Here I sit, again pondering the changes in how I work since turning from film to digital last year. The week in Yosemite yielded a good number of images. But the working process sometimes leaves my head spinning whenever I contemplate the efforts once the shutter has been tripped.
Here are a few of the numbers; I shot about 900 RAW Frames. Each Frame is 19Mb. I have a 4GB card that I filled almost five times. (A 4Gb card holds 199 shots.) It took two days to edit that number of images down to those I wanted to processes for my stock photo files. Part of the time lag in this process is having to make sure I look at every photo at 100% for sharpness. Out of approx. 900 images, I selected 250 image to RAW Convert using Adobe Camera Raw. Each converted 19Mb RAW turns into a 71Mb TIFF. It then took another two days to individually check each image for color and clean any dust spots. I’ll do another edit to determine which photos I’ll send to my agents. I’m willing to guestimate around 150 images, of which another 2 or 3 days will be spent doing keywords and captions. Call it 7 days to process 150 images.
In the old days, 900 frames would be about 25 rolls of film; $10.00 per roll w/ processing. I’d drop the film at the lab; pick up the film, and there you have it. I’d edit all 25 rolls in half a day, keep maybe 40% which includes brackets. I could caption and label all of those in another half day. Once captions were done, I used to affix 2 labels to each slide x 20 slides in 3.5 minutes.
Back then, there was no keywording. There was no deciding how the film should look. No playing endlessly with color or exposure variations. Two days tops, and I’d have a selection ready for the files, but not scanned. Adding scans of the same 150 images would take two more days to scan, clean, and adjust.
Old days = 4 days; Digital daze = 7 days. The difference? Again, it boils down to the time it takes to keyword the images. Gosh, I hate keywording. In fact, I’m procrastinating from that very task right now by writing this entry.
Woof.
Whoa, it only took you 7 days to crank out 250 images? I took about the same number of photos during my trip two weeks ago and chose 52 to work on. Took me 7 days to process and keyword. I didn’t do it 24-7 though. I hate having to examine at 100%. Cloning the occasional speck in the sky, sharpness and checking for aberrations drives me nuts. Takes forever. I think I enjoyed processing my images more a few years ago when I didn’t know to look for all that detailed stuff. I’ve probably gained 20 lbs since that time. 🙁
To save time and my hands from keywording, I took all my basics for several categories and put them on a Word document so I could copy and paste whenever I need to do it. Then when I keyword in photoshop, I do all the similar images all at one time so I can just use the drop down menus and use the same keywords I had just typed for previous images.
I spend roughly 2 days on the computer for 1 day on the field (in a productive day, esp. in urban environments, I can easily produce 40-80 usable images). I spend more time in preparing the master file, esp. since I frequently use multi-frame merging. There is no way I could do 250 in two days. On the other hand, since I do not use stock portals, so far there has been no need for keywording. If the need arises, I’ll certainly outsource at $1/image.
Tuan.