• site home
  • blog home
  • galleries
  • contact
  • underwater
  • the bleeding edge

the last word

Photography meets digital computer technology. Photography wins -- most of the time.

You are here: Home / The Last Word / Spray and pray?

Spray and pray?

December 27, 2013 JimK Leave a Comment

Yesterday my D4 made its 50,000th exposure. That’s 1388 36-exposure rolls, or almost 70 bricks. If you had to buy slide film and have it processed, that many shots would cost you at least $25K. And the camera isn’t even two years old.

I blame Lightroom.

In the film era, you were limited in exposures by what you could carry and what you could afford to pay for. At the dawn of the digital age, when you carried a battery-powered disk drive over your shoulder like a speedlight battery pack, you were limited by how much you could store. Then came Compact Flash, with tiny spinning 1GB disks and smaller semiconductor memory. The files got bigger, but the flash memories got bigger faster, and pretty soon you could store a couple of thousand raw images on a card.

When the photo editing was done in Photoshop, the thought of loading all those files one by one made you keep a light finger on the shutter button. Life was too short to edit thousands of images that way.

Then came Lightroom.

Actually, then came Aperture, followed closely by Lightroom, but Lightroom – Lr to its friends – is the program that casts a long shadow these days.

Without Lr, dealing with thousands of images at a time would be hell on earth. With it, it’s a breeze. It’s an enabler of nasty addictions: trying every possibility, taking risks with long odds, going for the perfect expression, not accepting any compromise.

In short, to making better pictures.

I know that some of you will deride any photographic approach that involves averaging more than 70 images a day on a single camera as “spray and pray”, but I don’t see it that way. I see it as freeing me to do my best work.

The Last Word

← A Sony a7R L-plate request Lens hoods →

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

May 2025
S M T W T F S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Apr    

Articles

  • About
    • Patents and papers about color
    • Who am I?
  • How to…
    • Backing up photographic images
    • How to change email providers
    • How to shoot slanted edge images for me
  • Lens screening testing
    • Equipment and Software
    • Examples
      • Bad and OK 200-600 at 600
      • Excellent 180-400 zoom
      • Fair 14-30mm zoom
      • Good 100-200 mm MF zoom
      • Good 100-400 zoom
      • Good 100mm lens on P1 P45+
      • Good 120mm MF lens
      • Good 18mm FF lens
      • Good 24-105 mm FF lens
      • Good 24-70 FF zoom
      • Good 35 mm FF lens
      • Good 35-70 MF lens
      • Good 60 mm lens on IQ3-100
      • Good 63 mm MF lens
      • Good 65 mm FF lens
      • Good 85 mm FF lens
      • Good and bad 25mm FF lenses
      • Good zoom at 24 mm
      • Marginal 18mm lens
      • Marginal 35mm FF lens
      • Mildly problematic 55 mm FF lens
      • OK 16-35mm zoom
      • OK 60mm lens on P1 P45+
      • OK Sony 600mm f/4
      • Pretty good 16-35 FF zoom
      • Pretty good 90mm FF lens
      • Problematic 400 mm FF lens
      • Tilted 20 mm f/1.8 FF lens
      • Tilted 30 mm MF lens
      • Tilted 50 mm FF lens
      • Two 15mm FF lenses
    • Found a problem – now what?
    • Goals for this test
    • Minimum target distances
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Printable Siemens Star targets
    • Target size on sensor
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Test instructions — postproduction
    • Test instructions — reading the images
    • Test instructions – capture
    • Theory of the test
    • What’s wrong with conventional lens screening?
  • Previsualization heresy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Recommended photographic web sites
  • Using in-camera histograms for ETTR
    • Acknowledgments
    • Why ETTR?
    • Normal in-camera histograms
    • Image processing for in-camera histograms
    • Making the in-camera histogram closely represent the raw histogram
    • Shortcuts to UniWB
    • Preparing for monitor-based UniWB
    • A one-step UniWB procedure
    • The math behind the one-step method
    • Iteration using Newton’s Method

Category List

Recent Comments

  • JimK on How Sensor Noise Scales with Exposure Time
  • Štěpán Kaňa on Calculating reach for wildlife photography
  • Štěpán Kaňa on How Sensor Noise Scales with Exposure Time
  • JimK on Calculating reach for wildlife photography
  • Geofrey on Calculating reach for wildlife photography
  • JimK on Calculating reach for wildlife photography
  • Geofrey on Calculating reach for wildlife photography
  • Javier Sanchez on The 16-Bit Fallacy: Why More Isn’t Always Better in Medium Format Cameras
  • Mike MacDonald on Your photograph looks like a painting?
  • Mike MacDonald on Your photograph looks like a painting?

Archives

Copyright © 2025 · Daily Dish Pro On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Unless otherwise noted, all images copyright Jim Kasson.