Digital STINKS - Page 4

 

 

 

 

It's not digital photography that's caused the problem, it's the internet you're mad at. If there wasn't Facebook and FTP and global distribution, you wouldn't have to put up with these people's 10,000 photos. Keep digital cameras, but revert to analog communication. When the real cost was mailing a $10 shoebox of photos or a $0.40 envelope of five photos, people really thought long and hard about what they shared :)

When it was film, I thought long and hard about what I snapped a photo of back then.   Just the developing costs for 15-20 rolls of film was a lot to spend on photography back in the day.

 

Your problem is not with digital photography. It's with people having too little self restraint and too much digital distribution.

But the costs of getting into digital photography has lowered the bar for entry and ongoing pursuits, flattening the photography landscape, littering it with those of such ilk.  If it was still "film" only, it's a different story today.  But, I'll take the bad with the good of digital photography.

 

While the ease of digital distribution is one factor of Photo Spam, you cant deny that the digital medium certainly enables that spam. If there was a real world cost (or hell, even just the real world restraint of "You only have 36 shots on that roll"), there would be more self restraint. I know that when I did digital, 200 shots on a road trip would be a slow day, and I'd be lucky if 10 of them were any good.

 

If I ever go back to digital, I'm going to shoot like I only have a 2mb card, picking and choosing my shots instead of the spray and pray method.

A person can shoot all the zillions of unfocused, pointless shots and no one would ever see them but for the magic of global digital distribution. The blame of you being bothered by someone else's photo-diarrhea falls squarely on the internet, not digital cameras. Or perhaps it's your own fault for subscribing or whatever to people with no photographic self control ;)

 

Seriously, this is not a problem in my life. I don't know people trying to show me 10,000 lousy photos. All I see are upsides: I can snap quick shots of my cats in cute poses and see them a second later, and text it immediately to my wife for her amusement. My wife enjoys photography more than ever now that there's neither cost for experimenting nor delay in learning from it. And we get immediate gratification. And then later, she ranks and yanks her photos, the best showing up on her screensaver, our digital frame, or in a photobook. And I like her camera with the Eye-fi card: shooting ebay photos, they're instantly on her Mac to color correct. I don't even have to think about syncing.

 

And thanks to all this, I'm getting weekly updates online of my two new nieces. Wouldn't have happened 10 years ago with film cameras.

Edited by DaveF - 5/2/11 at 12:56pm

 

I agree with Dave.  I'm not sure why the hatred is towards digital photography and not the poster.

 

When do a session with my kids I wind up taking 60 photos or so.  Usually they're screwing around and not behaving and eventually I get mad and we quit.  Then I look at the photos.  Invariably there will be three or four that are stunning, capturing a perfect moment in time: one laughing hysterically while the other poses angelically (because he just poked the other trying to ruin the shot), etc.  I'd never get stuff like that if I just took one or two pictures and ended it.  Do I post them all?  No.  Only the best one or two get shared.

 

I agree, tho, that there's nothing worse than someone sending you a picture of their kids in Halloween costumes and it winds up being 80 snaps that could have been pared down to five.

 

As far as preservation - I have all my photos in yearly folders, with quarterly subfolders.  I have them all packed in WinRar archives with Par redundancy on archival quality DVD-Rs.  The key is to look for discs manufactured by Taiyo Yuden.

 

http://www.supermediastore.com/product/u/jvc-taiyo-yuden-archival-grade-gold-lacquer-16x-dvd-r-media-25-pack

 

I really should set up a weekly backup of my digital photo folders but for right now they are on their own hard drive so the wear is minimal on the drive.

I agree with Dave, too. Since switching from film to digital, I do shoot a lot more exposures when we travel -- trying different compositions and exposures, plus I'll snap a lot more shots of wildlife hoping to capture that "perfect moment". Since there is no cost for film or developing, I take advantage of the situation. However, when we get home, I sort through all the photos and will end up only processing and posting a small percentage of the exposures. This takes time and discipline, though.

 

That's where the average digital "non-photographer" falls short -- they just snap away and do not take the time to sort the few gems from the piles of crap. And some people do not even know which photos are gems and which are crap -- my neighbor falls into this category. I dread looking at her photos from a trip. It's just hundreds of really bad snap shots.

Maybe going digital is like winning the lottery, where the money (or ability to snap photos without a conscience) doesn't change you, but just hyper-extends and reveals your character traits to excess.  Heh.

 

Could be. :)

 

I've noodled on your and Tony's issues with e.g. Flickr...I just don't have any context with people uploading 10,000 photos to say Facebook or HTF, totally pounding and borking the online discussions and normal culture.

The hatred of digital sometimes reminds me of the dismissal of the Polaroid... a "commoners" camera.  Eh.   I'd be much more bothered by the guy.  LIke I said, because digital has basically no ongoing cost, people take pictures of everything.   But there are worse things in the world.  :)   I'm far more bothered by these people who keep posting daily videos of their baby in my facebook feed.  Yes, I get it, he/she is cute and adorable.   Maybe you could do things with them other then pose them around the room and take videos for us..

I consider Flickr to be my archive and my blog to be my showcase.  If someone were to view my Flickr Stream (www.flickr.com/photos/kadath) it would look like a jumbled mess.  If someone were to view my blog (www.navesink.net) I'd hope it would be a lot less boring and more focused.   And I try not to flood either FB or Twitter with individual shots, just blog updates.  But that's just me.  I've considered making a separate Flickr account just for my best stuff but so far I've held off on it.

 

I have the same issue with a lot of people's Flickr, even the really really good contacts there's just too much to follow.  Pat puts some awesome stuff in his but I need him to make a blog where he showcases his best =) 
 

 

I may use Tumblr for my "showcase" or maybe not...

 

I did spend a few hours over the weekend organizing my photo sets into collections to make more sense of it all.  But photostreams are just that, streams of photos.

 

I've been using Smugmug for both offsite storage/archiving and collection display. It offers the ability to hide photos within a gallery, so I can create a single gallery, yet only display a subset of photos to the public.

 

The only thing that I do not like about the site is the file size limit. While they offer unlimited storage, each individual photo is limited to 12MB. While this is more than large enough for web viewing and smaller print sizes, I would like to maintain a single archive, and many of my jpegs processed from the original raw files are larger than 12MB at their highest quality setting.

True, but in your case you put a lot of sketches in there, including some nudes.  Surfing those at work can be... problematic =)

 

I make no apologies for art.  Even if I were to "restrict" them, you'd still see them (being logged in and all).

Oh I'm not complaining!  I've enjoyed seeing your efforts!  I'm just saying I follow a LOT of very high volume folks on Flickr and some of em have blogs and some don't.  I like those who do because I can see what they curate and pick out as their best to showcase.

 

I too have to agree with Dave.

 

For a long time I did continue using film photography only - finally having the negatives scanned (which I still need to do with my huge 36mm archive) - but around 2002 I finally caved in and never went (massively) back.

 

It's not the technology of digital photography that's bad, nor the technology of the web, but indeed it allows some people to make an irritating use of it. Which opportunity they grab.

 

That's the people, remember? "Hell is the other people."

 

(And I have no facebook account, nor am I in a habit of tweeting.)

 

 

Cees

 

 

 

PS:

Uhm, if you go back to serious digital, a 2mb card is hardly one photo.

A 255mB card might roughly be the equivalent currently of 40 takes.

C.

 

 

Absolutely.  For me the difference is that we get to choose, for the most part, who we are exposed to.  And that's why I think that we have to think about raw streams like Flickr and curated experiences like websites in different frames of view.

 

Also, as an aside, I lost a round of WordsWithFriends 2 days ago when someone played the word 'Cees' on triple word against me.  I had no idea it was valid english!  =)

 

 

 

Hmmm.

It is if there are more than one Center for Excellence in Education in your country....

 

(And what about the Yancees, and their stadium?)

 

 

 

Cees

Hmmm...  I wonder if the excesses haven't become the equivalent of hording in the world of amateur(-ish) photography...  Certainly makes me wonder about my own (devolving/vanishing) approach these days.

 

In my case, I'm thinking the ease and tendency to overshoot may in part be leading to a sort of paralysis in my overall process as I'm loathe to put in the effort to get photos into presentable state for quite some time now -- and in turn, I've also lost much of the desire to go out and proactively look and shoot as I did several years ago (vs merely shooting family stuff or similar).  It's all starting to feel a bit like how I never got around to editing down family video footages into watchable cuts and then pretty much stopped bothering to shoot them (and then replaced that w/ still photography instead)...

 

Having said that, I think I definitely have cut back a good deal in my tendency to overshoot in recent years.  But the other problem I'm seeing for myself is that I may have become a bit too critical of myself and don't feel nearly the same excitement to get my shots ready to be seen as I once did -- that combined w/ the need to deal w/ overshooting (plus my increasingly divided time and attention) has probably contributed a lot to my paralysis (even w/ simple family/event-type snapshots)...

 

_Man_

 

Edited by ManW_TheUncool - 5/16/11 at 10:41pm

Believe me, when you know you have a virtual mountain of photos to "process/crop/fix", and each will need 30-60 seconds of your attention, the joy and enthusiasm gets ratcheted down, quite a bit.  And until you're done with the "final' edit" of the batch of photos, it's like a daily weight on your shoulders until you get to that finish line for that set.  Nowadays, I try to get through about 100-150 per night, and not try to do 300-500 per day (like I did in the old days).

 

"culling" is my least favorite part of photography.  Fortunately I have a very fast and simple plan.

 

-All shoots go into their own individual set in Lightroom on import.  Sets are in super sets by year.

-All shoots are culled in one sitting.

-From grid mode open a set, go to first image in set.  hit d to go to develop

-Turn on caps lock.  Go to image in full screen mode, lights out

-hit p to pick, right arrow to skip.  Go through entire set.  Be moderately picky.

-turn off caps lock

-g to go to grid

-Command-Alt-A (Control Alt A on PC) to select picks

-Control N to make a new collection.  Collections are grouped by year.  Add selects to collection.  

 

-Fine edits on just the selects in the collection.

 

I overshoot, both in volume and in framing.  So I have to crop about 90% of my shots, but since I 'select' about 25% of my total take this doesn't turn out to be a big deal.  90% of the images in a given set are going to have the same develop settings or very similar, so its easy to copy the first one to all the rest and tweak to taste and crop to best, most interesting perspective.

I do not use Lightroom, but I will also sort through my shots after each shoot and put the vast majority into a discard folder. Shots that need more extensive work get put in a "to process" folder, and the remaining shots that just need simple tweaks get placed in a third folder. I use Canon's Digital Photo Professional for most of my editing, as it does an excellent job in converting from RAW to JPEG, has most of the editing tools I need, and is free. I use Photoshop Elements for items that need more extensive editing.

I don't delete anything but those shots which are obviously under or overexposed by more than 3 fstops (you would be surprised at how much latitude you have to recover from if something really matters to you) or grossly our of focus.  Hard drive space is cheap and with my organizational system I'm not worried about over clutter.

I do not usually delete very many shots, either (except for those out of focus or way over/under exposed), even though many get put in a "discard" folder. Those shots usually sit there unprocessed, though. As you said, Sam, hard drive space is cheap.

 

I do not usually backup the "discard" shots onto DVD-R, though, as I do the other photo files.

I also use DPP and PSE. I find 90% of the time DPP is all I need. For me, DPP makes it very easy to go through shots after a shoot and mark which ones I want to delete and those that I want to work on.

My brother and I both shoot high school sports at our kid's respective schools. We each usually put the photos on Facebook for the kids and parents to enjoy. I always judiciously go through my shots and only edit and post the best 30-40 shots. My brother uploads all the pictures he takes from the event unedited- usually a few hundred pictures. I could never do that. Not only would I never post what I consider a bad shot, I think people are less likely to view the pictures if they see they have to slog through a few hundred- many of which are very similar. I don't want people to see the number of photos in a particular album and be scared away.

I loathe both Canon and Nikon's native RAW editors.  They both seemed designed by engineers who truly hate humanity.  Perhaps newer editions are better but Lr has really won me over despite my initial fears of being trapped in a database world.

Sam, if you have not tried Canon's DPP in awhile, then I can understand your comments. The program has really improved its usability over the past couple of years, and now includes most of the tools needed for normal editing/processing without the need to use another editor.

 

This is what has kept me from buying Lightroom. Photoshop Elements meets all my other needs apart from what DPP provides, and it costs significantly less.

Your brother (and probably I) suffer from PUD (Photo Upload Diarrhea).  Ha!