The lazy photographer finds their intent

This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.

Talk with me over the last few years about photography, and you could have left with the sense that I was a lazy photographer. I was sort of ideologically opposed to editing images significantly. I had a PC hard drive fail on me in 2015, at which point I declared all computers, Windows ones in particular, to be a bad idea, switched everything to iPads and NAS drives for portability, archiving, and general futz-free-ness. I wanted to do as little as possible to my images, so I would use a card reader or wireless transfer to get images to the iPad and edit sparingly, looking instead to cameras and lenses that would give me the look I wanted rather than messing around in Lightroom for hours at a time. It was a glorious time. I made lots of images, took very little kit with me when I traveled, and got to hone my eye and photo-making skills. I loved it. Simple, fast, and no editing. 

I think it also may have contributed to the podcast as well now that I think about it. Time spent looking into cameras and lenses meant I was looking at the different effect they might have on my image-making in the same way that people maybe choose amps, guitars, or microphones for a particular sonic quality.  

This way of working with limited performance and storage space helped me to develop a fairly cutthroat policy to curation as well. I’ve talked about this on the show, but I make so many photos each year that I really can’t be holding on to too much. Does anyone imagine spark joy? Yes? No? If no, it’s got to go. I always liked this video of Hugh Brownstone editing photos. Dispassionate and clear-eyed. If you knew the sort of thing you wanted going in, you can discard what doesn’t work. 

Minimal RAW processing, correct the exposure, straighten, compensate for lens distortion, that’s kind of it. Job done, export JPGs, delete RAWs, back up to Flickr, move on. And that was how it was for over 10 years, but then I’d say 2 things happened that have put me onto a less lazy path. 

Firstly, Apple moved their computers to Apple Silicon. The M1 Mac and subsequent laptops upended the industry and were a game changer in terms of battery life and performance. I realised that what I’d wanted wasn’t an iPad, but an all-day powerful computer of any kind, and the iPad was filling that gap for me. Once the laptop was faster, lighter than an iPad Pro with a bulky keyboard case, and had all-day battery life, it became impossible to continue to ignore the benefits of a “do-anything computer” over the heavily restricted iOS. I could use Lightroom Classic to set up automated backups to different locations at the click of a button. I could print to a professional printer and dial in settings specifically. I could use my beloved Lenstagger to add metadata. I just had much more control than an iPad filled with bodged solutions made up of shortcuts, hacks, and workarounds, all strung together by apps that could stop working any moment because the developer got bought or stopped making it altogether. And with the podcast, I get even more out of a real computer because I can use Audacity and Audio Hijack to make the show. You’re also free to move around in a way that you can’t necessarily with a closed system. A colleague was talking to me today about Affinity Photo. 

Secondly, as hinted at by the use of lenstagger, there’s also the vintage lens factor. The further I go down the M route and vintage glass in particular, the more I’m getting into editing my images. A 35-year-old lens can possess shortcomings that need to be overcome on the way to the image in my head. Decaying coatings introduce funky colours, and shooting at high ISO in daylight to get a great shot of a woodpecker in the snow creates an image that benefits from some tweaking after the fact. Old me would have an SL3 with a really high-performance lens which would just output the file I want, but 2025 Iain? He’s getting into image editing. Not just treating the RAWs and moving on but leaving them in his Lightroom library and coming back to them after a few days to see how he feels. Zooming in, touching up areas where snow or dirt is on the lens, ensuring that the profile is set correctly, tweaking white balance, etc. I was looking at Wacom tablets earlier! Stylus and tablet!! What is happening to me?!

Well, I think what is happening is I’m starting to develop a greater understanding of my own intent. I don’t know how deep this rabbit hole will go, whether it’ll stop being a thing if I go back to my more modern lenses, but right now with all the snowy outdoor trips and long lens use cases I’m thoroughly enjoying the process of reviewing and refining. It’s really satisfying to see that print come out the other end and know that what you’ve created is exactly what you wanted it to be. 

Not just what you saw, but what it made you feel.