On the flight back home to Ottawa from NYC (it’s a short flight, less than an hour). I was thinking about all of the photos that I had just taken on this trip and also about all of the work that I had waiting for me back at home. I have never considered taking pictures as work, although it is and I do work at it very hard. And it is how I make my living. But still it’s not like work, taking pictures is what I love doing. I suppose that if you are interested in photography, I’m probably preaching to the choir right now.
What I do consider as work is sitting in front of the computer processing all of these images, I also used to consider processing the film in E-6 chemistry as work as well. The difference is that E-6 was much faster and I could get through huge shoots in very little time. All of the photographers that I know, who are shooting on a regular basis now have a backlog of digital images to process. I’ve heard some people say that because it’s digital you’ll shoot more, there isn’t the film and processing costs to consider so with digital as long as you have free hard drive space shoot away. That may be the case for some photographers, but I think they would be in the minority. I’m not shooting any more now than I did when I was shooting with film, in fact I probably shoot less. Now I can now tell right away when I’ve got the shot, so I don’t waste time shooting repetitive images.
My problem is that I’m on the road shooting for 4 months straight in the summer and then another 2 months of travelling spread throughout the remainder of the year. Then when we do get back home, Val and I spend our time planning for new trips and trying to catch up on the editing and digital processing. Time management is the answer, I just have to figure out how to adjust my time for digital work compared to what I’ve been doing for the past 25 years shooting film.
