June 17, 2012


Editing what a hassle


Editing your images is one of those necessary duties that if done consistently can improve your work flow and lead to stronger sales because your images will get to the clients sooner rather than later.  I am always editing.  I normally don't let my memory cards stack up on my work desk but last weekend I finished up a series of images I am doing on the Medical Industrial Complex that has made our society a pill popping freak show.  I will discuss the concept and images in a later blog.  But it took a good 4 hours of uploading to complete my mission.  The problem was the variety of subjects on some of the cards.

In the past when we were shooting transparencies and negative film, once the shoot was over, you had a little down time to relax as you dropped your film off at the Photo Lab for processing.  Having worked at Photo Labs in the Seattle area (ProLab and Jet Color Lab) there was always a tense anticipation waiting for your film to be developed.  You would go over in your mind the details of the shoot and make notes on exposure and what you thought were your strongest images and what possible you should have done better.

There is no down time with digital.  Once your done shooting you must get in the habit of uploading your digital files (doesn't that sound so clinical, not like the old days where you opened the Kodak box with Christmas anticipation) and begin the editing process.

One of the first things I do before I even think about keywording and captioning my images is to attach to those digital files my Copyright, contact information and other restrictions I want for those images.


I always do a quick image look through and delete the obvious mistakes.  I tend to shoot alot of images depending on the subject.  And this can get frustration to see alot of similars but I have to man-up and go through them and check focus and composition and delete the ones that don't work.  Time is the one thing that can get eaten up in this new digital age and you just have to accept that and run through the editing process or should I say crawl through the editing process.  Once the images are flagged as the best I will then crop, color correct, add alittle sharpness and finally caption and keyword the digital images.

I back up everything by using two external hard-drives, the Lacie 500GB d2 quadra's.

The payoff when shooting analog was that moment when you put the first slide up to the light and saw your work revealed.  The same can be true with digital only the payoff now is when you see your images selling to clients and are displayed in print or on their websites.