Forcing yourself to avoid Photoshop

For quite a few months now, I've been trying to minimise the amount of time I spend on photos in Photoshop or Lightroom. When I take hundreds of photos, I immediately get a sense of dread that I have to trawl through them all to select and process the best ones.


Aux Vieux de la Vieille, originally uploaded by Dave Romanis.

Recently, I set up a C-setting on the 5D2 for aperture priority (as I shoot 95% of the time), JPEG (as opposed to Raw) and black and white. The Picture Style settings using C3 are variations on black and white with contrast pushes, some sharpening and a tint, e.g. sepia.

Lou and I went to Lille for our first anniversary and I carried on Project Black and White, which uses this setting specifically so that I am forced down the route of black and white (note: if you set up Picture Style on Raw as Black and White, you can still revert to colour if you choose, something Henri Cartier Bresson and Ansel Adams would be turning in their graves over, I'm sure).

I used a 17-40mm for this shot at open-wide 17mm. I also focused on the menu at the bottom of the picture to make it a bit more interesting - the obvious focal point was probably the plate or the champagne bottle.

I'll return to the Borneo blog soon, but thought I'd chuck this one in a) to introduce the project, b) to highlight one of the sepia Jpegs, and c) to moan a little bit about having to process FAR too many photos!

I am trigger-happy, but I am also photo-happy!