All of us get into an editing rut from time to time. One reason might be that we never really form a decisive reason for creating photographs. It’s like a thing we have to do – which unfortunately results in a lot of seemingly pointless editing.
If you have a specific purpose for editing – like working on a book or an exhibition for example, that’s often enough for us to keep on creating. If you don’t, it can be hard to continue with no clear light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
When I’m a bit stuck like this, I try changing my images from colour to black-and-white, just to see what it looks like in monochrome. Most of us love a bit of black-and-white but it’s very hard to pre-visualize this on the camera’s LCD – that’s why I always get my workshop students to select ‘Monochrome’ in-camera, but set the menu to capture RAW and JPEGs at the same time. That way you get to see a black-and-white image on the LCD – which then allows you to think in black-and-white, rather than trying to mentally convert from colour. It gets better – when the files are downloaded to the computer, guess what? You get a black-and-white JPEG, but a full colour RAW file. In other words, you get the best of both worlds.
– Robin Nichols – BPSOP Instructor
Robin Teaches:
