A Change Is as Good as a Holiday - Moving from Lightroom to Capture One

I tend to make big changes seemingly impulsively. My move to Apple was on the back of a hissy fit caused by multiple crashes of an old PC (while trying to deliver to a client who had a rather hard-to-meet timeframe). My move to digital was the result of a single conversation with an image editor who complained about seeing grain in a digital scan of Fuji Velvia. Possibly I’m not being fair to myself and these decisions are actually made after months of thinking about it, but a single event causing everything to snowball into shape. So I’ll deliberate in my mind for months and then suddenly dive head first into whatever change it happens to be at the time (the decision to move house has been similar). The move to Capture One followed this thread exactly.

The Accidental Artist

“The thing that interests me about photography and why it’s different from all the other media, is that it’s the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece” 

Chuck Close in Photo Wisdom - Master Photographers on their Art

You could say that photography has sort of exploded over the last decade. It’s estimated that 17 trillion images were created in the last year alone. People who call themselves photographers will quibble over the equipment used and moan about the proliferation of cellphone wielding snapshooters, but the reality is that we have entered an era of the ‘every-photographer’. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram make sure that there is an insatiable demand for imagery to be created. Create we do as millions of people around the globe upload countless images of their cats, to their cars, to their vacations and more. What’s more, we have become addicted to fulfilling this demand. We get a small hit of endorphin when someone, somewhere, clicks a little heart to tell the photographer that they ‘like’ the image (the ridiculousness of this is that often those clicks are automated, but the receiver still gets a high). Slowly our perceptions of self-worth become moulded by the amount of views, comments and reactions we receive from our online images. The ephemerality of it means that an image last barely moments before it is superseded by another image, and then another, and another, and another.

A Brief Introduction To Storage and Backup

As photographers we are now well past the days where we stored all our old film negatives in a shoe box in the closet. Now instead of several hundred photographs to sift through on a Sunday afternoon, we have tens of thousands of images that we need to sort through, store and somehow backup. It is an often articulated concern among the photographers that I engage with as to how to store all these images. More than just store the images, how do we keep them future safe and back them up in the case of loss or damage.

A Love Affair - A contemporary review of the Nikon F3

 

I was still in school when I first met her. God, she was beautiful. I felt like I was cheating when I switched my attention to her, but it also just felt right and good. Like it was meant to be. Years later I deeply regretted abandoning her for a newer version. It ate at me. I yearned for that click, for the feel in my hands; for the tactile caress and they way it just felt right…every…single…time…I pressed the shutter. After many years, I finally have the Nikon F3 back in my hands, and she’s mine!