At the outset of my career, as a photographer who had no significant experience with using film cameras, getting everything “right in-camera” was just about my last priority. Not having shot extensively with film, image files had no monetary value to me. When you’re shooting film, every exposure, good or bad, costs you money. I lacked the attachment to every shutter actuation being an investment. Because of that, my concerns lived in the end game, and knowing I could edit made me slack in how thorough I was in learning my camera. Sounds stupid in retrospect, but I came to photography by way of being interested in digital editing.
I started putzing around with Microsoft’s digital image suite, probably because it was 20x cheaper than Adobe’s Photoshop, CS2 at the time, and I was enthralled at what could be done by it. Photography started for me as a bit of a means to an end, I needed images to practice editing. A few years later, I got a student (read: cheaper) version of Photoshop CS3 and learned that day and night. I developed my editing skills faster and with more interest than my actual camera skills.
In retrospect, I don’t recommend going about learning photography that way. It’s not that it made learning how to use my camera any harder for me, but it certainly made me more likely to say “I’ll fix it later” while on a shoot. The worst part about that mentality is that I was signing myself up to invest more time later. You don’t need an MBA to realize the ways that’s not good for business.
So I went on for a few years seeing these two parts of my photography – the camera work and the editing process – as opposite ends. I thought some people value working their camera and not moving on until things are right in camera, other people, like myself, are skilled editors who don’t have to get it right the first time.
Over time, as my camera skills and willingness to keep shooting until I got things the way I envisioned caught up to my editing skills, I began to shift the way I thought about editing.
Follow me through an analogy using numbers. I’m decidedly not a “math guy,” but this is the only way I can think to explain this idea.
Say a “perfect” image has a value of “100.” In the beginning, I was satisfied, even foolishly proud of myself, knowing that I could take a “50” image and process it to a “75.” Through the passage of time, I naturally got more accurate in my camera work. What I found, which is not hard to conceive of, is that I began taking images that were more like “75” and then was able to process them to a “90.”
That’s the end of the math, but what I learned was that the better my in-camera shots were, the more latitude I had in my editing. I was less and less of the mindset that I’m using editing to “fix” and more of the mindset that I’m using editing to take my images to the next level. My previous understanding was dichotomizing, the theory sounded like “If you get things right in camera, you don’t have to bother with editing!” and on some levels that is true, but it didn’t sit right with me because I loved the editing process. Now, my vision has broadened, through time and age, and my theory sounds more like this “If I get things right in camera, there is so much more possibility with my editing.”
Maybe you already think that way, I hope you do, but because I entered the game with editing my first priority and camera work my second, and everything I was reading and learning from (by everything, I mean master photographers who came up through the golden age of film) made me consider the two entities as opposite ends, I had to come to the conclusion on my own that my motivation for being great in my camera work wasn’t to avoid editing, but rather, to be a higher platform from which to begin.
If you are thinking about making it easier for you to get things right in camera, nicer gear can help with that a lot, and I have a lot of camera and lens recommendations for you in dedicated articles. Happy hunting.
