One in ten, if I am lucky

Just the other day, someone saw my photos and said, "I really like your camera- it takes such good photos." At first I was miffed because they were bypassing all the work that goes in to a photo. What about complementing me and my hard work? Then I thought back to when I was just using a point and shoot. All my photos were 'ok' enough. As long as they were not blurry, they were pretty darn good. Don't mind the 57 other things that lead up to the photograph and the 52 things that had to happen after the photograph was taken. Point and shoot means, you are happy with what you go because it is automatic and everything is equal.

In this post, I am going to focus on the after part of the image taking- editing.

I equate photography to painting a wall- no one sees all the extra effort it takes to get everything done. They only see the end result- a nicely painted wall. Same with photography- no one sees all the work it took to get that one photo, they only see that one resulting photo.

It has been a slow slog for me to realize the power of editing... really it has. My first attempts at editing go back to self protection. Film was something I protected. I didn't know when I would have the money or time to get a roll developed, so I became picky about the photo I would take. That was a bit of self editing. Which lead me in to the digital realm- self editing on the camera. I could see the results right then and there. The easiest thing would be to delete the picture if I did not like it. Wonderful!

Still, I wasn't getting the same quality of images as I saw in other places. Why not? Had to be the camera, right? I know differently now, but I instead got a better camera and things got slightly better. But that was because of the tech in place, I still had to take the photos and self edit. I would always, incorrectly, assume that ONE photo would always get what I wanted to show off what I wanted to share.

The biggest mental break for me was that I could self edit the results for others to see. I was attempting to get everything perfect in ONE shot, instead I realized that I could take several shots and only show/share the one I liked. Fantastic. With digital, I could load up as much as possible. Memory is cheap, storage is cheap. Off I went. Snapping happily with my new knowledge that I can control which images people see. Yet, something was still not working out.

Then I read about editing software- basic stuff like cropping and removing red eye. Easy enough. I hate spending too much time in front of the computer if I could help it. Photoshop was more of a photo-creation suite of software for me. (plus it was expensive!) I started to use free software. I switched between Google's Picasa and Canon's Digital Professional Pro softwares. I still refused to do much with the image other than the basics. I wanted to keep the image as unedited as possible. I liked to stay true to the scene. The quality was getting better, but I was still lacking that refined image to share that I wanted.

The next breakthrough was Adobe's Lightroom software. I read about how it was for photographers and did work flows. It could even create a gallery and upload to an FTP site. Oh wow, cool. I downloaded and tried, a little complicated. However it allowed to do keywords, sorting, and various other neat features I liked.

The power of editing was brought home by watching the Lynda.com training done by Chris Orwig. I was completely smitten. I felt like I could do anything in that package now... without taking 30 minutes per photo. I was jumping in on the ground floor of the software, so everyone was learning at the same time... and I loved it all.

My editing flow now goes something like this: import images with keywords, quick select of ones I like by rating, filter images by rating, re-scan for things I did not see, white balance photos, crop, tweak levels, minor edits like spot removal, final check of images, export via extra filters with watermarks, upload to flickr. A vastly different process than deleting on the first point and shoot I had. Now I don't even typically look at the images on my camera unless I am checking the levels of the images.

The one image I may share usually has more than 9 other images that I did not now. Thats on a good day.