Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive

Old Habits Die Hard

As you’ll already know from the previous post, last week I was in a beautiful part of the Lake District called Buttermere. It’s one of those places where if you haven’t been before, your jaw drops, and you become so astounded by the beauty, you almost don’t want to put the camera to your eye in case you miss seeing something. For me, it was my first time there and I could have happily sat and watched the sunrise around me without taking a single shot, but I did, and I feel no embarassment in saying I returned back home like an excited child rushing to post-process them. I knew there was gold locked inside the memory card somewhere, I just needed to gently lift it out!

Contrarily, the image above is something I think of as more of a lightly tarnished silver. It’s got something in there, I just can’t quite bring it out in a way i’m happy with. I’ve tried all sorts!

It was during this trying, or ‘panning for gold’ as I prefer to think of it, that I realised that whilst having a workflow is essential to any sane and logical approach to image editing, you also need to have a bit of flexibility in there as well. I start out by importing the images straight into Lightroom, and I then go through them one after the other, flagging the ones that attract me in some way. If they don’t have an instant impact then they don’t make the mix. I then run through the remaining flagged images giving them a rating from 1 to 5, then a final run through where I colour code them according to similarity. That leaves me a set of images i’m relatively happy with and which I can look at in the context of others so i’m not wasting time processing an image i’ll ultimately reject in favour of a similar one. That done, and i’m left with something like the image above where i’ll use the develop module of lightroom to adjust the image in a way that hopefully leaves me with a finished product. I rarely use photoshop these days as I find that most of the time Lightroom will do everything I need but still, that’s there as a fallback option if needed.

It was during this editing in the develop module that I realised, after something like 200 images had passed my eyes, I was doing exactly the same thing over and over again. Using the same sliders, making the same or similar adjustments, using the same or similar presets. That can sometimes be beneficial of course, if you’re looking to create a specific theme for example, but the thing that annoyed me about what I was doing was that I was essentially taking no notice of the image itself and I was in fact treating it like every other image that had gone before it. There’s no way i’d do that for a painting, so why was I doing it to a photograph?! What’s the difference?!

Very little is the only answer I could come up with. Each is a work of art in its own right and yet here I was, setting the highlights to the same point on the histogram, adjusting the blacks in the same way, etc, etc. My workflow had become my own mental prison. Having spent time out in the field composing structure to the image, considering the different shapes and lines, contemplating the emotions I felt, there I was, back home, treating each image as if it was something coming off a conveyor belt.

Thankfully i’ve adjusted my workflow to take this into account and i’m standing back a bit from the processing side, promising myself I won’t start PP until at least a day or two has passed since shooting the images, that i’ll take a break at each stage of the process, that i’ll sit back and think about each image specifically, before I touch a single slider. For someone who is predominantly concerned by the individuality and expression within an image it came as something of an annoying realisation to discover I was being so negligent in my workflow and enthusiasm to see the finished results, but I imagine also that it’s something we’re all guilty of from time to time and that’s why i’m writing about it here. A cleansing of the soul that I hope others may find value in.

It’s very easy to become preoccupied in what we’re doing and equally easy to then make mistakes of judgement. You adjust the slider so the shadows show detail, but is that really best for that image? Are you sure you could see the detail in there when you took the shot? You boost the contrast or adjust the clarity slider because you know you like a bit of ‘punch’ in your image, but perhaps some softness and diffusion would echo your feelings more, even if it looked a little less ‘realistic’? There are many possibilities, but the hope is that by considering each of them, you bring yourself closer to what you saw and felt when you clicked the shutter button rather than to some pre-conceived notion of what makes a good photo.

I don’t know which is the chicken and which is the egg here, but in realising this problem, i’m now looking forward more than ever to the next book by David duChemin entitled Vision & Voice. I make no apologies for ending this post on another plug because I imagine this book is going to go a large way towards addressing the problems i’ve mentioned here and whilst I could be wrong of course, (I haven’t read it myself yet) on the strength of the last 2 books i’d be very surprised if it didn’t do ‘exactly what it says on the tin’. It’s released next month and you can read an excerpt over at the publishers Peachpit. David also speaks a little about it on his blog here.