Brooks Jensen, in his podcasts, has frequently mentioned that this is one of the best times in history to be a photographer because of the many ways artists now have to get their work out into the world and because of the various imaging modalities and options that are now available. I agree with him. But, at times, I find myself wondering if the wide variety of options can become too much.....to the point where learning them or spending time with them can actually become a detriment to the art.
Let me be clear. I do not think the proliferation of options and modalities themselves are the problem. On the contrary, as Brooks suggests, these options open up opportunities that we have never had before. I think the problem, at least in my case, has become deciding what options to choose. Like a smorgasbord at a regal feast, eating everything can lead to.....well, you get the picture. I have finally reached the point where I think some choices may be in order.
Just to delineate what I am talking about, I would like to enumerate some of the choices that come to mind, and these are only the ones that come to my mind. I am sure there are others that I am missing.
PROCESSING AND PRINTING:
1) Lightroom/ Aperture etc
2) Photoshop or other image editing programs and their techniques
3) Plug Ins
4) HDR processing
5) Printing on paper
6) Printing on canvas, which necessitates learning how to coat and stretch/mount the prints
7) Standard Mounting and Framing
VIDEO
1) Learning To Shoot Video
2) Video Editing
3) Sound Management / Production
NON PRIMARY EDITING SOFTWARE
1) Adobe Acrobat (to make .pdf / e-books)
2) Dreamweaver (to construct your website)
3) Adobe InDesign to produce folios
4) Slideshow Production
5) ? Making Presentations i-Pad / Android Compatible
SOCIAL NETWORKING
1) Blogging
2) Newsletter Generation
3) Facebook Fan Pages
4) Twitter
5) Flickr
The choices can become overwhelming and time consuming. So what to do?
Continued in next post....
Dec 14, 2010
Too Much - Part I
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3 comments:
I absolutely agree with your comments; becoming engrossed with "options and modalities" such as you describe can become obsessive and distracting. In the past I have found that solving 'technical problems' to do with photography has been an end in itself, and that I lost sight of what I was really trying to do ~ to make photographs.
Today though, I fortunately have another perspective. The equipment that we have at our disposal, be it cameras, computers, printer, papers or ink are so good that I just don't have those sorts of problems left to solve any more. More important for me though, is that presently I have lots of enthusiasm and very clear set of objectives about my photographic projects. All the other stuff has just become a very good and more than adequate tool kit at my disposal.
and you did not mention the ability of having thousands of images taken with excellent digital cameras. Which image to process, to work one, what are the good one to care about?
Also thousands of images in our lives brought by the media. Our lives are full of images as if we were living in an "imaginatory" universe.
Luis...good point. I do often find myself somewhat ' frozen with indecision' when confronted with many multiples of the same image in Lightroom with slight variations and trying to decide which one to fully process. Worse, it sometimes wants to make you 'decide later' which. of course, decreases the chance of it actually getting done!
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