Automation in Photography

Today is a better day, temperature wise, here in South Dakota, but I decided to do some work on the pictures I've taken rather go into the park.  One, it is still hot for me and Two, I plan on doing some night shots again so why bother wearing myself out shooting all day and into the night?  I'm doing more of what I had originally intended to do back in the spring but for various reasons didn't.

Sunset at Badlands National Park

Over the years photography has moved to making things more and more automated.  First there became auto processors for our film and now with Adobe Lightroom (r) and Photoshope (r) you can automate many of your tasks as a photographer.  Want to set a blanket color adjustment across the board, easily done with a few clicks and bingo. Want to remove a pesky person from the image? Well, just select and hit delete and tell the software to be aware of the content and match it.  So many ways to automate things. 

Even the HDR software I use can go through a directory and process each image into it's HDR form and then process it into a form that we can use on the web. (Any HDR image on ANY website isn't a true HDR image, the web standards don't allow it for one and most monitors can display them properly.  You have to translate it into another format that can be properly displayed).  I don't use a lot of this though. I may have the HDR software create the HDR image and save it, but I go through each one and look at them to tweak them the way I want.

Moon Light shot at Badlands National Park

So, instead of letting my computer do all the work I have spent the day working on processing as many of the images as I can get done that I've taken so far.  I have several hundred tiff files that are ready to be brought into Photoshop to process into a final image and that will take a lot of work as I sift through them all, looking and deciding what to display and what to keep locked away on my hard drive.

Hence, why does it take me so long to process my images? Because I do it all myself.  I don't let the computer choose what is the look I want just like I don't let me camera choose what is the best aperture and shutter speed for a shot.  This is MY ART and not what some company thinks what it should look like.