Project365 - To Post-Process or Not ?

 

I have been doing a lot of research about the field of photography. It's become a passion for me. I read Popular Photography on my iPad. I read a Zite newsfeed which keyword searches for Photography. I use FlipBook to let me follow various feeds there, of which the Phoblographer is my favorite. Aside from the nearly religious wars over Canon vs Nikon, or Lightroom vs Aperture, I have been reading various opinions about whether or not to post-process.

To begin with, I shoot RAW file format. This means that the file contains all of the information captured by the camera's sensor. The files are huge - 14 MB is the average. But if I wanted to post-process, this is the best format around, as I could tweak everything in Aperture if I wanted to.

Interestingly, my processing workflow goes something like this:

• I take the photographs on my camera, which stores them on an SD card.
• Using the Apple Camera Kit adapter, I transfer the photographs to my iPad, which collects them in the default Photos app.
• In Photos, I take a quick look at the imported images. Any that are unsuitable are selected & deleted.
• Then I open up iPhoto on my iPad. It shares the Photos library, so will immediately perform an update, having found new photos in the library.
• I perform any minor touch ups - usually cropping and exposure corrections. Then I save the edited images in the Camera Roll. At this point, the pictures are auto-magically saved as JPEG files, which are much smaller in size - very suitable for sharing on the web.
• Once the photos are in the Camera Roll, I (optionally) mark them up using Google's Skitch app. It's great for drawing on the photos - like arrows or boxes, for emphasis. These are again saved back to the camera roll.
• From the Camera Roll, I use iWatermark to "stamp" the images with my copyright. Anad again, the water-marked images are stored in the camera roll. So that's up to three distinct copies of the photos in the Camera Roll !
• Once the photographs are ready, they are typically shared amongst various social media - Facebook, my blog, and if I think they are really good, 500px
• Once the images are uploaded to social media, I connect the iPad to my laptop and import everything into Aperture for cataloging. Once that is complete, I select the option to remove the images from my iPad.

As you can see, almost ALL of my post-processing is done on my iPad. And at that, there is very little that I change on the photos. I mean, sure - right CAN go into Aperture and tweak the images to my heart's content. I have even learned how to do things like remove power lines from photographs ! Is it "cheating" ? Many people would say yes ! Me - I dunno...

My Project365 objective is to take the photographs completely manually. There is nothing on my camera (Canon 60D) or my flash (Canon Speedlite 430 EX II) that is set to "automatic". I don't even use auto-focus. This sounds laborious, but it forces me to slow down & think about what I am trying to achieve with my photography. This in turn allows me to learn new techniques and become more creative !

So if I spend a lot of time in post-processing, tweaking the images, what will I have learned ? Equally, how would my readers feel if I didn't show them both my successes and my failures ? It is in that spirit that I am limiting post-processing for this year. I'm not vehemently against it, but it simply doesn't lend itself to the objective of my project. Maybe next year I'll do a post-processing project !