flawlessly translate that music from your brain – through your fingers, on to the keyboard of a piano. I bet this is easy for most people to imagine (yeah, me too) wishing you had the discipline and the skills to play what you have right there in your head. This is the stuff of good tools. Good tools come out of necessity. Necessity to move a rock, necessity to sharpen a knife, necessity to create art. If you have to move that ten thousand pound slab of rock ten miles down the road, I bet you try to figure out the best way to get the job done. 
My grandfather was a master woodworker- I used to love to sneak up and see him working in their garage- probably on a purple martin house (hotel, really), or an elaborate ship, and he would make a slight popping sound with his mouth, and rich bouts of pipe tobacco smoke would issue out, curling above his head, turning into a hovering haze over his latest master work. He took craftsmanship to a magical level. Every placement of tiny detail in the joinery, the perfect micro-measurements he must have made to fit it all fit together, it was so impressive- even if he wasn’t your grandfather. One of the only “sayings” I recall him saying is “there’s nothing like the right tool for the right job.” He was so right. And after countless hours of doing things the hard way, he would tend to naturally find the path of least resistance.. or to find tools to help him get there.
One of my home hobbies is photography. I like it a lot, but it takes up a lot of time. Also, after looking around sites like flickr, I realize I don’t have any special abilities when it comes to photography, I just take a lot of pictures. To see what I mean, look at some of the pictures that are categorized for what they call ‘interestingness’ at flickr. (Yes, I’m a sucker for made up words that need no explanation). Here’s the pictures from last month that have “Interestingness“ It shows you a calendar, each day they pick five hundred from the however many jillions. You get the idea. Lots. A sea of them.
Now that sites like this offer free hosting of images, and millions of people are getting into digital photography cheaply and easily, the art of photography is actually changing.. and is now accessible to the masses. People take so many more pictures than they used to.
All these people are rapidly taking pictures of everything, everywhere! Try using google earth and turning on the pictures layer- you can see pictures- really good pictures- at almost any place on earth you pick. For all these people taking pictures, especially those who shoot raw images, they are looking for ways to handle the load of the sheer volume and size of their growing library.
Here’s a description of what a RAW image is on wikipedia, but basically, it’s a picture that’s got all the information the camera could take at the time, all unprocessed. It’s up to you to squash it into something usable. This is one of the best things to happen to photography- since I don’t know when. I wanted to say since photoshop, but I don’t like to get too dramatic.
It does come at a cost though- usually you can’t just lookat raw images like you can a .jpg or .png file. You usually need to process them, then turn them into a ‘usable’ picture. Another negative is they are quite a bit larger than a normal picture file. The raw pictures that come out of my ‘good’ camera are about 12MB- or about the size of three of your favorite songs from itunes. A lot of the pictures you see on this blog are from my ‘bad’ camera (on my phone) just capturing moments. They serve the purpose of documenting, to remember something or point something out- like this from earlier this evening:
I was wishing I hadn’t spent so much f’ing money on dinner after going to Mandola’s Italian Market with the boys. Then I immediately hurled more money into the water. Wishing is dumb.
Here’s a picture using my ‘good’ camera to show you the difference in quality:
This picture didn’t look nearly as good before I adjusted it. Just believe me- I don’t feel like uploading a bunch more pictures. The point is- it’s nice to be able to make a lot of adjustments to these pictures after the fact, but I’m certainly not alone in my frustration of taking all these pictures, only to have them sit idle on my computer. The physical space isn’t so much an issue, you can buy a terrabyte of space for about two hundred bucks. It has become a workflow issue. Once you take all these pictures, it actually takes discipline, and the help of the right tools to edit and keep track of them all.
I certainly did a lot of the same things as everyone else- make a year/month/day directory structure, and keep it in sequential order, but.. then what if you want to just look at pictures of one person- or just of your family? This is where the tools come in. I needed something that would convert raw images to .jpg format, and be able to do similar operations to multiple pictures. Since you can usually (conservatively) expose a RAW image up or down a whole stop after you took the picture (see? the 12MB file does have some advantages) Adobe has created this tool which allows you do do a whole lot more than that. It takes very complicated math (color temperature, imaging displays, gamma, etc.) and gives you intuitive little tools for adjusting them all to get the end result you want. It was a tool clearly designed for doing this one thing quickly and easily.
I think this, with the help of Canon and others, has dawned the era of post processing. This means that the focus has shifted away from the particulars of capturing the image, and more to what you do with it after the fact. Most people who take pictures, given the proper camera, could take excellent pictures. There’s only the pointing and the clicking, and the knowing where to be, etc.
This is an over-simplification, of course, but here’s an example- I handed Harps the camera Saturday and he took this of me and Hen while we were.. I don’t know what we were doing.
Not bad light levels and composition- but.. (sorry harps) most of the ‘work’ was done after it was taken. I took it through the steps I’ll talk about below. I also pulled in this lever called ‘fill light’, which emphasizes the middle levels of light in your picture. Also I’ll probably do some other post about my trials and tribulations with importing RAW images, what histograms are in plain English, etc. but this post is mainly about doing batch operations to a bunch of pictures at once using a tool like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
I’ve used Photoshop since it came out- it is one of the most mature artistic tools out there. This is why I tried lightroom without question. Apparently adobe interviewed a lot of professional photographers about their work flow of shooting, processing, delivering to clients, etc. after realizing so many people are in this same position of dealing with thousands of images instead of dozens- they ended up with lightroom.
I found it to be a really easy way to batch edit lots of pictures (raw images), add keywords, adjust white balance, etc. It has a ‘library mode’ where you can quickly rotate, name, modify lots of pictures all at once, and it has a ‘develop’ mode where you can go into fine controls to get the right histogram or exposure, tinting, or even make your own presets to get custom looks, or common adjustments you make. It also has a decent set of more ‘creative’ presets for sepia, aged photos, etc. The big thing for me was all of these settings can be copied and pasted to masses of pictures at once.
Here’s an example of a raw image that I loaded up straight into Lightroom- it’s a picture of my friend Lacie playing banjo.
OK, tuning a banjo. Obviously, she’s either got some crazy yellow lights, or the white balance is way off in this picture. Notice I didn’t think about framing this shot- that’s intentional. Because my camera has a full size (35 mm) chip, and the images are much larger than I need for showing on a computer screen, I rely on the fact that I can shoot more objectively- get the whole thing- then decide how much to crop out later when I understand the subject better in the context of the scene. That’s ‘nice’.
So the first thing I did was crop it, like I said, to something I feel gets to the point of the image a bit more. She loves playing music, so there’s the smile, the pictures of her grandparents, the strumming and tuning, the hint of bare feet. That stuff all helps the idea of the image. All the rest can be cropped out. 
Then (above) I adjusted white balance and exposure settings…
Then I adjusted some of the ‘creative settings’ a bit. Once you get something you’re happy with, you can save the settings. Here’s my “high contrast black and white” setting using the same original:
One nice option is to apply settings to raw images as you import them into lightroom. So if you have fifty shots of that birthday party where you had your camera on the ‘inside’ setting and you were ‘outside’, you could change the color temperature on one of them, and paste those changes to all the others. Color temperature is about the energy levels of the main light source in the scene. Tungsten lights, direct sunlight, a cloudy day, etc. all have different color temperatures that effectively push your pictures either towards blue or orange. Anyway, a few quick setting changes and you’ve got a bunch of interesting possibilities:
If your camera has the ability to take raw pictures, you might want to try it out and see what you think. Here’s a link to a free trial of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
I’d be curious to find out about any open source solutions to this kind of work flow. I’ve used the gimp- an open source free program that has photoshop-like functionality, but I don’t know if anything like Lightroom exists. Let me know if it does!
.j.
