Photography And Computers

Photography And Computers

by William Lulow

From about the time I opened my studio,  I have used a computer for my work, and I have continued to use it even more in the intervening thirty years or so. It began with a way to process a mailing list I used to keep in touch with clients and prospective ones and it morphed into using the computer for the essence of my photographic work itself with the advent of Photoshop and related applications.

Without doubt, computers have become absolutely necessary to the workflow of commercial photography. It just doesn’t make sense to rely on chemical technology these days if your are running a business that relies on post-production after each and every shoot. A strong argument can be made however, for the superiority of analog printing and processing, especially with large format film. I always loved making images with my view cameras and obtaining truly breathtaking prints with my Omega D2V enlarger.  

Computers of course, rely on electricity or battery power to do their work helping you do yours. So, at some point they are vulnerable. Once your images are saved on a Solid State Drive, however, they should be relatively safe. Redundancy is still the watchword to preserving your digital work. Solid state drives (with no spinning discs) are not only faster, but don’t break down nearly as often.

Today’s digital photography creates very large images with  amazing amounts of data, especially if you shoot in RAW mode.  You need a computer that can handle them. One of my DSLRs is a “crop sensor” camera that creates an image roughly 32MP in size. That is enough to create an approximate 90MB file for EACH JPEG image I shoot.  If I shot in RAW, the crop sensor would produce roughly a 130MB file. You can see how, if I shoot two or three hundred images on a typical photoshoot, I might wind up with several GB of files that would need to be imported, organized and edited before the job is delivered to the client. (By the way, RAW files cannot be sent electronically. They must be converted to JPEGs. So, unless you really and truly need that extra information, shooting in RAW consumes a lot of extra time and computer space.

This is a typical image from a file shot with my 32MP sensor:

An 8×10″ image from this file would be approximately 5 MB in size, whereas the unedited version might be as big as 96 inches by 65 inches and might be 100 or more MB. (This calculation was done automatically by Adobe Lightroom. See how long it takes just to load a file of that size. My Dell computer running at 3.6ghz with 16GB of RAM takes about 3 minutes to load that file). If photographed correctly, one of these files might fit on the side of a building. Most images I shoot will be reproduced on a website or in printed form. So any image I produce with my equipment would be more than sufficient for very high quality reproduction almost anywhere.

By comparison, I made a 30×40″ enlargement of this image I shot of Jerry Garcia, backstage at a Grateful Dead concert in 1972. The original was from a 35mm piece of B&W film!

And the image below is representative of the clarity I obtain on a daily basis with the computer setup I use:

If you intend to create photographs digitally and work with them on a constant basis, there are several requirements that have become more and more important over the years.

Requirements:

Here are the minimum requirements I believe a photographer would need in order to process images easily and quickly.

1. A fast enough CPU (command processing unit) of at least 2.9 GHz. This refers to the power of the computer itself to process commands. These days, CPU’s of 3.4 GHz are common. Many are still around the 2.9GHz level.
2. Enough memory. Again, the more memory your machine has,  generally the faster it will work. For photographs, you need at least 16GB of RAM (DDR). 32GB is really good, 64GB is better. These machines tend to be more on the expensive side for Windows as well as Apple. I have looked at both. I think Apple is a superior machine on which the memory works faster and it is much less likely to break down. Plan to spend in the $3000 to $6000 range.
3. External Drives. These become very important in terms of sheer space. I now have four externals, each of which holds 4 TB of files and I am slowly replacing them with SOLID STATE DRIVES. That’s usually enough for several years worth of professional grade images where EACH SHOOT is comprised of 1-4 GB of files. The reason you need external drives is for storage. Many computers come with only 500GB or 1 TB of storage on the built-in hard drive. You will need much more than that for any professional use. These days you can purchase storage space on the “Cloud” and it is worth investigating if it’s necessary for the work you do. The one common thing to remember about computers is that they are machines. Even the best of them will develop problems sooner or later. So, it is wise to have your worked backed up several times over. Redundancy is the key to not losing any work.
4. USB Hubs. With all the peripherals that go with computers and all these external drives, here are some of the items that will require USB connections: (I am up to 10 connections already and there are probably more. I have 3 USB Hubs in addition to the ones built into the computer. If you are using an IMac or a similar Apple product, you have ONE USB input). The extra wires behind and underneath my desk are truly labyrinthian).
   1. Monitor
   2. Wacom tablet (for accurate retouching)
   3. At least 4 external drives
   4. Webcam
   5. Printer (I have three)
   6. Scanner
   7. Speakers
   8. Microphone (I have a separate one because I also play music)
5. Software for workflow. These days there are a few image processing software packages. The most well-known is Adobe Creative Suite which typically consists of Photoshop and Lightroom. I use Adobe’s Bridge, Lightroom and Photoshop all in conjunction with each other. They are always open on my desktop for speed and ease of use.

Solid state drives are quickly becoming the norm. This one is a 1TB drive and is smaller than your cell phone:

They are running, at the current time about $129 per TB. But they are well worth the money if all your images are digital (as most of ours are).

A typical workflow provides editing using all of these programs open at the same time. I use Lightroom or Bridge to import all the files from a shoot. I prefer Bridge because the editing and intake modules are a bit simpler than Lightroom, especially when I have clients looking over my shoulder while I’m working. They then go into Lightroom for bulk actions on a take from one shoot, for example, and then to Photoshop for editing and retouching individual images.

Those professionals who like to shoot in RAW format need to remember that the files need to be converted to JPEGs before they can be transmitted to the client. For most commercial uses I usually shoot in JPEG mode mainly because of the ease of working with that format and because my JPEG files contain more than enough information for any commercial use. If you love the extra information that RAW files provide and you have the time to edit each one on your own, then, by all means shoot RAW. As a further note however, I usually import files into Photoshop using its CAMERA RAW feature which gives me some extra leeway before the file actually gets to the retouching stage. It is imported as a rasterized file in Photoshop and can be saved in the JPEG format.

Quite a while ago I got a WACOM tablet with a stylus to help the editing process. It has become a necessity for any kind of really good retouching. A mouse is way too cumbersome. Another item I obtained a few years ago is a 27-inch monitor. It’s much easier to see and to enlarge images for detail work. (I recently had a student who bought a stylus that she could use on her touch-screen laptop. I thought that was a great idea, but it seemed to be a bit awkward because the screen could not lie flat on a desk). In addition, since I used to have two monitors, one for tools and one for the image, it’s way faster to have all the necessary canvas add-ons and tools on one screen. It’s not necessary, but it works far better than a laptop. You can probably use a large monitor in conjunction with your laptop, but I have never done that.

The takeaway from this article is to make sure you have enough storage space and that your machine can handle the size files that you will be creating most.

As a postscript, I just researched a top-of-the-line iMAC with a 27-inch monitor, CPU power boost up to 5GHz and 128GB of DDR RAM. Price: $6,000. And, there are other accessories and peripherals that could easily cost you another $1000. So, if your work can pay for it, that’s what the best computer system would cost.