I am pushing to finish building an office into the basement. This coming week should give me time to sand the drywall and get it painted before I leave for New York again. Setting up the business side of the paperwork is going slowly, but I’ll have more time to focus on it in the coming weeks as my schedule gets a bit more consistent. Hopefully if I stick to everything as planned I’ll have a viable business structure and plan of action in place by the end of the second week of April. I have all of June and July open in my schedule to fill with photo clients. I’m focusing the business on commercial photography and industrial sequences. The spec shots for that type of portfolio will not be spectacularly easy to get, but I think with a little ingenuity and a lot of style duplication, I’ll be able to achieve a viable product. I really want this to work out as it would be nice to have a more localized business in the coming couple years.
Having thrown down the gauntlet for myself to get back to Photoshopping images before posting images online, I’ve run into the slight snag. My current laptop will not comply with my wishes. I’ve been running a single core HP Pavilion dv8000 since its inception over six years ago, and while I can still run all the programs made up until 2009, the new giant RAW photos eat my processor like candy. I have been biding my time just using what I had until I found something I liked. I finally put in an order for a new laptop that will be capable of running Lightroom and processing the 30Mb RAWs churning out of my Blunderbuss. As I wait for the new laptop, I’m going to throw some time at finishing up the office so I can get to making the command center desk and actually have space to do some serious editing again. For now, I’m using Evernote to record my ideas for the new photos and will have a slew of stuff to work on after getting the office up and running, hopefully all by the end of this month. If I’m not on the road, that is.
It has been at least 12yrs since I processed a roll of film in the darkroom, and I was reminded this afternoon about the time it used to take to do so.
I was just listening to a discussion about processing digital photos and what is considered viable business practice regarding dedicated time allotment. One side of the discussion seemed to think that 5-10 minutes per photo was max, while the other was of the opinion that each photo should be produced as an artistic work for however long it takes.
I remembered waiting for the film processing, pulling up each frame in the enlarger, and playing with a couple shots to get the exposure right. Assuming no burning, dodging, or whatever other tricks could’ve been used were necessary for the print, the time allotment for each of my hand processed photos was about 10-30 minutes – if it all worked the first time through.
Taking a look at my own digital workflow lately I think I’m going to step back into the processing a bit more. I’ve been focusing so hard on the in-camera completion that I lost sight of how processing was integral to creating the art I see in my mind’s-eye prior to taking the original shot.Thanks to my closest critics for pointing that out.
In light of all these thoughts, I’m giving up instantaneous photo processing for Lent. 