Prudence…….
This is part one of three short essays on matters that I have come to understand as very important in my work as an artist. You are probably questioning “What has prudence to do with photography?”. I hope that I can clarify this. The following is the definition of prudence from the Merriam-Webster dictionary.
pru·dence
Pronunciation: \ˈprü-dən(t)s\Function: nounEtymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin prudentia, alteration of providentia — more at providence Date: 14th century
- the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason
- sagacity or shrewdness in the management of affairs
- skill and good judgment in the use of resources
- caution or circumspection as to danger or risk
I think one of the real drawbacks to digital is the illusion of the actual cost of each image. While film itself was a major cost in photography, the processing, whether by lab or in your own darkroom was substantially more. The time that color film users had to wait for results was also a factor. The mind set was one of judicial use of your resources. You just didn’t want to invest in bad images so you were likely to be more selective in your work.
When I made the move to digital I loved the freedom from being shackled to a lab or a darkroom. Well, actually Photoshop has become my new darkroom, it just doesn’t smell quite so bad. I no longer had to financially account for the images that I was accumulating. Bits and bytes are free and “The more you shoot, the better you get”. More is better. Right? So off I went merrily filling up CF cards and accumulating thousands of images.
It didn’t take long until I realized that I had a growing crisis on my hands. I was filling up my hard drives and I really didn’t have any real control over what I had on hand. If I wanted to find an image I sometimes spent hours looking for it. This was worse than waiting for film to be returned from the lab. This issue was compounded by the fact that I was running on a pretty old computer. It just wasn’t up to the task of working on files that were ballooning to the hundreds of megabytes.
So I bit the bullet and invested in a fairly high end work station with ample hard drives and backup storage. End of crisis? Not really. I still had this problem of having absolutely no idea of what I had and where it was. All I really knew was that I had a lot of it. What to do? I had to find out what others in this field were doing to address this problem. I ended up with Peter Krough’s, The DAM Book, and I purchased a good asset management program and started to address this issue. I was also becoming painfully aware that what I had just invested in this new system would have bought alot of TMax 100 and DK-50.
I was out one evening trying to get a good sunset shot and was sharing this particular spot with a fellow photographer who happened to be using a 4 x 5. As we waited for the light we talked of different areas that we had both been to and had photographed. He related that on his last three day pack trip into the Sierra he had taken only six film holders with him. I thought to myself that that was one of the disadvantages to large format and film. As the light began to change the conversation slowed as we busied ourselves with the task at hand. I was busily clicking away bracketing my images to make sure I got the sunset just right. When I would pause to check the LCD I would notice that my fellow photographer was patiently checking the light with his spot meter. He finally inserted a film holder and took his one shot. We packed our gear and headed out as darkness set in.
As I drove home I kept thinking about what had transpired that evening. It was not only a very beautiful sunset, nor the congenial company of another photographer. It was the epiphany that I had just experienced. More, certainly was not better. In fact it was a curse. I had been substituting quantity for quality. Three days in some of the most beautiful scenery on earth with only six film holders. This was Zen like.
I came to the realization that I had accumulated a huge amount of totally unusable images. My rationalization for most of these was that I could fix them in Photoshop. If I sat at my work station everyday for ten hours a day and did nothing but fix these sub par images I would never get caught up. So I began a campaign of ruthless review and grading of my work. This required a very substantial investment of time but resulted in a collection of a manageble size and images of proper quality.
I am pleased to see that my work is improving. It hasn’t gotten better because of the volumn, because this has been steadily decreasing, but, because I am becoming more selective again. I now shoot about a tenth of what I used to and still feel that this can be refined. I find more joy in my work now. I spend less time sorting and cataloging images. I haven’t had to upgrade my hard drives for quite sometime. As to my time in the digital darkroom……..I think that I am one of the few that really loves working in Photoshop. I get as much joy from this as I do from the actual photography. And now I don’t waste time trying to fix images, I spend that time in perfecting my images.
“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” Ansel Adams. This has become my creed.
