{ why it takes me so long to edit photos }

One of the hardest things about the past year was finding my “look”. There’s nothing wrong with a crisp, saturated, fully focused photo. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s the look most people are going for when they’re snapping pictures from day to day. While I do want my photos to be in focus, I’m not overly concerned about the rest. I would pore over websites and blogs looking at other photographers’ photos and it felt like they all looked the same. Rich, saturated, super sharp photos, with creamy almost fake looking overblown skin  (this is huge pet peeve of mine). I don’t know where I saw my first “hazy vintage” (that’s what I call it, anyway) photo, but I was immediately drawn to it. I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of people out there doing that look, but it’s certainly not as prevalent in family photography as the more traditional saturated look.

So I starting working on my own “recipes” to get the look I wanted. Turns out that recipe has to be tweaked with every shoot. Sometimes I can use the same ingredients over an entire set of photos, but sometimes it doesn’t work and then I find myself adjusting the recipe, photo by photo. And the real kicker is that I could do this for HOURS. Not because I didn’t get it right the first time, but because I just love playing around with variations on a single photo. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken a photo and run a few edits on it and said, “perfect”. And then for some reason I’ll start over again, do a whole new set of edits and go “oh I like that even better.” And then take it back to the beginning and do ANOTHER totally different look which I hate. And then I’ll say, “I liked that second one… now how in the world did I do it?” Because by that time you’ve tweaked every slider, every channel, every color, every level, and you can’t remember how you got there. So then you just have to start all over again and hope you get close.

As a result, I have a hard time getting a set to look like a cohesive collection. It’s extremely frustrating, but refining my editing process is way up there at the top of my resolution list for this year. I am hopeful that this workshop I’m attending next week will help me in that effort.

Anyway. This is a photo (not a particularly good one) that I took this weekend. Just watch and laugh as you see my brain at work here – as frustrating as this process can be, I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was fun. It’s like painting a new picture every 5 minutes.

Original (or SOOC, straight out of the camera) – and to give you some background, it was a very overcast day, so the second one is really quite misleading. Which bothers me.

Bringing out the colors, warming it up, adding a sky where there was none (but screwing it up around the top branches)…

And then washing it all out…

And finally, a completely desaturated take.

See? Every one of them different. But I don’t really dislike any of them. I just can’t stop myself from messing with it over and over again. I’m not sure what the point of this post is, but just imagine this process times however many photos I take in one afternoon of your family. Do you see the challenge?