david_henderson

What parts of Nik Efex do you find more helpful than LR? Alan Klein The only bits I actually use - pretty much Tonal control in Colour Efex and the b&w presets. Don't know whether I could get to the same points in my LR5 or not- but I know I can get there fast and in an easy to adjust format by skipping briefly into Nik. But bear in mind your LR might be more capable than my old software; or you might be better with it. A fair question might be whether at the point of buying my Nik Suite ( which at the time was far from free) had I known what use I'd actually make of it , would I have gone ahead with it? Would I first have explored whether I could replicate the effects I use in Photoshop or Lightroom ? Not really a fair question in some senses because I bought the NIK suite because I was getting a firm impression that photographer friends were making good use of it, and without a firm aim in view.

I have tried PS 6, and found most of the "new" features were for things I wasn't doing anyway. I agree that you can be kind of lazily content with what you have without trying new stuff. But for me I'd value more highly the views of someone who's tried a new toolkit than the opinions of someone who thinks they don't need to try because they're content. This latter is pretty much where I've been this last decade and maybe I should try to be more open to different/improved techniques . Couple of years back a good friend introduced me to some of the possibilities from Nik Efex ( which I'd bought but wasn't using) I guess I now use that on 25% of my work- not always as dramatically as it can go, but to an extent.

To respond to Puntacolarado's question No, because I already have dng's of these images on a HDD in the computer- or at least those I haven't deleted. The CR2 files are in my external HDD as back-up and I guess I knew that one of two things would happen Either I'd migrate to the current versions of LR/Photoshop that would open them or if I had a crash that affected that drive before I migrated, I could convert them as you describe.

Just to try and resolve what some might need to know about how I use photographic software. I currently have Photoshop CS5 64 bit and Lightroom 5. I had used earlier editions of both these tools before upgrading to these. I also make a little use of the NIK suite. I bring new photographs ( all stills btw) onto my computer via Lightroom. The import process creates a DNG in a trip folder on an internal drive, and a CR2 on a back-up folder on an external HDD I review all new images in Lightroom and decide whether I'm going to keep it. I dump probably 40% of what I take at this stage. I may well make some adjustment to the image to decide. The vast majority of those adjustments are made in Lightroom. Occasionally I'll use the "edit in" process to transfer an image into Photoshop or NIK to adjust & return the result to LR. My LR folders are organised by trip and date and by which of two internal HDD the originals sit-2007-2014 on one drive, 2015 onwards an another. Those I consider the best images are colour coded in LR If I'm going to use photographs for a presentation, to submit to a stock agency( much rarer these days); for my website; for a self-published book, or to have a print made I will copy the candidate/selected photographs from LR to Photoshop as Tiff or jpeg. and make further adjustments there, normally to fine tune. They are finished according to the purpose Occasionally depending on destination I'll soft proof in Photoshop. These "adjusted for purpose" images are kept in sub-folders of the trip folders on the internal HDD where the dng sit. These sub folders are my first port of call if I need to make further use of these images. If I want more images, different images, or to treat photographs differently I'll go back to the LR folder and re-export before fine -tuning in Photoshop/NIK Editing for me primarily means changes to colour, contrast, size, cropping ( many of my final images are square) selection ( normally the clunky quick selection tool in CS5) using potentially a range of tools. In Nik the majority of use is the Tonal Control tool within Efex. I don't ( probably to my detriment ), get into masking or combining images at all. Maybe that'll be simpler with updated software ? A final couple of points. First this is a short, paraphrased description of what I do. It works for me, by & large, but I'm not trying to promote it to others and I'm totally prepared to accept that what I do is suboptimal, and that if I used updated software I might well do more in LR and less in Photoshop. The reality is sometimes a little more complicated but I don't want to write a book here , just provide a bit of a clue to those who want to know in order to advise me. And I do understand that today's LR and Photoshop will be improved vs what I've got. Maybe that will provide an incentive to try new things- I'm a bit stuck in the mud and frankly just grateful that I can do what I now do without things going wrong- produce decent books on Blurb, make the odd print that has a passing resemblance to what I get on screen, run a website that gets some viewings, and have a few thousand images with agencies albeit that I don't take pictures of young people using cellphones and get paid peanuts now. Thanks again for your inputs

Barry. Can I please probe a bit on the "keep images on external drives" issue. I'd like to know more about why you feel that's the way to go. I'd thought about it a little, sort of decided that it doesn't make a lot of difference cost-wise to store the images on the machine or externally; wondered what else I have to occupy an onboard HDD that is probably going to come with an off-the-shelf Dell with a bit of configuration that won't fit on a 500GB SSD C drive as it does on the current computer; and I look at the small pile of external drives I have on my desk currently for backups and thought I could do without making that three into five. Fitting extra HDD into the computer doesn't seem hard ( in fact its not at all hard for me since I'll get someone else to do it!). I do wonder whether external drives are any more ( or less) reliable than internal drives & simply concluded that they're probably about the same and at the individual drive level, unpredictable. It does decouple changing computers from changing storage ( though that doesn't necessarily mean I'd have to buy fewer drives & transfer stuff onto them less frequently in the long run). So please- what am I missing? Nothing cast in stone yet, nothing on order, and I am absolutely convinced that I don't know much about this stuff! Thanks

Thanks to all who have so far responded. I just thought I'd chime in on a few of the issues repeatedly raised. 1. Drives, I have a SSD C drive and two internal HDD on my current machine- the SSD since I had a major crash with the original C drive a couple of years back . I had thought about the possibility of putting the existing drives in the new computer since it would save the grief of transferring across to the new machine ( on old/slow USB) quite a bit of software plus about 4TB of photo files. But the reason why I'm changing computers is to avoid the grief of another major crash and maybe recycling drives 11 and 7 years old is not a way to plan for reliability. I already have a few external boxes on my desk. I had been planning to have one copy of each of my photographs, old and new, on my computer, another in external HDD on my desk, and yet another on HDD in a nearby house where 2 daughters live. I don't think packing HDD capacity into a computer is expensive & as I have managed to achieve the " one raw copy of every retained image plus lots of Tiffs & jpegs" on my current old machine I don't really see whats better about not doing that on my new one. If people disagree with that route then I'd much rather listen to the argument now than after I've acted! 2. Type of drives. As indicated I now have a SSD C drive holding everything but photographs. It made start-up a whole lot faster & I am likely to replicate or even re-cycle that. I am still mulling over whether to make the other two internal drives HDD or SSD, bearing in mind I'd like these to be 3-4 TB each. And remembering that reliability is a primary reason for making this change. 3. My needs for image editing software are not hugely complicated & the current stuff does what I need. I wasn't aware of the possibility or keeping hold of the current software. I had kind of assumed that the next ( and maybe final) computer change would be accompanied by switching to up to date photography software. Now I'm apprehensive always about making changes to anything computer-wise since I'm not particularly savvy on these things, but I do find it somewhat frustrating to be unable to open the CR2 files taken on my Canon 5Diii that sit in my external hard drives. And not being able load the version of ACR appropriate to my camera. And I have to think whats most likely to get me through the next 10 years without grief. I think it would be neat to have a computer where the OS, software , and my camera are able to work properly together without hassle, and which might see me for 10 years. 4. Build or Buy? I can't see me having a computer built to my specification. For one, specifying it may well require knowledge I don't have, and if I have a problem I don't want my first issue to be diagnosing it myself so I know which component manufacturer needs to be asked to put it right as I'm not up to it and don't want to be. Frankly I'm not at all interested in computers - I just need to use one. I wish it was like a car - buy something that broadly meets your needs, get in it and drive it. If I had secure technical back-up who would maximise reliability and value by building it for me I might have different attitudes, but I don't. So thanks again for the input which will be most useful, and if anyone wants to add

I have a Dell desktop running Windows 7 . I have about 50 000 photographs on there in Lightroom 5/DNG/backups in CR2. . I also have several thousand Tiffs from scans of older film work, and many jpegs/tiffs created from the Lightroom stuff. I use Photoshop CS6 and to a lesser extent old NIK software to edit all these images. It all works well enough but its old- maybe dangerously old. The photos are backed up onto external drives & at least one copy of everything is held off-site. The digital photographs have been made on Canon 10D/5D/5Dii/5Diii. I'm well overdue a change of computer/operating system. I may well go with another Dell desktop and Windows 10/11 and recycle my screen which was replaced a couple of years back. I'm aware that my old but working software is far from up-to-date & that it will have to be replaced - presumably by subscription versions- as it won't work with the newest incarnations of Windows. I have a feeling that I'm heading for a massive task and lots of decisions. So--- What are the big tasks I face and in what order should I carry them out please? Naturally my desired end position is that I have all my photographs on a new machine, hopefully with a drive structure that mirrors the three internal drives and three external backups I have now and where all photographs and back-ups are accessible in and able to be edited in new versions of PS/LR/NIK. Am I right to feel daunted?

I've answered this question for you before Joe, and I've no interest in going through it again for someone whose interest seems to be in poking disbelief that anyone might prefer to use methods different from the ones they promote. Might be different if I hadn't sold my film equipment 10 years ago , but right now I really can't be bothered to enter a debate on which you will always insist on the last word.

QG You'd really do yourself a huge favour if you would take the little time it takes to learn how to do it. Too late QG. I stopped using film more than ten years ago, my Bronicas and Mamiya 7 are sold and now I'm content with the options on my Dslrs. Being able to see a preview and a graph, together with instant reshoots are game changers for me.

Tom Chow. Your assumptions are pretty much right, plus I'd never found it necessary to learn incident metering and I was more than a little reluctant to do so on the hoof at the beginnings of a 3 week trip with no feedback available on whether I was getting it right or not. I only used the 308 as a wide-angle reflected light meter, and frankly it was that or nothing in a small town in northern New England.

When I shot MF film I found a spot meter totally indispensible. But then I was using highly critical colour slide film, and I needed to be good with it. I used an identical exposure process for B&W, not because the medium required it, but because I was switching from colour to B&W in separate backs and was concerned that using two different metering processes was likely to lead to confusion and mistakes. If I'd only been using b&w neg- which is what Danac has said he intends- I'd probably have stuck with incident and made occasional use of my Bronicas' rather primitive averaging meter prisms simply because latitude is greater . I don't use my dslrs in spot mode at all and to be fair given instant feedback and the ability to re-shoot I can't see much point in moving far from evaluative metering. I've taken my share of poor photographs these last ten years or so, but I don't think poor exposure has cost me anything at all. The point I'm making is of course that choice of metering method should relate to what medium you're using not just an abstract view of whether one style of metering is better than another. For me there's one type of meter I just couldn't use , and that's a wide-angle reflected light meter such as a Sekonic 308. For me a 40 degree receptor means that I can't really tell where the readings are coming from and relate that to the lens in use. I bought one because my 508 broke on the first day of a longish trip, I'd forgotten my back-up 508 & a 308 was the best I could find locally. But I sold it as soon as I got home- the slightest hand movement sent the readings all over the place. I have no idea how people use this sort of meter well, it was beyond me and I worked hard at it. I ended up taking a reading from "sky" (insofar as I could tell) and another from "ground " and working out an exposure and grad filter combo that would possibly mean that I wasn't blasting anything into total over or under exposure. The only trip in my life where I've fretted a lot about exposure.

whilst I don't want to start into a reflected vs incident debate , or indeed a wide angle receptor vs a spot meter debate ( and however narrow a spot needs to be to be useful debate) there is one thing I'd like to say that is just so right I have to say it. If you want to use a spot meter get your own. It is not reasonable to expect someone who may be trying to set up their own photographs to meter for you or hand over her camera for you to play with. You don't need to buy/carry a dedicated spot meter. the Sekonic 508/558/608 and successors combine incident and spot facility . There are others that do the same.

I have a background in slide photography, which cost quite a lot. This probably explains why, although the number of photographs I make has increased since I turned to digital, it has never touched thousands a day . I've never, ever, come back from a trip even one of 2-3 weeks, with more than say 2000 images spread across a variety of subjects. I do get rid of outright rubbish on the hoof. That 2000 max tends to become c. 1200 max once I've edited at home. I'm happy to keep that number of images from a trip that has probably consumed several weeks of my life in the planning, organising, travelling and editing. About a hundred may actually get "used" in the sense of appearing on a website or self-published book, or placed in a stock agency. I could get it down much further but it would take serious time to do that which I'd rather spend doing other things. I've been doing this for years and I still have only a small pile of external drives & 2 internal drives in my computer for images & back-ups. So its not like its depriving me of space or food. But I have to say I'm not interested in photography that involves keeping the shutter pressed down in the hope of the best ever picture of that species , or game, or even wedding. I don't think I'd enjoy sifting through hundreds of similars to find the "best " & I'd probably pick the wrong one anyway. I hope that, for me,each shutter press is a decision.

Couple of further comments Point above about Jay Maisel. He was fortunate enough to know that his catalogue was worth something and quite probably also had/has assistants to actually do the work. I take it that neither of those apply to you? Stock agencies not taking scans. Well there was certainly a time when the bigger /better agencies didn't take 35mm scans, citing quality /enlargeability concerns. They did take scans from medium format and bigger though, and indeed my first years working with stock agencies were entirely based that way. In fact they would initially take the slides from you and have the scans made & pay for the scanning themselves. That didn't last too long though! Then the cost and mostly getting the work scanned fell to the photographer. The factor driving the stock industry to become pretty much 100% digital was that photographers quickly got fed up with paying for zillions of high res scans ( at least Imacon std. even from Medium Format), many of which would never get sold- and rushed into digital. Then the rush became headlong when the bigger agencies declined to even look at slides at all and photographers had to speculatively scan work to get agencies to even consider them. Naturally enough these last few phases didn't last too long, because frankly they were just totally uneconomic and made no sense.

Without a shadow of a doubt I would approach your project the other way round. I'd scan maybe a couple of hundred and use those to see whether I can create a worthwhile market for them. See how much you think you might raise. Assess on that basis whether it's worth digitising the rest. It is not a given that the answer will be "yes".

I already have a plan chest full of prints from my MF film days, plus quite a few storage boxes for the B&W fibre prints. So printing my digital output from the last 13/14 years is something I could really live without. Its not the printer or the ink or whatever, its that I really want to avoid adding to the vast pile of prints I already have, so printing is something strictly reserved for when I or someone else wants to hang something, in which case I send them out as the quality &fidelity these days is great and it avoids having to own a suitable printer & ink with the angst that goes with it. What I do have, and strictly for viewing pleasure is a series of large (12" sq) Blurb books , sometimes thematic, sometimes location based. They're not cheap at c £50 for a book of say 100 pictures but the quality and size are good for viewing, and they're portable if you're only carrying one or two. I no longer have any real difficulty in getting my books to look decently close to my computer screen. Otherwise I use entirely screen based viewing mechanisms. If its just for me I'll use the same PC I'm typing on now with a 27" display, and maybe a slideshow., If I need portable, or to show someone something remotely I maintain a website with about 50 collections of the themes/locations that interest me most for the moment, though I change them. I can view this on anything from phone via tablet to PC display depending on where I want to view and who with. I can tailor-make a presentation for others to load via WeTransfer is I can't just refer to a website album. Finally a good friend has a decent digital projector and screen and probably each of my "keepers" will make a large scale appearance on that not long after I've processed and edited .

Picking up from the above, its always interesting to see questions for which there is no answer, at least without qualification So if instead of "Photography is not art" you propose that "Photography can't be art" or "Photography is (always) art" Then you can have a response that defies reasonable debate. But you still of course have the inevitable conflict over whether a particular work is art or not. Much of what I see in commercial art galleries I don't consider remotely artistic. But then I understand that some will disagree, the creator maybe ( notice I didn't use the term "artist") and even more likely the guy that owns the shop. There are people who set themselves up as having the skill to decide this for us all and I consider them pretty bogus. The answer is that I can decide, but only for me. No-one else can decide for me and I can't decide for anyone else, though I may seek to persuade/influence them. "Is it art" is a question that can only be answered in the context of a specific piece of work and a specific viewer, no matter what the medium.

Ahhhh. Travelling to photograph. That's something I remember doing a lot. What you need with you depends on how you want to behave and spend your time whilst away. The big decision for me is whether I want to process/edit images whilst I'm away in any more detail than I can achieve by looking at the back of the camera to get rid of shots that simply, obviously don't work or are duplicates. If you want to edit properly you're going to need a laptop and if you have a laptop you may as well load images to it and use that as a form of back-up, keeping the original images on their cards till after you get the laptop safely home. For me, I never carry a laptop ( I carry an iPad mini for internet/email/watching movies etc but not photography) . I don't carry a laptop because I won't have time and begrudge the time to edit on a trip. I spend a lot of time with my nose in a computer at home , and I'd rather spend on location time more sociably or planning my next day or two or relaxing over dinner. I'll do a better job of editing on the desktop computer at home & will enjoy doing it more there, and my wife will enjoy the trip better without a constant reminder that what is for her a holiday is actually just a photography trip. So for me the entire question is how I keep and protect my images on the trip. I want it to be safe & I want it to be light. The way I do it is to record every image onto two cards -as mentioned above. Cards are cheap and light. I don't use big capacity cards because I don't want to lose more than a days photography if anything should go awry or more likely if I mislay one. I change cards and backup cards together but I store /carry the two sets of used cards separately. I hope to avoid being the guy who loses all his pictures when his camera bag gets stolen at the airport on the way home because he keeps both sets of used cards in there. With the exception of total garbage, no images leave either set of cards till the load to my at-home computer and external drive system for back-up has been completed and verified. And even then I'll probably keep all the images on cards till I actually need to format the cards when I next load them to a camera. The other way is to use a hard drive to load all images daily. You can use that with two sets of cards or one. but you still keep all images on cards till you load up at home and carry the cards separately from the drive.

Movements on a view camera at ground level won't enable you to see the roof of buildings and vehicles higher than you. So the original shots ( whether on a view camera using movements or not) must have originated some way above ground level.

Bracketing? I did work out once - about 20 years ago- what it would cost me to bracket, given I bought film reasonably efficiently but used a pro-lab to process it. The answer then was about £7 000 pa if I bracketed twice for each shot. And it would have meant carrying c 250-300 rolls of E6 film on a 3 week trip without for the moment fretting about the storage implications and cost unless I threw all but the best exposures away. No thanks. I preferred to put the effort into getting the exposures right and stay solvent.

My slide films could cope with a brightness range of 4 or 5 stops. I found it indispensable to have knowledge of how different parts of the scene would be rendered if I chose any specific exposure level. And I'd systematically check around the frame along the lines of "well at f11/1/60 those trees are going to be 1 stop darker than a mid tone, that path would be a half stop lighter than a mid tone, but the bright parts of the sky are 4 stops lighter than a mid tone so I need either to cut it out or use a 2 stop grad". That, as a quick paraphrase of a process that stood me well through 10+ years of MF slide film with good results, albeit sometimes one concluded that a shot simply wasn't do-able with that film. I found no need or advantage in averaging spot meter readings I started to use FF digital in 2008. Within a year I'd sold the Sekonics and haven't needed to use a spotmeter since. And to be fair I haven't missed the few minutes of palaver before deciding whether I could make a successful photograph before even getting the camera out. But then neither do I miss scanning slide film, and buying & carrying around 100 rolls of film on a longish trip.

Rodeo Joe. You speak like someone who thinks that I need some sort of reason not to use the methodology you prefer. OK here it is. For the films I used I needed a methodology that told me whether and where parts of my my pictures were likely to render as detail-less black or white. So that I could consider options to avoid those outcomes.

"But, but.... if you take enough spot readings and average them, then isn't that exactly the same as taking a wide area reflectance reading?" No. Not at all. Because you don't average those readings ( well I know some people do but thats not IMO the right way). You actually choose between those readings in the knowledge of how those other areas will be rendered. So no.

But the OP's original questions seem to me to indicate that he doesn't understand how spot metering (indeed any reflective metering) works. Spot metering requires the photographer to make a lot of judgment about how you would like important areas to be rendered ( as a mid-tone? lighter? darker? how much?) Some people don't mind having to do that . Others find it faffy and difficult.

I used Sekonic meters in spot mode for many years with exposure-critical slide film and never once felt the need for incident metering. I felt no weakness in my process or equipment that incident metering would have resolved. But here's the thing. Some people use it all the time & get good results. I and others used multiple spot readings all the time and got good results. Depends entirely on which method you feel comfortable with and trust. The real no-no to me is a combination of exposure-critical film and wide -receptor reflected light readings.