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Digital STINKS (1 Viewer)

mattCR

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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..
 

Sam Posten

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Originally Posted by DaveF

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.
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 =)
 

Patrick Sun

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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.
 

Scott Merryfield

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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.
 

Sam Posten

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Originally Posted by Patrick Sun

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.

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

Patrick Sun

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

Sam Posten

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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.
 

Cees Alons

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Originally Posted by Tony J Case

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.

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.
 

Sam Posten

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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! =)
 

ManW_TheUncool

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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)...


_Man_
 

Patrick Sun

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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).
 

Sam Posten

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"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.
 

Scott Merryfield

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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.
 

Sam Posten

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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.
 

Scott Merryfield

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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.
 

Bryan X

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Scott Merryfield said:
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 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.
 

Sam Posten

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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.
 

Scott Merryfield

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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.
 

Patrick Sun

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Originally Posted by Bryan X

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.

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

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