Is post production more important than Gear?

[kyteflyer]

As with everything, I believe its horses for courses. You (generalising) try to do the best you can with the gear you have. You might not have the faintest idea how you will post process until you get the shot into the computer and into your processing application of choice. I've gone back to photoshop. In reality, it doesnt matter a damn whether you know right away that you'll do this or that (more power to you if you do, but I just don't think it matters)... learning what your software can or can't do, learning what your camera can or can't do, will lead you to the results you want.

For me... it really is about trying to get the best exposure I can, straight out of the camera... *then* I start thinking about how to make it better. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Today, for example, was a bust. Wrong lens, wrong time of day, and wrong subject. I'll come back to it later but for now, its all wrong and not worth a second thought. I doubt that I will ever come home already knowing what I am going to do to my stuff. Half the fun is in the playtime afterwards.

 

[Gary]

Not seeing a collection of your work ... it's hard to get a sense of your dilemma. So some quick remarks and maybe one or two of them will stick:

Finding a style is an ongoing development process.

1) For me it's not about hardware or software, it's about seeing the final image in my mind and then using hardware or software or both to realize that image. Sometimes I see the image when shooting and sometimes when processing. Sometimes I'll underexpose or overexpose the image knowing that exposure will enhance the processing end. Being an old film guy, I try to get it all done in the camera.

2) Get back to basics. Grab one lens and shoot the hell out of something. Make it a weekly assignment, say ... a rose garden. Shoot it over the course of a week with the one lens. Shoot the same garden again with a different lens. et cetera. Then pick another assignment, say cars, and then do it all again. Understand your equipment inside and out. This understanding will help you pre-visualize your images.

3) If you find an image you really like, re-create it, emulate it, put yourself in the original photographer's shoes. Then take it one step beyond, manipulate the image and make it yours.

4) It doesn't matter what anyone else things thinks, (unless it's a client or editor), as long as you're happy with the final image. (If other like it also ... you get extra points.)

5) Don't use pre-sets, process everything by hand.

6) Look at the light. Capture the light.

If you shoot tons, if you understand your equipment and capture what you see in your mind's eye, if you understand your PP tools as well as your camera/lens ... then a style you can call your own will develop.

An artificially created style will look artificial.

Remember what Henri Cartier-Bresson said ... Your first 10,000 photographs are your worse.

Gary

 

[Boid]

Interesting discussion. To me the importance of gear vs pp is straight down the middle, 50% gear, 50% pp. That's how I've started looking at images when I shoot as well. That's where ETTR is a good way to go when shooting digital. BUT it's a pain. Not only do I find that I have to be in a "correct" frame of mind when I shoot, I have to be in a "pp state of mind" when I edit. I have also been reading about how it's often a good idea to distance oneself from the time you shoot to the time you pp, say a month or two, when you revisit what you've captured with a fresh pair of eyes.

I have also started evaluating gear with pp in mind. I just picked up the RX100 and I probably won't keep it, because at the pixel level the clarity is just not there (ya I knew when I bought it that its a small sensor camera, but I just don't like the way Sony spreads around the colours and it's weird noise reduction process that I can't seem to turn off).

About seeing the shot - I was toying around with a pal's camera, he had left it over at my place since I wanted to test it out, and stumbled across an image he had taken. I quite liked the composition and mailed him the "after" picture, to which he said that's exactly what he had seen on the day. Of course it could have been no such thing, since I'd created the second image in pp. Just goes to show that our memory filters out the bad, or the camera sees what it wants to and we need to re-create what we see later.

Also as an asides, I was much more comfortable going OTT on someone else's photo, than I would be while editing one of mine. Rather strange.

 

[Briar]

99.9% of my photos on Flickr are post processed. Off hand I can't think of many that I have taken that I have had my post processed image in mind when I've clicked the button. I see them as two different processes, two different hobbies really. I'm bouncing about on a rickety bus just now so this is the best I can add to this thread before my stop!

 

[tilman]

That's where ETTR is a good way to go when shooting digital. BUT it's a pain. Not only do I find that I have to be in a "correct" frame of mind when I shoot, I have to be in a "pp state of mind" when I edit. I have also been reading about how it's often a good idea to distance oneself from the time you shoot to the time you pp, say a month or two, when you revisit what you've captured with a fresh pair of eyes.

Good point about mentioning ETTR.
With digital we've been very much drilled to get a "technically correct" exposure. With nothing being clipped and a "healthy" histogram.
If you're doing that you definitely HAVE to do your own raw-conversion/post-processing.
A technically correct exposure rarely is an interesting one (over-simplifying here, but you get my drift)

Also, with default in-camera processing , you leave the look of your final image to some imaging-engineers... (Fortunately you can tweak a lot with modern camera settings).

Having said all that, I just bought an OMD EM5, hoping that I can spend less time in front of the computer and get more straight off the camera :tongue: We'll see how that will work for me

 

[pdh]

i can't help coming away from reading this thread with the impression that what matters in photography is having the Best Gear with the Highest IQ, along with really good post-processing software with lots of "filters" and that managing exposure at the time of taking the photograph simply doesn't matter. The idea that someone might have thought about what they want to be seeing later at the time of taking the photograph seems not to come into the process. Almost as if we can just fire off our cameras at any scene that looks vaguely interesting or pleasant, and then hope to generate a pleasing image later.

Of course this, is a time of amazingly fast technology change in imaging and cameras. We may be in the middle of a revolution that we're not quite aware of yet, and of course in the midst of revolutions "traditional virtues" become seen as irrelevant and may be supplanted by new and different virtues and norms. Perhaps that's what I'm seeing?

 

[grebeman]

The idea that someone might have thought about what they want to be seeing later at the time of taking the photograph seems not to come into the process. Almost as if we can just fire off our cameras at any scene that looks vaguely interesting or pleasant, and then hope to generate a pleasing image later.

Paul, I couldn't agree more, symptomatic of the times we live in, instant gratification without having to work at it (call me old and cynical )

Barrie

 

[Ray Sachs]

1) For me it's not about hardware or software, it's about seeing the final image in my mind and then using hardware or software or both to realize that image. Sometimes I see the image when shooting and sometimes when processing. Sometimes I'll underexpose or overexpose the image knowing that exposure will enhance the processing end. Being an old film guy, I try to get it all done in the camera.

5) Don't use pre-sets, process everything by hand.

What he said, at least in #1! The other point I'll disagree with slightly...

The main thing is seeing an image when you shoot it, not just a photo OF something, but what does the IMAGE look like in the frame, how do the lines and shapes and light and shadows (and colors if you're planning to leave an image in color) arrange themselves in the frame to create something visually interesting. And you need to play with the exposure to get it right, or at least pretty close to right. Although between modern sensors and PP capabilities, you can miss more on the exposure than you used to be able to and still come up with something really workable. But, obviously, the closer the better. Being an old film guy like Gary, I try to get it right in the camera too, but I'm getting pretty used to the idea that you can pull a lot out of an file that you'd never have been able to do with film...

But then once you have the basic image in the camera, it often takes some real PP work to fully realize the image you saw, to emphasize the parts of it that really pop or grab the eye, to play with contrast, etc. I sometimes know EXACTLY what I've got when I take the shot and have a pretty good idea how I'm gonna process it. But more often I discover what I've got after I go through a whole batch of photos when they come up on my computer screen and I'll see a few that I realize have a lot of potential that I didn't see when I shot them. But the bottom line, whether I really knew from the moment I took the shot or if I had to discover it later, is that pretty much ANY shot is going to look better after PP than it does straight out of the camera.

So I don't think its a PP versus GEAR thing. I think its a SEEING thing. Most GEAR will allow you to capture what you see, but sometimes better gear will make a big difference in terms of really low light (particularly if you need a reasonably fast shutter speed to freeze movement) and DR, but for most shooting, the gear isn't gonna be the weakest link in the chain. The artistic vision is almost always the weakest link in the chain. The only evidence you need on that is to see some of the brilliant work that great photographers have done with cell phone cameras and some of the garbage that mediocre to poor photographers do with the most expensive gear in the world. But I think PP works with your artistic vision to help you realize it, the camera gear generally doesn't as long as it doesn't get in your way when you take the shot. The exception being for working with flash or artificial lighting which are parts of photography that have never interested me, but are another world into themselves...

As for pre-sets, you definitely don't want to use them as a crutch, but I often use them as a starting point. I have a basic set of pre-sets in Silver Efex Pro - some of them I developed myself just by saving settings when a group of settings works really well on a photo or two, some of them I've gotten from elsewhere and generally modified. And I use these as starting points all the time. I'll have a new shot and I'll usually scroll through a handful of presets and see if one grabs me and, if it does, I'll use it as a starting point and then go in and make additional changes and adjustments from there. I never use a preset as a finished product, but as a starting point, I think they can be very helpful...

-Ray

 

[pdh]

So I don't think its a PP versus GEAR thing. I think its a SEEING thing. Most GEAR will allow you to capture what you see, but ... for most shooting, the gear isn't gonna be the weakest link in the chain. The artistic vision is almost always the weakest link in the chain.

I couldn't agree more.

 

[BBW]

Me, too, Ray.

Thanks to all for writing your thoughts... Often in attempting to put this kind of thing into words it helps us each clarify...or, if not, think about things differently.

I used to be very anti post processing - several years ago when I first started down the digital road. I just do what looks right to my eyes...damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead.

 

[Pelao]

I'm more in line with Gary and Ray.

I certainly don't see it as a decision to focus on gear or PP.

The first thing I will say is that I love gear. I love the technology behind it, the decisions designers make in producing it, and above all the feel of using a very effective camera and lens with which I connect.

But I love photography, and everything it encompasses, including gear, much more than gear itself.

With that confession out of the way, I would say that that what Ray referred to as seeing is at the heart of why I make photographs. Sometimes, I will have a vague notion in my minds' eye of something I want to capture. An example relevant at this time of year is the change of seasons, and capturing that change. More often though I spot a something that is happening, or about to happen, and I start to see the possibilities in a finished image. Everything comes together; my capture skills, my camera and lens, my PP skills, and I shoot.

I desire gear that works reliably and simply. Intuitive feel and a sense of confidence are things I seek.

My final output for everything I like is a print, and on some level this may influence my approach.

I feel that one of the issues we face is the volume and accessibility of information. new cameras, new software, various approaches and techniques, as well as a vast volume of finished photographs (from horrendous to breathtakingly good) is a few clicks away. Somehow we have to fit making photographs into all of this.

Which takes me back to what I suspect may be relevant to your original question. I suggest giving yourself a period of readjusted focus. Spend more time making photographs. Make lots of them (thank-you digital!) with the gear you have. Process them with the software you have. Remember, it's much easier now to go back months or years later and re-process with different software or new skills. When you are online, spend more time looking at photographs, and less in gear threads. And when you are in gear mode, remember that it isn't going away, and while you will read about great gear, it doesn't make what you have useless.

Just make photographs for the fun of it. It takes around a month to change habits. Give yourself a break and just enjoy photography and take pleasure in your output. Pick a date 6 months from now, and decide that you won't change gear until after that date. Just try it.

 

[pictogramax]

Both are tools, allowing YOU to achieve what YOU want. What YOU do with them counts.

Or what Ray said, more elegant and eloquent

 

[Gary]

What he said, at least in #1! The other point I'll disagree with slightly...

... As for pre-sets, you definitely don't want to use them as a crutch, but I often use them as a starting point. I have a basic set of pre-sets in Silver Efex Pro - some of them I developed myself just by saving settings when a group of settings works really well on a photo or two, some of them I've gotten from elsewhere and generally modified. And I use these as starting points all the time. I'll have a new shot and I'll usually scroll through a handful of presets and see if one grabs me and, if it does, I'll use it as a starting point and then go in and make additional changes and adjustments from there. I never use a preset as a finished product, but as a starting point, I think they can be very helpful...

-Ray

Ray,

My remark about pre-sets is a focused remark regarding finding/developing a unique style. I feel that manipulation by hand will enhance the pp skills and understanding for the photographer of how the final image is attained. Using a store bought preset kit may/will create a certain pp style, but it won't be your style.

Once one has learned, mastered and recreated a certain preset, then the photog can own it.

Presets are useful to play with and a quick way to see how an image looks. But, like walking before you crawl ... using them prior to mastering the technique(s) of the preset will hurt your development as a photographer (not learning how the preset was developed).

Barrie brought up a good point, instant gratification is the expectation of many. It is far easier to purchase a fine photograph with expensive hardware and PP software then spend years learning, understanding and developing photography and in particular one's own photography and style. I think this type of photography has been hyped by the equipment manufactures and photo manipulation software developers.

In our global community fast is good. Email is better than Snailmail, the tablet has replaced the pen, instant streaming has replaced theaters, Amazon has replaced Borders, the internet has replaced the community library. But there is always something lost when something is gained for fast. I fear that many photogs have never been exposed to anything other than fast and instant gratification.

Photography is many things, a hobby, a profession and a craft. As a craft, your final product will be based upon your tools and your skills, experience and vision. The more of your craft you do, the easier, quicker and better the end product. But you must learn and understand a basic skill set. So to for photography.

Once again, the more you understand the end results from your equipment, the more familiar you become with the camera/lens combo, the basics become more automated and you can use more of your brain power on the image, the pre-visualization and capturing of that image.

Becoming familiar your camera/lens to the point of automation or semi-auto takes time, for some of us, a lot of time.

Gary

 

[Luke]

I knew this forum held a lot of very good photographers. What I'm constantly surprised by is the number of really great thinkers as well. I'm really enjoying this thread and beginning to take away from it what should have been obvious from the start. That everything really comes down to the fact that no two people work alike.

There is no RIGHT way. Well......no RIGHT way in a sense that if you do it differently you're doing it wrong. ANY way can be the right way if the resulting image is one that you are happy with.

But there's a lot of great food for thought here so far and has given me some new concepts and ideas to try to put into practice.

 

[Gary]

You're correct, as with many personal endeavors, right and wrong isn't as important and often does not even pertain, as to what works for the individual. Those of us posting advice and suggestions are drawing from our own personal experiences. We need to remember, that based upon the luck of the draw, anybody with any camera can snap an award winning image. All my advice and suggestions are meant to increase one's consistency in capturing the exceptional image (a greater keeper rate).

 

[Luckypenguin]

We can talk about having vision, or even about art if we really have to, but the act of capturing and presenting an image is a largely a technical exercise. Image processing is simply taking greater control over that exercise. For some reason the "to process or not" debate always ends up at some point with the act of processing being labelled as something that only the photographer who can't "get it right in-camera" needs to worry about.

Would someone who takes the time to process an image to their satisfaction also not take the far less amount of time required to do something as basic as getting the original exposure right in the first place? That just doesn't make any sense.

 

[Ray Sachs]

Ray,

My remark about pre-sets is a focused remark regarding finding/developing a unique style. I feel that manipulation by hand will enhance the pp skills and understanding for the photographer of how the final image is attained. Using a store bought preset kit may/will create a certain pp style, but it won't be your style.

Once one has learned, mastered and recreated a certain preset, then the photog can own it.

Presets are useful to play with and a quick way to see how an image looks. But, like walking before you crawl ... using them prior to mastering the technique(s) of the preset will hurt your development as a photographer (not learning how the preset was developed).

Barrie brought up a good point, instant gratification is the expectation of many. It is far easier to purchase a fine photograph with expensive hardware and PP software then spend years learning, understanding and developing photography and in particular one's own photography and style. I think this type of photography has been hyped by the equipment manufactures and photo manipulation software developers.

In our global community fast is good. Email is better than Snailmail, the tablet has replaced the pen, instant streaming has replaced theaters, Amazon has replaced Borders, the internet has replaced the community library. But there is always something lost when something is gained for fast. I fear that many photogs have never been exposed to anything other than fast and instant gratification.

Photography is many things, a hobby, a profession and a craft. As a craft, your final product will be based upon your tools and your skills, experience and vision. The more of your craft you do, the easier, quicker and better the end product. But you must learn and understand a basic skill set. So to for photography.

Once again, the more you understand the end results from your equipment, the more familiar you become with the camera/lens combo, the basics become more automated and you can use more of your brain power on the image, the pre-visualization and capturing of that image.

Becoming familiar your camera/lens to the point of automation or semi-auto takes time, for some of us, a lot of time.

Gary

Gary,

I agree with you on pre-sets. When I first got into digital processing, I already had a pretty good background (a pretty distant background, but a good one) in B&W darkroom work. So I had an idea of what I was after. I started with Aperture and moved pretty quickly to Silver Efex Pro. In both, I quickly found AND created my own presets that got me pretty close to a look I frequently was after back in the darkroom days. The ones that weren't mine I tweaked until they were. I agree that pre-sets can too easily become a crutch if you don't understand their underpinnings and using them that way is generally counter-productive. But even for relative beginners, if they see a preset that they like for a particular photograph, there's a LOT to be learned by looking at those, playing around with the settings that make them look how they do, and figuring out which controls or combinations of controls add up to a look that works with your own vision. So I agree that pre-sets can be really counter-productive for folks just learning to process their work, but they can also be a pretty valuable teaching / learning tool for those who are trying to figure out how to get to a style that works for them.

As for instant gratification vs longer term achievement, I certainly agree that ANY photographer will be better once they put in the time to learn the craft and the technical aspects of photography. But I think its equally true that some people just have a natural eye and natural feel for making images. Their work will be better after years of honing their craft, but their early work may well be better than the work of a less talented photographer who's put in years or even decades of time really learning the craft but never really getting the ART part of it. Its like with music. Anyone can learn to play a musical instrument and the longer you play, the more proficient you get. But some people sound really good REALLY fast when they take up music and other people can practice for years and become excellent technicians but who just never really learn to make an instrument SING. Some people just start out with a better ear than others in music (I'm VERY aware of this because my ear sucks!) and some people start with a better EYE in photography. And some of those folks may well get some instant gratification out of it, not that can't still improve with work and more technical skill...

-Ray

 

[Ray Sachs]

You're correct, as with many personal endeavor, right and wrong isn't as important and often does not even pertain, as to what works for the individual. Those of us posting advice and suggestions are drawing from our own personal experiences. We need to remember, that based upon the luck of the draw, anybody with any camera can snap an award winning image. All my advice and suggestions are meant to increase one's consistency in capturing the exceptional image (a greater keeper rate).

This I agree with absolutely and completely. I can't say that my first 10,000 photos were my worst, because I had some really good ones pretty early on. But I'm far better now in terms of getting a much higher rate of keepers. I know more what I'm doing, I miss less, the technical aspects are incorporated closer to the DNA level so I don't have to think about them much in the field and can just go PLAY the instrument whereas in the early days, I really had to learn the damn thing and missed a lot of shots in the process. Although digital has something to do with that too. In the film days, the pure volume of shooting was much much less because there were very real expenses associated with each shot or roll that you took. Today, we're a lot free-er to experiment and shoot liberally to see what works. In one sense I wish I'd had this freedom in the early days. In another sense, I'm not sure because the expense also imposed a sort of discipline that I might not have bothered with otherwise...

-Ray

 

[Gary]

We can talk about having vision, or even about art if we really have to, but the act of capturing and presenting an image is a largely a technical exercise. Image processing is simply taking greater control over that exercise. For some reason the "to process or not" debate always ends up at some point with the act of processing being labelled as something that only the photographer who can't "get it right in-camera" needs to worry about.

Would someone who takes the time to process an image to their satisfaction also not take the far less amount of time required to do something as basic as getting the original exposure right in the first place? That just doesn't make any sense.

Nic,

I see this discussion ultimately about 'vision' and 'art'. The OP was seeking to develop a personal style (vision/art) and questioned the importance of processing over gear in this quest. I'm saying that style is a personal development which typically evolves from working the medium. The more familiar one becomes with the tools of that medium (camera/lens/processing software) the more energy your brain can devote/will devote to style. I personally think that changing systems and using presets, (without the hands-on learned experience of the basic elements of your tools), while providing one an instant gratification of nice imagery, will/may actually inhibit the development of one's personal style. One's personal style takes time to develop and may evolve over time.

Gary

 

[pdh]

We can talk about having vision, or even about art if we really have to, but the act of capturing and presenting an image is a largely a technical exercise. Image processing is simply taking greater control over that exercise. For some reason the "to process or not" debate always ends up at some point with the act of processing being labelled as something that only the photographer who can't "get it right in-camera" needs to worry about.

Would someone who takes the time to process an image to their satisfaction also not take the far less amount of time required to do something as basic as getting the original exposure right in the first place? That just doesn't make any sense.

you won;t catch me labelling in that way Nic, but at the same time I don't agree that the "act of capturing ... is largely a technical exercise" - partly because I don;t see how any link in the chain from seeing a potential photograph to the final output (whether that's print or screen image) can be split off from any other ... making a meal, after all, could be called a largely technical exercise, but you don;t start cooking with a set of random ingredients and hope that it comes out ok in the pan (or maybe you do? )