As If You’re Shooting Film

There’s a nice joy that comes from shooting digitally. If we make a mistake, we can simply tweak everything in Photoshop or delete it. How easy is that?! In this day and age, we also have the luxury of wonderful cameras on our phones that are capable of taking professional-quality photos, and even cooler applications to stylize them and make them look even more amazing. How cool is that?!

The problem with all of this is that it results in… well… “photographic diarrhea.”

I recently took a trip to Colorado to photograph the Warrior Games, an event that pits the best wounded, ill, and injured athletes from the different branches of the military against each other. It was an amazing experience to see these athletes participate in the events, and even more fun was capturing such inspirational moments. Not to rub it in or anything, but you should have been there.

I was specifically there to photograph the Marine Corps’ athletes, and amongst the other media personnel who were there to do the same, I met one photographer who filled up a twenty gig memory card… for a thirty-minute game. That’s a lot of images! Meanwhile, I barely filled my 4Gb card, so what is going on? Am I shooting too little? What the what?

My philosophy has been to shoot what I need and scratch the rest. While I don’t advocate simply using your 3″ LCD viewfinder to be your guide as to which images to keep, I do believe that you need to be able to determine what is a worthy shot and what is going to end up in your computer’s trash can before you even push the trigger.

I have never shot with a film SLR, but the way I see it, we should shoot with our dSLRs like we are shooting with a film camera. If a photographer shot with the mentality of shooting for efficiency’s sake instead of the “spray and pray” method, I believe he could achieve more optimal results. If you can already determine that an angle isn’t going to work, you save on memory and can focus on capturing the shot the right way, rather than shooting into the sun and getting under/overexposed images that take up precious space. You wouldn’t do that if you had the limited number of rolls on film, right?

The “spray and pray” method aims for mediocrity. Think about it: what is the mindset of a photographer who uses such a method? All you are doing is going into shooting a subject with the mentality of “I’m going to hold down the trigger and hope I catch something.” If you observe the verbiage of that sentence, it doesn’t sound chock-full of confidence. A confident photographer would know what he is going after, check the camera settings to ensure they will give him the best opportunity to capture what he is envisioning, and focus on achieving that shot instead of holding a camera up and relying on post production to salvage what ends up getting stored on the memory card.

It could be said that if you are shooting fast-action subjects like athletes or children, you would want to use this method because it allows you the maximum opportunity to capture something useable. Fair enough. However, it’s fairly easy to go back on your viewfinder and see if you accomplished what you are after without having to wait until post production to determine if you nailed the shot. The less work I have to do when I sit at my computer, the better.

While I’m not suggesting that after each shot, you inspect what you captured and cull the blurry images, what I am saying is that it’s not such a bad idea to remove those shots you know aren’t going to make the cut ASAP. Since that is the one major advantage of shooting digital, why not? My reasoning is simple: if it looks bad on a 3″ LCD screen, it’s probably going to look terrible blown up and printed. Why agonize over 20Gb of images uploaded to your hard drive later when you can cut down the editing process almost immediately?

I have read in a few locations about going through the “five star process” in Lightroom/Aperture. The principle is to go through your images and any photo that doesn’t make the cut at first glance doesn’t get a star – typically soft images or under/overexposed images that are beyond help. Then, you filter the photos with one star and go through them again, giving two stars to the better shots. Lather, rinse, repeat. As you go over the images more and more, you narrow it down to the usable few. This makes sense, and it is a practice I have used since learning of this technique, but in my experience, those that receive only one or zero stars are fairly noticeable from the back of your camera anyway. Why not cut the time down and start with two-star images out of the gate?

The main technique I use to cut down post-process time, though, is to have a game plan. In my mind, I can list off the types of images I’m trying to achieve, and once I feel confident in capturing something off the list, I can move on to the next image. This way, I’m not using up a 32Gb memory card on one angle of an image, forcing myself to use the remaining time after crossing everything off my check list to experiment with different angles and mix up my style, attempting new shots that I may not have tried otherwise if I was fixated on the “spray and pray” method and filling up a memory card with mostly one-star images.

After the said event, I was left with 120 images to go through. It took me less than an hour to sift through what remained, narrow that down to 20 usable images, edit, upload, and add captions. My belief is that it shouldn’t take you more than twice the amount of time you shot in the session to edit your images. This has been a practice that has been difficult to achieve, but let me tell you: once you get in a rhythm of culling your images down as you go, you will have less of a headache later.

What is your workflow when processing images? How do you approach a photo shoot – do you go into it with a game plan, or do you hold down the trigger and pray you got a usable shot out of 100?