Leave That Couch!

Professional travel photographer Steve Davey has posted an op-ed at DPreview, making a point for taking your portable computer with you when traveling so you can spend your nights editing images on the road. I really think this is a bad idea in general. Davey addresses his advice at “the serious, committed photographer, looking to improve their travel photography” who have “great photography as their primary goal” when traveling.

Seeing that Davey does not target only professional photographers on a specific assignment, my advice to everybody out there: do not waste your precious time on the road staring at your notebook to sort through your images. Unless you are a professional on a specific assignment with a pre-defined list of images you need to deliver and your deadline is close to the end of your trip, do not bother carrying a 5 pounds notebook when traveling.

Practical reasons for not taking a notebook when traveling

A notebook on the road is one of Davey’s pillars of his backup strategy. While this does the job, so do much smaller devices such as portable hard drives with a built-in power source and card reader. They are smaller, cheaper, easier to replace, easier to stow away in your luggage, easier to lock into a hotel safe and so on. No one really needs to bring a notebook to store a second or third copy of their files while on the road. If you need to professionalize your backup as your livelihood depends on the images you took, you might also consider a professional camera that has two card slots and allows simultaneous write of the same data to both cards or duplicating the content from one card to the other. My Olympus E-5 offers this feature and I use the SD card to backup files, while I take the images by writing to the faster CF card slot. To summarize: you are not gaining anything but weight and an expensive and bulky item to carry around and safeguard by backing up to your notebook on the road.

There are other, more practical reasons for not taking a heavy and expensive piece of hardware with you when traveling. When you are out shooting, taking your notebook adds a lot of weight you need to carry around. While professional photographers such as Davey might stay at hotels that have good security and a solid safe to lock away a notebook, the majority of travelers does not enjoy such luxuries. When traveling to more interesting and remote regions, there will be no option to safely lock away a notebook, with hotel rooms being too unsafe to just leave valuables there.

A notebook is also an unnecessary luxury for communicating on the road. Every smartphone that fits into your pocket can perform the same function as a computer in terms of communicating. In fact, a notebook needs a WiFi in most cases, your smartphone can roam to send and receive text messages, emails and the likes. Take your iPhone or [insert crapy Android phone of your choice here] instead of your computer.

And the most important reason for not taking another 5 pounds (or more of gear): you gain agility. I have recently started to adopt Micro Four Thirds as my go-to solution for travel gear. My full set of gear, including my Olympus OM-D E-M5 and a set of lenses covering all focal lengths I need, fits into a small shoulder bag that’s not even big enough to hold an iPad and weighs less than my 13″ MacBook Pro. For longer trips and to be more versatile, I’d probably take a slightly bigger bag, add either my E-5 with a longer zoom lens and a tripod. That would bring my equipment to about 14 to 15 pounds. Lugging around 15 pounds a whole day is hard enough. I neither want to carry an additional 5 pounds for a notebook, nor do I want to leave it at a hotel and worry about it all day long while I need to focus on getting good images.

Images must stand on their own, not associated with memories and perceptions of your travel.

Davey’s first argument in favor of editing on the road is to avoid a backlog of editing work when returning home. This of course is nonsense. The amount of editing work will still be the same, no matter if performed on the road or at home. So, editing on the road does not save time. Instead, it wastes precious travel time – time you should better use to either go out and take more pictures, make friends with locals and indulge into the local culture or get much needed sleep so you’re sharp when you attack the next day, most likely by getting up really early to shoot the sunrise. All of these options are a much better way to improve your sense for your current location and allow you to take better images.

There is another good reason to actually be happy about the editing backlog piling up: it forces you to take a healthy distance from the images you just took. Everybody knows the feeling when they just took a couple of images while traveling, being surrounded by so many impressions of the location – smells, sounds, the general atmosphere. When you edit your images just after you took them, your judgement will be clouded by the fresh perceptions and memories attached to the images. A mediocre image, associated with the memory of a brilliant sunset will probably receive a four star or five star rating in Lightroom, Aperture or whatever you’re using to organize your library, just because your subconscious associates this image with a pleasant memory. If you look at the same image half a year, or even a year later, you will probably dismiss it easier and more fairly as you are not blinded by the memory but you can look at the image and judge it by its own merits only. I cannot stress this argument enough – it’s better to let some time pass, before you actually look at your images the first time to edit them.

Editing is not meant to help you figure out how to operate your camera properly, it’s meant to help you form a consistent body of work of meaningful images.

Davey keeps stressing that the whole idea of editing on the road is to improve your photography during the same trip. He even advises to study the EXIF settings of failed shots and take them into consideration when you continue shooting during the trip to avoid the same mistakes. My opinion is, that most photographers fail to take good images, not because they don’t get the camera settings right, but because they fail to compose properly. “The serious, committed photographer”, that Davey addresses in his post, should know how to set their camera so that the image is in focus and properly exposed. They shouldn’t even worry about this when taking images. Managing the exposure settings should be a second nature to the serious, committed photographer, much like an experienced driver knows their car inside out and does not need to look at the instruments to know what gear to shift into next. Photographers who do not know how to work their gear like a second nature should not even bother correcting this mistake by looking at the EXIF settings on a notebook they carry around while traveling. They will be fiddling with their camera settings all day long, missing moment after moment and won’t be able to enjoy their travel at all. In that case, don’t mess around with your camera. Set it to “P” mode, let the camera handle ISO and auto-focus and just concentrate on framing your images right. I promise you, you will both enjoy your trip much more and your images will be so much more rewarding.

Improving the craft of photography versus improving the art of editing.

Davey fails to make the point as he thinks you can improve your photography by editing on the road. You gain nothing for your photography if your editing process is bad and you’re doing it for the wrong reasons – such as figuring out wrong exposure settings by pixel peeping and studying EXIF information. Editing is about selecting meaningful images which together form a consistent body of work. Only if you master your editing skills, you can become a better and more consistent photographer, not the other way around.

You won’t improve your editing skills by looking at images while still traveling, with memories fresh and mixed with different influences while taking the images. Don’t believe me? It’s easy to prove. Go out and shoot. Edit your images the same day. Do not delete any images while editing, just mark them or group them into albums or whatever categorization your image management tool allows. Now, let someone else with a good knowledge of photography edit the same files. Let them be brutally honest and do not intervene. Do not explain why you took the shot. The images have to stand for themselves! Compare the results. You can repeat this experiment by being the other person yourself. For that, just put away your images for some time, a month, maybe longer and edit again with a fresh and unbiased perception. You will not believe what a difference this makes until you try this.

I am not a professional photographer, however I managed to exhibit some of my work through fine art galleries, selling the occasional image to art collectors. One of my smaller bodies of work got shortlisted in last year’s Travel Photographer of the Year competition, making me one of the finalists. I am a serious and committed photographer who travels a lot for fun and work. In fact, I travel so much and so often with so little free time to edit my work that I pile up a backlog of editing work all by itself. Last year in October 2011, I traveled through Andalusia, Spain for a week by car on a road trip. I took tons of images – all digital. I did not edit these images until recently. While I had vague memories of images I thought were good at the time I took them, a very small percentage of these images actually turned out to be good when I edited after more than half a year. I was able to tell fast since I was looking only at the image, not at the memory of the moment. I have been to Southern China in April this year. I have a USB hard drive with an Aperture library of images of this trip I haven’t even touched yet. I am looking forward to do this – but I have no rush as I know the sense and vision of a good image in editing ripens like a good wine in the wine cellar.

Let me know about your editing workflow in the comments, all opinions welcome.