Small handbook about photography while cycletouring. #1 - Editing

The poll spoke: most of you readers are curious about the editing, so here we go with photo editing.

Which, sorry to disappoint, starts before actually retouching the picture in Lightroom, Snapseed, or VSCR. First of all, we must choose the picture we want to edit. And most of the times, this is a painful task, since we find ourselves facing lots of them. So, this first piece is dedicated to the choice of the pictures, and to how make it less burdensome.

Our first task: from "too many pics" to a reasonable amount

How many times did we come back from a trip, opened the folder, and then cried at the sight of 4058 pictures to scroll? This is honestly very discouraging.

Therefore, before talking postproduction – apps and software, color grading, shadows and highlights, texture and clarity, masks and vignette, and so on – we must talk about how to eliminate pictures. Very important step to survive.

Easy: if we have 100 or 1000 pics, it makes a huge difference in our mood when we have to edit the pictures. Many of us already know this too well: having too many pictures is the first obstacle to having fun while shooting.

As for weight, the same about pictures. The less, the better, the funnier.

There are ways to end up with a reasonable amoun of pictures at the end of our adventure, no matter if it’s a long day ride or a month-long crossing of a Continent.

Shoot less, shoot better. But how (and - are we so sure)?

The first solution is “shoot less”, of course. Simple thing, but not easy at all. Our cameras make us very comfy with the shutter button; but that’s only part of the challenge.

Most of the times I keep only 10-15% of the pics I shoot. Sometimes it’s a bit more, but I rarely reach 20%.

Personally, this is one of my medium-term goals: during the two chapters of VIA race I had the opportunity of seeing experienced professionals at work, and they shot half the pictures compared to me (at least). There was a lot of walking, a lot of thinking, and then one or two clicks. A matter of experience, no doubt. I am working towards that, but it takes a while.

Moreover, I don’t think shooting less is possible when starting to enjoy photography. It’s also good to take a lot of them, to understand what works and what not. Provided that we study our work afterward, trying to understand why that works or not.

Not a digital-only issue. Contact sheet

So, let’s go directly to the main point: removing the unnecessary pics.

Yes, unnecessary, not “ugly”. The goal, usually, is to understand what story we want to tell. If we manage to do that, choosing the pics will be so much easier, because we will understand very easily those whoch help the story to advance, and those which don’t add anything. And sometimes we need a not-nice picture to fill a gap in the narrative.

Anyway, let’s stick to single pictures. How do you choose the right one among a series, designating one survivor among similar images?

Sometimes it’s very simple, and you see that one image shines over the similar ones. But most of the time, it doesn’t happen.

This “having too many pics” is not because of the digital: even during film era, you can see that only a small percentage of pictures made it until the print phase.

The topic is so important that it made the subject of one of the most famous books by Magnum, called “contact sheet”. And so important that you can find several of these stories online too, on Magnum’s portal, under the super-appropriate label “making the image“. The book analyzes many famous photographs, showing the process of choosing the good images within the roll. This allows to understand the reasoning of the photographers as well as their intention – how long did they wait for the perfect shot? How many compositions, how many angles did they try before being satisfied?

The first thing you’ll notice while browsing the book is that you enter the photographer’s mind: you really see how they see, feel how they think. The second thing is that a picture is not taken but made: the photographer always chooses one among many, so he takes action on reality – because of this choice, photography is something active, not simply a registration of a fact. It’s what we decide to tell and not to tell.

But we are going too far with the philosophy. Let’s stick to the main issue, editing, a polite way to say remove all what’s unnecessary.

Probably the easiest way to get used to the selection is seeing some practical situation. Let’s go with real situations, with a tech note: almost all pics you’ll see here are unedited RAWs, that’s why they look a bit flat in color and contrast.

Some examples

Person and background

Nelson is OK, but there is a second person coming from the left: it doesn't add anything, so it's just a distraction

Nelson is OK, but the gesture is not clear

OK: the gesture is clear, the expression is nicer, and the background is free from distractions

Let’s start with a simple case like a single person. During Nelson Trees’ talk at BAM! I shot a few dozens pics. He was speaking to a small crowd while riding a turbo trainer, during the Senza Freni interview. From this point of view they were 6-8: the backlit situation made it a little bit trickier and I chose to wait a bit and catch a good moment.

Between these three pics, only one is good, and deserves a proper post-production: it’s the third one, because it’s the right combination between the subject expression, the gesture, and the background.

In cases like these, where you have a subject that is stuck in a fixed place, you can experiment a lot: a very practical situation.

Situation

This second case is more interesting. I wanted to capture a daily life scene, with kids fishing under the rail bridge at the outskirts of a town in southern France. I shot a series of 10 pics in about two minutes. Here you see four of them, all still without postproduction.

First I found a composition that I liked, with the bridge on the upper part, a small bit of the houses beneath it, and the river and family down.

The first thing was waiting for the road being without cars, to show the “southern France” houses in their peach color.

Then there was the subject: single kid under the bridge with the fishing rod in his hand, and the rest of the family on the left part.

The composition was set, but it wasn’t really soomething, so I waited (01).

I shot once more (02) when the kid was throwing the rod in the water: at least the scene was alive.

Things got better when the brother arrived (03): the subject was then a bit more visible, being “heavier” within the frame. But I didn’t like the grey car passing in the background.

So I waited a bit more, and had a clean shot with the brothers fishing together (04).

I am not completely satisfied with the final results, since this last one lacks action; in the (02) the action was clearer, but the kid is alone. While writing this, I don’t know yet which one I will choose, but at least I’ve reduced the options from 10 images to two.

Action, overlap, and alignment

In many cases, the key is alignment (or rather the lack of superposition). This is a very common situation.

Here I was covering the Gran Fondo Fausto Coppi. I found this old building next to a cave, and it was a nice background to show the flow of riders. I took several pics in quick sequence, trying to catch a good positioning of people in the frame. Remember that this is an unedited RAW, there is no correction even on the horizontal and geometry.

The first is not bad, with the two riders evenly placed.

The second is also correct, with the single rider on the right balancing the restaurant old label on the left. But I wanted to show a group of people rather than a solitary adventure, so I kept shooting.

The third is also OK, but it’s the fourth that works better: three cyclists, and the two on the sides are cut, which suggests the idea that the they are like chain links: more will follow and more are already past that point.

01

02

03

04

Take these recent shots, from Pain au Chocolat. I was waiting on the top of Pas de Pelle for the riders to go through that tarmac patch in the middle of the wide forest; there was a group of five, but I had no clues to anticipate the timing, so I waited with my eye into the camera for a few minutes; being downhill, the timing window was short. Being a few KM downs, I couldn’t know if the five riders were still together at that point.

As soon as I saw the first rider I shot a quick series (not a burst, though); as you can see, the first pics shows the first and only rider in the midst of the patch. The second one is much better, showing him plus three more; the third is already too late, and the riders are not perfectly visible. Easy choice.

BTW, as I showed elsewhere, this”alignment” issue is the main challenge of my usual game of putting things in frames

Check the "put things into frames" thing

Practical tip #1: put distance (of some sort)

The first tip is about attitude – be ruthless, be detached, be as lucid as possible. There are far more reasons to discard a picture than to keep it. It’s not an easy task, because all pics are our sons and daughters. But it’s key. You can achieve the detachment by letting the pictures aside for a bit, but this is not our case – the goal of this article is to learn to get faster, not to waste time.

You can ask someone else to do the task, if they still talk to you 🙂 When I’m in doubt, I ask my wife Anna, and she’s very effective in cutting all the useless branches: having an external eye (an educated one, possibly) helps a lot in this task, because it ensures some healthy distance from the pictures.

Or you can try by yourself – asking who would like this picture, and why? Or, which pictures would you like to see hanging at the wall in your room?

My French teacher used to say that if you can’t answer clearly, you probably didn’t study enough. This is true here too: if you can’t justify with words the reason to keep a picture, it’s probably not worth it.

Anything that allows you to put some distance from your Jpegs and RAWs works, just find what suits you best.

Practical tip #2: one KM at the time

Second, don’t wait till the end of the trip. As with kid’s summer schoolbooks, it’s way easier if you do the work little by little. It becomes painless, and it saves you a lot of time afterwards; but most of all it eliminates that anguish when we are in front of a wall of pictures to look at.

Concretely, there are several ways to make the burden lighter.

You can do it every evening, while you wait for the stove to cook the food, or before going to bed in your tent.

Or you can do it at a few breaks during the day, while waiting for Turkish coffee or sipping a fresh coke. Two times per day, say noon and evening. Or even more often.

Or you can do it at the end of every “photo opportunity”, the very minimal photographic unit.

As soon as you finished shooting something, before even starting to ride again, you can evaluate your pics: you’ll probably have 10 or 30 photos to peruse, meaning just a minute. This way, you don’t have the distance that allows objectivity, but on the other hand you have fresh in mind why and what you wanted to shoot. And at evening, when your eyes will close after a long day in the saddle, you will not have 200 or 500 pics to check.

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Practical tip #3: use your camera to make it smoother

Every camera has some feature to evaluate pictures: the lock function is about preventing an accidental delete, but you can also use the lock function as a way to mark interesting pictures.

Most cameras have also a star system to evaluate your work: it’s a precious feature, because lightroom (and most softwares) recognize these marks. So, when you’ll import the pictures, you will find the stars already there.

In my case, OM cameras (as well as older Olympus) have something called Share order, which is extremely useful: see on the right.

I reckon all brands have a similar feature: if you get used to that, it can make a great difference in how you process the photos – meaning you can do it very fast and stress-free.

OM system Share order

on your camera
- open the photo playback
- click OK then “share order”
- arrow UP or DOWN both add a sharing symbol (upper right corner). Pushing again up/down remove the mark.
on the OM app:
- as soon as you choose “import photos”, the app recognizes the marked pictures and automatically download these (and only these).
- when you quit the import menu, the share order automatically resets on your camera, so that the next time you import pictures, you don’t have doubles.

Practical tip #4: think in sequences, not single shots

This requires a bit of extra training and/or experience, but no worries, it will come.

Try not to judge a picture in isolation. A photo that looks unremarkable on its own can become essential once you see what comes before or after it — and a technically “perfect” shot can turn out to be dead weight if it doesn’t connect to anything else in the set.

This is where selection stops being about “nice vs. ugly” and becomes about “useful vs. not” , or good/bad – a different, harder question, but a much more interesting one.

Ask yourself: does this picture move the story forward, or does it just repeat what another one already says better? If two shots tell the same beat, keep the stronger one and let the other go, however nice it looks by itself.

This is also where the anguish creeps back in — too many options, no way to compare them all at once in your head. The trick is the same one that gets you unstuck out on the road: stop treating every picture as its own decision, and start treating the selection as one single decision about the whole set. It’s easier to choose a story than to choose a thousand photos one at a time.

See you soon: some editing apps

Hopefully, next time you’ll shoot you’ll be less worried about this tedious part of the workflow. Let me know about it, and see you soon with the next episode, where we’ll talk about post-production with a very small selection of apps (plus one non-app), free and less free.

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