Re: Lazy Photographers Of The World, Unite!

1

Swap for a flattering facial expression?

Try, flattering figure. Forget surgery or working out. Photoshop is your answer"Hmmmm, her butt/breasts, thighs would look good on me."


Posted by: will | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 10:52 AM
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I'll freely admit that the combination of digital photography and Picasa has turned me into the world's laziest photographer. Why take the time to frame a photo just so when I can instead take five and figure out which was the best angle later? And then crop and color correct it once I'm home?

I've started taking pictures this way too, but isn't this how professional photographers work, rather than being lazy? Take several pictures, do post-processing of the best one in the lab? It's only the poor schmoes who don't want to waste 35 cents on a bad print who strive to make every picture a keeper.

My dad went to the Galapagos Islands for a week last month and came back with maybe a hundred pictures, probably only a quarter of what fit on the memory card. And he'd only take one picture of each thing, and if it didn't come out, then oh well. That's a mentality that makes no sense to me.


Posted by: neil | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 10:59 AM
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I have three one gig cards and I just shoot a bunch. It does make you lazy.

But, I do love the ability to look at the image immediately to see whether you got it right. Or in my case, wrong.


Posted by: will | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:01 AM
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I think 2 is right -- while professional (or serious amateur) photographers do have serious picture-taking skills, a whole lot of the difference between what they do and what ordinary schmucks do is taking a million pictures and selecting the good ones.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:02 AM
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Professional photography has really changed dramatically with onslaught of digital technology.

My ex had to totally change her equipment and suddenly learn photoshop or pay others to photoshop, not to mention the change in cameras.

I have a great Mamiya medium format camera that I never use anymore.


Posted by: will | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:07 AM
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4: yes. I have a friend who is a professional and even in film days the amount he would shoot was phenomenal.

But the thing that really freaked me about the linked article was that someone has a business faking the pictures on dating sites.


Posted by: Nworb Werdna | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:14 AM
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My phone has a nifty feature that'll take 9 pictures in a row and let you choose the best to keep. Great for crowd shots & drunk people.


Posted by: Beefo Meaty | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:19 AM
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none will be the wiser

Kind of ominous no? Suggesting that this might be a good tool for implementing the Perfect Crime...


Posted by: Clownaesthesiologist | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:35 AM
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8: Somebody snapped this group shot at the exact moment the crime was committed! We can pick and choose our eyewitness.. oh no! Everybody's eyes are closed!


Posted by: Beefo Meaty | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:37 AM
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Dooood, I'm writing a review right now about a photographer who does this multiple angles thing through elaborate staging.


Posted by: Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:45 AM
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1: "look" s/b "feel"


Posted by: My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 11:48 AM
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O/T:

Hitler's 1932 design for the Volkswagen.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 12:16 PM
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Digital does allow you to be lazy, but it also allows you to do awesome things like HDR photos with relative ease (I hasten to add that I'm lazy and haven't tried that yet).

Has anybody around here used Aperture yet?


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 12:26 PM
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Arg. I have important things to contribute to this thread, but which I can't due to my own pseudonymity and the privileged communication I have had IRL with someone who knows big secret important info! Wah!


Posted by: A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:04 PM
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You know big secret important info about...photography? Cool.


Posted by: Matt F | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:06 PM
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Or Fascist car design?


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:18 PM
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I had the beta version of Adobe Lightroom and have never gotten round to trying it out. There's some stupid barrier to use, I forget what--wrong OS or some shit. Every so often I hit a wall in my willingness to learn things about my computer. And whenever I see a sample HDR photo I think "I've got to try that", but I'm secretly sure that my photos will still just look like high dynamic crap.


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:24 PM
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Perhaps Dolly Madison can tell us something about this amous person.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:25 PM
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Most HDR photos are really nasty. Like many things, a little goes a long way. Similar to a lot of `special effect' type approaches, when you make them very easy to do lots of people will do them ineptly for a while, and then move on to the next thing.

What they are talking about with photo editing isn't really anything new, but automating it will be. These sort of modifications are pretty minor on the scale of typical glamour/advertizing work these days.

I think Picassa, which is basicall a clone of iPhoto, which is basically a cleaned up clone of a bunch of photo management softs doesn't really add anything really interesting to the mix. What's more interesting are Lightroom and Aperture.

Previously, you had two camps: consumer-friendly but pretty limited softwares like Picassa & iPhoto et al. You can print and send emails, and do a limited amount of processing. The processing is underpowered, though, and misses some importan things. They've absorbed a few `real' tools over the last few years (whitebalance & exposure done properly, say) but are still pretty weak.

On the other hand you had Photoshop (& bridge) et. al. Which a pretty big hammer for a lot of photography needs, and really designed around a different workflow.

Now, though, Aperture & LR have nearly the best of both worlds. The workflow is far superior to either of these camps, so you can work with more images easier. It has all the basic (and some not so basic) tools you need for basic manipulations, cropping, colour spaces, raw conversion etc. And they are pretty much as easy to use as Picassa or iPhoto (but much more powerful). The only tradeoff is that they aren't free.

I know many pros have shifted the majority of their workflow into these programs, making PS an adjuct process, rather than central.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:38 PM
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Why take the time to frame a photo ...

and how. i went from carefully metering and framing for slide film to blissfully snapping away: snap, view, tweak, snap, view, tweak...

jeebus bless Mr Nikon and his big black D100-making-machine.


Posted by: cleek | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:51 PM
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Thanks, soubz, that's exactly what I was after.


Posted by: Jesus McQueen | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 1:59 PM
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Wow, I can't type today, it seems.

I should note that LR & Aperture aren't perfect, and both of them will want lots of memory and a current cpu (so does photoshop). Both have free trials I think. They are definitely changing the way that photographers think about digital workflow, but it's an ongoing process.

re 1: there's no need to swap in someone elses butt or whatever, just use `liquify' etc in PS to change your own.

Have a look here for example (I can't immediately find a better link) to see what pretty standard retouching can do these days. Probably does do, in fact, in most of the marketing images you see.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 2:05 PM
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You are too skinny when: the retoucher makes your thighs bigger.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 2:23 PM
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The site linked in 23 is amazing.


Posted by: mrh | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 2:44 PM
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Aaaand in 22.


Posted by: mrh | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 2:45 PM
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Not even Dolly Madison can talk about it, because the famous person only told one person about his technique before he died, and that person, my friend, still lives on in the middle of various financial battles over the processes that remain only inside his head. Sigh.


Posted by: A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 2:47 PM
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26: Oh, and apparently also in mine, but I only get to know because I am not a threat, having no expertise with these things at all.


Posted by: A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 2:51 PM
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AWB, you are the tease of the universe. And my steely-eyed look is boring into you from half a continent away.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 04-17-07 2:58 PM
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I get quite luddite about a lot of modern digital photography* but the 'shoot hundreds, print one' thing isn't really a huge deal. As has already been said, to a certain extent photographers have always worked that way -- the popularity of the 35mm format and small compact cameras like Leicas and Contaxes and the early compact SLRs derived pretty much from exactly that.

Modern digital compacts let people take that mode of working to extremes and if most of your shots are shit then you're not really learning anything, but if your goal is just to take the occasional good picture, it's no big deal.

However, it's probably worth noting that it's easy to exaggerate how much of an average old-school pro photographers 'roll' was actually bad. If you look at contact sheets in books of period photography, for example, while only one shot may end up being printed and is the 'iconic' image we may know, most of the rest of the roll is also composed of pretty usable decent shots and the choice to print one or the other is usually an aesthetic one rather than resulting from shots that are technically bad or badly composed.

There is also a lot to be said for other slower, more considered, ways of working, though.

* nothing actually specific to the digital medium, but rather, there's an aesthetic that comes out of some of it that I find a bit boring (in much the same way that I find a lot of landscape photography involving massively saturated Velvia transparencies a bit boring).


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 12:38 AM
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I actually do a lot more composing now that I have that little screen to look at.


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 8:51 AM
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re: 30

I can see how that would help. I find the big screen on a TLR or medium format SLR helps with composition and a dSLR screen in similar. Also, the really exaggeratedly narrow depth of field on a TLR or medium-format SLR seems to help me think better too.

Downsides to those big screens on TLRs (etc) is that they are pretty dark compared to a good SLR viewfinder.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 8:55 AM
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I've been struck myself by what ttaM observed, that "contact sheets" as he calls them, showing the other shots on the roll, are often composed of one really great picture after another, and if the iconic one had not been chosen, another would still have been a great photo. Sometimes, as in the final sequence of pictures as it were walking up to immigrants dozing in their car at the end of Robert Franks' Americans they were all used.


Posted by: I don't pay | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 9:04 AM
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re: 32

[PHOTO GEEK FACT]

They're called contact sheets because often a photographer will place the negatives all flat on a piece of photopaper, expose it to light for a few seconds, and then develop. That gives them a sheet of paper with positive images of all the shots on a roll of film and they can then look at them closely and decide which ones they want to print and how they want to print them.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 11:18 AM
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another photo geek facts, please: what does TLR stand for?


Posted by: mcmc | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 11:23 AM
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Twin Lens Reflex camera. Like this:

http://www.stutterheim.nl/rollei/rolleigraphy.html#tlr66

or

http://www.camerapedia.org/wiki/Flexaret_VII

[I have one of those latter ones]

You see them a lot in old movies and photographs. They usually take medium format film rather than 35mm.


Posted by: nattarGcM ttaM | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 11:41 AM
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28: I sent my comments to Standpipe, and I don't think Standpipe fainted from the overwhelming interestingness of them. If you like, I'll email them to you, too.


Posted by: A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 11:46 AM
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Redact 36?


Posted by: A White Bear | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 12:30 PM
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Got it.


Posted by: apostropher | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 12:33 PM
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That's hilarious, apo, and I'm pretty sure not what she meant.


Posted by: Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 12:33 PM
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I'm on record as pronoun-friendly.


Posted by: Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 04-18-07 12:34 PM
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