How do you find the time?

[R. Neil Haugen]

I just wrote a missive over on PhaseOne's EM forum that many here might find interesting, many not. In it, I note that for me, a long-time professional photographer and small-business person who has needed to learn computer-skills to survive but is NOT natively a person for whom software engineering, design styles, and code-sets are intuitive (ahem) ... I need a decent instruction piece on how to use something as capable, massive, and useful as say, EM2.

And please understand ... I DO NOT consider the nice feature-film videos over at PhaseOne to be at all instructional materials. First, they are very few, second, they only show a teaser of how those few tasks can be done, and third they don't show in detail how to puzzle out the details to adapt the "shown" task to what you will find with your own images and metadata practices over the last few years. In other words, how to actually apply the capabilities of the program in real-world time and space. Peter's EXCELLENT books (I have both, and love that the 2nd edish is actually signed!) still give overviews, and don't have the space to give in-depth "how-to-do-X" with the few million different things one can do with EM ... just as ONE of the major software pieces I must use daily.

Which gets me to the heart of the question I'd love an answer for ... some of the people here, especially Peter and John Beardsworth (and many others), are most impressive at having puzzled out arcane software/hardware issues WHILE managing real-life photo-businesses and supposedly remaining on decent terms with family and friends. In straight IQ terms, I'm not worried about mixing it up with anyone ... yet ... I'm totally impressed at this ability. I haven't the knack, clearly. My brain's highest powers are simply not in computer-science areas. As much as some of my local peers find me a great resource on computer hardware/software, and as much time as I spend dealing with it ... it SO frustrates me. To actually have a chance of mastering such a program would take hours that do not exist in any even parallel universe I can imagine. (And yes, I grokked Peter's comment about the Prime Directive!)

THAT is why I need to have a detailed instruction set of how to real-world use the programs we need for survival in daily life. Lightroom, Photoshop, EM-"X", idImager, such software is so capable of assisting us to speed through the necessary tasks of making our file live and breath for us and our clients. But ... learning how to really use them seems to require setting aside getting things done for clients and family. There's a ton out there on Lightroom, some quite good; there's a ton on Photoshop, much of it useless for my needs, but still much VERY useful; yet, the DAM part of the puzzle is really the more important for the long-run and DAM programs don't tend to have great instructional materials available for the DAM-dimwits among us (like moi), though at least idImager (and Hert) is trying. Much of it is try this, oops ... try that ... huh ... how about ... oooh, NOT that ... maybe change this variable I've no clue of ... well, that worked, I don't know why ... and so on. Hours and hours of trial and (mostly) errors to test out and validate ONE little step before it's ready to be applied to our precious files.

And there's what, a few hundred steps that we really need to know and apply daily, in each of these programs?

It's a conundrum I struggle with. How ... in Hades or whatever NASTY place you can imagine ... do others handle this?

Neil

[ashleykaryl]

Hi Neil,
I've just read your post and as you can see it has taken some 10 days before somebody replied to your very straightforward but important question. It's like a ghost town around here in some parts of the forum and perhaps that is a sign of just how little time photographers have available, while trying to juggle all the problems you mentioned. I won't pretend to have all the answers because I spend too many stressed days to understand that I clearly don't have all the solutions. The time needed for learning curves on software has become a major burden for any photographer running a business of their own and it's not just a question of time either because there is also a problem of mental overload. It's not that we are stupid or incapable; we have too much to deal with nowadays.

Quite recently I made the jump to Lightroom from Bridge and for the most part I much prefer Lightroom, which I can see is a great time saver and a generally nicer place to spend your time, however the fact remains that I put off this switchover for a good couple of years simply because I was reluctant to start on yet another learning curve and I really had to find a time when I was mentally relaxed enough to know I could spend an hour or so every day without excessive pressure and just get to know the program slowly. I am still learning but deliberately not trying to pressure myself.

One suggestion I could make is that you investigate various pieces of time-saving software that help to improve your overall efficiency. I imagine you rolled your eyes when you read that sentence because you are clearly in the same boat as I am, however I have found a few tools that have really helped to boost my overall efficiency with remarkably little work. For example I'm not actually typing this forum post but dictating it by voice using some software called Dragon Dictate. I wouldn't use it just to write a two line e-mail but for anything a bit more involved I find it dramatically cuts down on my typing time, so a lengthy letter that might have taken an hour or more to compose with my limited typing skills can probably be finished in around 10 minutes dictating by voice and allowing for a few thought corrections along the way. Over the course of a year something like this will potentially save you many hundreds of hours, which equates to weeks of work. I also find certain other pieces of software such as 1Password and LaunchBar can be very useful. In Apple Mail I use a plugin called MailHub that has made filing and searching for email significantly easier. This isn't the whole answer but it may well go some way to cutting down on the general fatigue we all suffer from.

I don't know about you Neal, but one of the main problems I find is simply having a long list of unfinished chores and tasks at the back of my mind which one way or another are constantly distracting and wearing me down. Computers are great for multitasking, so you can have them burning a CD, uploading files to an FTP server, converting Raw files to DNG and more besides. Although I gain a great sense of satisfaction when the computer is performing tasks like these all in one go it's not that often but I seem able to bring everything together in a relaxed way so it all happens in a neat fashion. The computer may be great at multitasking but I'm not and I think this curse of trying to multitask all day long contributes a great deal to our daily levels of stress and more to the point less seems to get done, so nowadays I'm trying where possible to just do one job at a time. N.B It is especially worthwhile taking a while to get rid of all those nagging tasks that you have been leaving on one side for possibly weeks or even months. Just draw up a list of the most hated and delayed jobs; then if they genuinely should be done go through them one by one without any distractions. At the end of it you will be amazed at the sense of relief when it's all done.

A short while ago I read a blog post, though I can't remember where. It was very short and to the point however saying simply that you don't need more hours in the day, you just need to take more decisions. I think it's very easy these days for photographers to get so caught up in the day-to-day struggles that they fail to take enough decisions about how best to use their time and simply get blown along by the wind of events as they take them. Sometimes it can do you good just to take a complete break for a day or so and then come back in a fresh state of mind with a clear plan. Also don't be afraid to ditch something that isn't really essential. There are lots of good tutorials out there for all kinds of software and sometimes they are very worthwhile following but not all the software you think you want to learn about will actually make as much difference as you think, so choose carefully because you often end up learning something only to find yourself ditching it a few months later when a new alternative appears.

Specifically with regards to DAM I read the book and then spent three entire weeks to set up the system cursing every step of the way. I think your choice of program for DAM will influence the way you work but the good thing is that once you have set up a system it is relatively painless switching from one program to another. I am finding that Lightroom makes my work quite a bit easier than Bridge, since it can carry out several automated steps during the phase of file import. I read the book and basically decided it was pointless trying to come up with my own system, so I just followed it word for word. One area I could improve on now is keyword sets so that applying one word automatically lists associated keywords. For example if there was a picture of my house, I could add a whole group of related keywords all in one go, which also helps to maintain a consistent vocabulary.

I do understand your stress because it's not easy now and perhaps I haven't given you the answer you were hoping for but I wish you good luck.

Ashley

[ashleykaryl]

Sorry for the typo on your name in the last post! I really wish there was an edit feature on this forum.

[R. Neil Haugen]

Thanks for the very thoughtful reply ... and welcome to the Lightroom World ... so many things easier "there" that it is very worthwhile and a very fast program for SO many parts of the image-processing workflow. There are even gadgets to speed-up Lightroom tasks, such as the keypad shortcut gear available through Kevin Kubota's site, along with of course about a billion people including Kevin who also sell you presets, which can be of great use ... IF you don't spend an hour searching between the 300 you buy looking for just the RIGHT one. {sigh}

Both the missus and I were intrigued by the Dragon Dictate program ... I'll be checking that one out!

Now ... back to learnin' more geek-stuff.   ;-)

Neil

[ashleykaryl]

Hi Neil,
There is definitely a knack to working with Dragon Dictate and occasionally I come unstuck, either due to an error that I don't spot or because my brain simply goes blank and I can't think of what to say. The initial training period with Dragon Dictate is very fast and can be completed in around 15 minutes, however the more you use it the better it becomes and the greater the accuracy. It's vital however, that you correct any errors as you're going along using the recognition window otherwise it will repeatedly make the same mistakes. The chief problem with any software of this kind is that it can't use logic in quite the same way as we do when speaking to decipher garbled words, so you do have to try and speak clearly, though it is perfectly possible to speak at a normal pace.

One thing that helps greatly with Dragon Dictate is to feed it samples of your existing writing so that it learns the way that you put words and phrases together. You can also add your own custom words, which will be particularly useful as a photographer because you will probably be using words that wouldn't be found in a dictionary. For example when writing about lighting I have trained the software to recognise the difference between "D-Lites" and "delights". Although there is a subtle difference in the pronunciation the software still needed me to add D-Lites to the dictionary so that it can make a correct judgement.

I think there is no doubt we are all feeling a degree of day-to-day pressure simply trying to manage our businesses and I have often seen myself looking at other photographers only to wonder how the heck they manage and where they find the time. Sometimes I try to delegate tasks to others but this is rarely been a successful as I would like, however I would encourage you to look at the various parts of your work and see if there are areas that can be effectively farmed out to others at an economically viable rate. For example I know a couple of photographers who have all their clipping path work done by a company in Thailand and they both say they are very happy, though for some reason I persist in losing time by trying to do it myself Sometimes you just have to let go and allow others to do part of the work or you end up going crazy.

Unfortunately work beckons so I will have to end here but I'll try and take another look at Lightroom this evening. Good luck with it all.

Ashley

[R. Neil Haugen]

Thanks for the advice!

Neil