Lamentation!

[Peter]

It is so hard to be a photographer and yet keep a day job to feed the family! I have more than 2000 un-edited scans in my hard disk and I am adding more to it everytime I take photos! I have a very interesting work on Karen refugee in Thailand that I took last December and I have not even completed the editing!
My dear friends and photogs! Do you have such pain that I am experiencing now? Trying to express oneself through photography and yet forced by professional commitments to put your one true passion in life as last priority? Life is cruel! :bang:

 

[back alley]

oh yeah! can be very cruel.

i plan on leaving a thousand rolls of unprocessed film to any university that will take them after i die.

 

[Flyfisher Tom]

That is why the lottery exists 😉 Hope springs eternal that one day my biggest worry will only be which fly I tie onto the end of my line ...

By the way, Peter, looking through your work, I would not be surprised if you could easily make a go of it as a professional documentarian, excellent portfolios!

 

[VinceC]

>> I have more than 2000 un-edited scans in my hard disk and I am adding more to it everytime I take photos!<<

I shoot a couple rolls a week and try to maintain a private family Website as an online scrapbook/photo album/archive. I also have thousands of images from two decades as a photojournalist, and a dayjob that is no longer photo related. I have small kids and a fairly active life. Sometimes I get up very early in the morning, before the rest of the house, to catch up with my photofiles.

Here are few ideas.

SHOOT TIGHT AND SHOOT WELL. In the slide-film era, we had to nail the shot perfectly. I recommend using that approach with digital, too. Learn and practice the techniques that result in excellent image capture (on film or silicon) so that the scans need as little editing as possible. You can then concentrate on the meaning of the images, not on trying to fix flaws in PhotoShop.

DON'T OVERSHOOT - I like film because you can't just blast through 40 images. You have to stop and think, but you still have enough flexibility to shoot indiscriminately when you have to. I get the negs scanned onto CD and copy them onto my computer.

EDIT AS YOU GO. When you're putting the images on the hard disk is the time to grab the best one shot out of every ten and put it in a highlights folder. I sort my images by month and year, with raw JPEGS in a subfolder for each month. I treat the JPEGs as digital negatives, then, when I quickly process them through PhotoShop, I save them as a TIFF. As soon as I've done as SAVE AS to make a TIFF, I then do a second SAVE FOR WEB operation to store a much smaller JPEG into a separate folder used for email and Webpage images (A folder on my Windows desktop).

DOCUMENT YOUR WORK AS YOU GO Include notes in text or Word format in the folder alongside the images so that other people know what your pictures show. Be creative with long file names to help identify the images.

BACKUP Back it up every few months. Extra harddrives are very cheap, so I installed a second harddrive in my computer that's larger than the original. Every few months, I back up the entire contents of the image folders onto the backup harddrive. I also back up to CDs and DVDs.

Once you get a system down, you should be able to do this all very quickly and should consider it part of the photography process. That way, several years from now, when you're looking for an image or have more time to spend on the images, you thank yourself a thousand times over. Also, the images will be meaningful to other family members or even historians. The techniques described above would let you will you body of work to a university or museum. JPEGs are so common that future computers will almost certainly be able to convert them.

Several times I've seen postings of "I just inherited my grandfathers/aunt's/Brother's photo files ... six packing boxes full of negatives with no notes ..." That's best avoided.

 

[sbug]

Great advice Vince. My favorite part (and why I question the importance of a high FPS rate and huge buffer on a DSLR):

DON'T OVERSHOOT - I like film because you can't just blast through 40 images. You have to stop and think, but you still have enough flexibility to shoot indiscriminately when you have to.

 

[Peter]

Thank you Vince for your most insightful advice. By the way Tom, going pro was on my mind for a while but in my corner of the world, going pro means doing color glamor work. Anything else would make me hungry and in perpetual poverty! It is just the strain of meeting the work demand and still find the time and energy to do PS editing at home.

 

[wlewisiii]

Anything else would make me hungry and in perpetual poverty!

Peter,

That really is a shame as your work is some of the finest I'm aware of. I can only echo Vince for the most part. I forget what gear you are shooting with but an exercise that I have found useful of late is to take one 12 exposure roll (35 or 120) or 2 sheet film holders with my Speed Graphic and go out for the afternoon. It makes you be sure that the image is what you _really_ want and that's a very useful corrective for me. Especially with a T-90 in the house now (4.5 fps??? Yikes!)

Good luck!

William

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

I really can't add to what has been said. Sometimes you get "trigger happy", you know? But then you pay at the archive, so to speak.

That is why the lottery exists 😉

Speaking of, I didn't buy any for yesterday, but I bought 10 numbers last Friday, and I had *all* the numbers for Saturday!!

The bad news is, they were spread among the 10 tickets. 🙁 I even got the Powerball right on one of them. I wonder if there's a prize for spread numbers :bang:

 

[Rafael]

Speaking of, I didn't buy any for yesterday, but I bought 10 numbers last Friday, and I had *all* the numbers for Saturday!!

The bad news is, they were spread among the 10 tickets. 🙁 I even got the Powerball right on one of them. I wonder if there's a prize for spread numbers :bang:

Yes there is. You win a collection of beautiful paper tickets, each sporting a different pattern of numbers. They're all the rage this season. 😀

 

[rogue_designer]

The bad news is, they were spread among the 10 tickets. 🙁 I even got the Powerball right on one of them. I wonder if there's a prize for spread numbers :bang:

I think you get at least the price of the ticket back for the one with the correct powerball. I could be wrong tho.

 

[akptc]

what if....

what if....

...Anything else would make me hungry and in perpetual poverty! It is just the strain of meeting the work demand and still find the time and energy to do PS editing at home.

I wonder, what if, there was a section of the forum with "for sale" images, i.e. highest scoring or otherwise selected images of non-pros were made available for sale to the general public as prints (I saw someone offering cheap print jobs here a few months ago), stock photos, or limited-use digital files? Has this been discussed before? I mean, many of the images in the Gallery are simply stunning, if there were an easy and relatively quick way to acquire them, I myself would not mind buying a few. Surely, a few bucks here and there to pay for that Elmar couldn't hurt... 🙂

Not long ago I saw some pics I wanted to buy on photonet. Contacted the photog, an amateur who'd never considered selling his pics, needless to say he was quite happy to be complimented that way and we worked out a very reasonable price arrangement.

Anyway, does this sound far-fetched?

 

[ampguy]

not at all

not at all

it's done elsewhere. If any of my photos are of interest to you, please email me. Thanks! 😎

I wonder, what if, there was a section of the forum with "for sale" images, i.e. highest scoring or otherwise selected images of non-pros were made available for sale to the general public as prints (I saw someone offering cheap print jobs here a few months ago), stock photos, or limited-use digital files? Has this been discussed before? I mean, many of the images in the Gallery are simply stunning, if there were an easy and relatively quick way to acquire them, I myself would not mind buying a few. Surely, a few bucks here and there to pay for that Elmar couldn't hurt... 🙂

Not long ago I saw some pics I wanted to buy on photonet. Contacted the photog, an amateur who'd never considered selling his pics, needless to say he was quite happy to be complimented that way and we worked out a very reasonable price arrangement.

Anyway, does this sound far-fetched?

 

[akptc]

it's done elsewhere. ...

- where? do you mean individually?

 

[Peter]

It has been more than a year that I posted this thread and you know what? I still have yet to do any editing of scanned films! I was so busy with clinical research and attending conferences that I do not have enough sleep these days! Furthermore I am going to be a father soon in June 2008! Well at least that will give me the opportunity to do a great documentary! 🙂 Wait a minute! That may be the impetus I need to give my photography a new life! Wish me luck guys!

 

[shadowfox]

Get a digital camera 😀