--Bob Whitmire
Certified Neanderthal
On Nov 18, 2013, at 11:37 AM, Ken Norton wrote:
> For Wedding/Event/Portrait photography, I think most of us target a
> maximum of 2:1 shoot/backoffice time ratio. In reality, for a turn and
> burn, we want to keep it to 1:1 at most. So, for every hour spent
> shooting, we top out with two hours behind the computer. <snip>
>
> I use a three pass system. First pass I mark everything that is
> technically OK. Blurred, badly composed, coleslaw hanging from the
> mouths, bad blinks, etc. are culled out at this point. <snip>
Makes perfect sense. I do something similar, except I don't mark anything for
deletion on the first pass unless it's a black, or white, frame, or it's an
out-of-focus shot of my shoes. <g> My general rule is to look at everything
once, and then go back after a break of some kind.
> For the second pass, I mark the best of any dupes. If I rattle off
> three shots of something in hopes of getting one good one, I select
> the good one here. These get two stars. <snip>
As a rule, I leave dupes alone unless I went hog wild. There have been times
when a dupe hasn't been an exact dupe. Something changed in the settings, and
what's wrong with one shot isn't wrong in what appears to be a dupe. So I leave
the dupes where they are. But I do tend to use LR's flag feature to start
picking the shots _I_ like best. This is a big difference from event
photography. I'm not trying to make sure I have my bases covered for a client.
In a sense, I am my own client.
> For the third pass, I mark the best or keepers out of the scene. I
> might change compositions and reshoot the same thing. In the third
> pass, I keep only the best of them. <snip>
Again, makes perfect sense. If I ever suffer an attack of lunacy and agree to
shoot someone's event, I'll use your system to keep from taking my own life, or
someone else's. <g> With shoots such as two weeks in Scotland, it usually turns
out that some of the shots I liked best at the beginning fall out of favor as I
did deeper and deeper into the whole mess. When I downloaded the Scotland shots
each day, they went into separate LR folders: Lomond-Killin, for example, or
Beauly-GlenAffric. Then came Road to Skye, three folders of Skye, then Road to
Mull and Mull. Makes working on files a little easier to have them grouped by
area.
Then it becomes a matter of going through them many times, playing with his
file, half-developing that file before deciding it's not going to work, etc.
Some of the files I posted on Zone-10 earlier--many of them, in fact--I've
deleted because I wasn't satisfied with the rendition after not looking at them
for a while. Usually, it was a matter of color balance, but sometimes it was a
lot more than that. Also, this is about the time when I go back and revisit
black and white conversions, or start applying some different plug-in effects.
I have to remind myself that I'm not shooting a travelogue, and I'm not
shooting news. This is basically wall art, or web art, or whatever. So I'm
trying to make eye-pleasing images that might survive for a while on someone's
wall.
This is about the time I start using Epson's relatively cheap Enhanced Matte
paper to make large test prints to get an idea how an image is going to look on
paper. Sometimes I print smaller, earlier, to get a notion of printability, but
as a rule I don't start the test printing process until pretty far along. After
seeing an image on the Enhanced Matte, I have a better idea of which kind of
paper ultimately will provide the best surface for the image. I also begin to
get an idea as to which images might do better on canvas, or aluminum.
So with Scotland, this process is inefficient and takes for-frigging-ever. <g>
On the other hand, if I spend a productive morning at a local harbor or
lighthouse, it doesn't take all that long. I usually hope for one or two usable
shots from a morning shoot, so the time from shutter release to print can be as
little as a day. I've shot locally in the morning, and had a print drying by
that afternoon. I've also shot images in 2007 that I'm just now discovering
might have something to offer the overall portfolio. Makes people think I'm
more prolific than I am. <g>
Also with Scotland, there's not a lot of marketability in my market. Everyone's
obsessed with Maine. The woman who runs the shop where I sell my higher end
stuff has agreed to let me do a little Scotland show this winter, with maybe
6-10 images, including a gallery talk, etc. (She's marketing, and so am I, but
in a different way.) This works for me because I think six to ten images is
about what Joan and I want to hang around the house. May turn out to be fewer
than that when it's all done, but that's the working assumption. If some of
them sell, fine. If not, they'll live on my wall for a while.
--Bob Whitmire
Certified Neanderthal.
--
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