All you do is press a button!

Now I personally haven't had anyone tell me this(there's a first time for everything right!), but it is a common misconception that all a photographers job involves is pressing a button.

Pressing the shutter button is probably about 5% of what our job consists of.   Take a quote I read recently, I thought was pretty witty "you want to take better pictures? Stand in front of better things".  Take that advice and stand in front of dirt bikes going over jumps, bumps and turns and the pressing of the button gets exponentially harder.

This is a job just like anything else someone may do for a living,its time spent doing something. Pushing buttons on a cash register, answering phone calls, delivering pizza, pressing a button on a camera, they are all things that take your time.

I am not writing this trying to rant, I was mainly wanting to give a little incite into post production and share the amount of time it takes to get a great photo.  So for example if I am covering a race, lets say I am there from 3 till 11pm. So I'm shooting photos for 7 hours, then I need to go home and sort out all the photos and find the good ones.  With 7 hours of photos, this alone can take an hour or more.  Once I have them all sorted then comes the editing.  This is going to vary for everyone of course, but this is my workflow.

(warning, technical talk!)
I shoot photos in RAW format, it is the same thing as having a negative from a film camera.  Its your digital negative and when you process this negative you never lose your original file, same as you never lose your film negatives.  All cameras come preset to shoot in JPEG format, doing this loses over half of your data. JPG compresses all the data to make a smaller file size and in turn throws away about 60% of the information.  Shooting in RAW takes more time (and hard drive space!) in the editing side of things, but the results are what we are all about right?  For the very best results you need to work for them.

That being said, lets say I have 300 photos that are keepers from a race.  Even if I spend one minute on each picture it will still take me 5 hours to edit all those photos.  Now I certainly wish that was a possibility, but its just not.  I've been using photoshop for over 10 years, and lightroom for a long time as well.  I know all the short-cut buttons, I have a wacom tablet to make things go faster. I edit as fast as one most likely could. On a good day I'm spending at least 5 minutes on a photo to perfect it.  So 5 minutes per photo x 300 is 25 hours of editing, one hour sorting photos, 7 hours taking photos. One day at the track can come out to 33 hours of work easily.

Now add that the longer it takes for these photos to get done the less they will be cared about, who's working 33 hours in 2 days?  (this guy)  Now I'm not going to deny that I could do this much faster, which is what I do when I am shooting an event on spec (Speculative work—work done without compensation in the hope of being compensated) You can batch edit photos in lightroom and apply the same edit to all the photos shot in similar situations.  This takes a big chunk out of your time, then I will only fully edit photos that are purchased. If your at the race only covering one sponsor you may need to edit just 50 photos and get them out the same night. The situations are endless, but at the end of the day you will almost certainly spend more time in front of your computer than pressing the button.

I will add to this a little comparison of the amount of editing it takes for high fashion photography.  If you have read my intro you will know my 2nd job is editing for fashion photographers(if not now you do). They are busy, and making enough money that they usually don't ever do their own editing (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain).  The editing for these photos takes forever I have an example i'm going to post up and it took me 4 hours on one photo.  This of course is a completely different situation. They are shooting a bunch of photos looking for one perfect shot, not to offer up 300 photos of event participants.
Please keep in mind I did not take this photo, I only edited it.

Not my photography! The Before

After 4 hours this is what the client settled on being what they were looking for:

The After

Just to show a couple more examples here is my cover photo for my most recent blog.  One thing to keep in mind is that shooting in RAW format, the camera adds absolutely nothing to the image.  No color saturation, no contrast, no sharpening, your left with a ugly flat photo that you need to bring to life!

totally flat raw file

5 minutes of tweaking some settings it ended up like this

I will leave this with a perfect example of how shooting in RAW format can save you.  This was my fault (of course), I was inside of the arena shooting photos and I came outside to go to my car. I seen Darryn Durham outside talking to a fan.  I snapped a photo of him and holy crap my settings are for shooting in a dark building and its bright as hell outside! If I would have shot this photo in JPG it would have been completely worthless.  All the blown out areas of white with no detail would get compressed by the JPG format and would be completely gone.  Here comes RAW to rescue, it actually saved all my data and there is detail hiding under those blown out areas. I was able to get a photo that I found to be a really nice candid shot (one of my favorite things to do)

Holy crap is bad, about as blown out as you can get

RAW saved the shot

Now I don't advocate shooting in raw just so you can blow highlights and not pay attention to what your doing. This was a dumb move on my part and shooting in RAW just gives you this much play in your photos.