Dane Sanders’ not-so-secret secret
I was nosing around Blu Domain’s blog and came across their interview with Dane Sanders. He’s such a doll and if you’ve seen his work you know he’s a spectacular artist. If you’re nice I’ll tell you a secret about him. It’s about his workflow. Promise you won’t tell anyone because I’m sure no one read the interview. ::wink wink nudge nudge:: You know how he processes his images? He doesn’t. No, seriously — he outsources his post-processing. Yeah, outsources. What do you mean you don’t know what I’m talking about? Haven’t you heard of Shoot.Edit (ShootDotEdit)? They do your flow, man, and Dane Sanders is down with that.
When I first read about the outsourcing it made me wonder if some would consider it cheating. Just about everyone who shoots digital spends a good deal of time in front of a monitor playing with curves and adjustment layers etc. before uploading their files to a digilab for printing.
Back in the days of film, aka the Paleolithic Era for you solely digi-era whippersnappers shooters, we essentially did the same thing but it was called sending film to the lab. Unless you shot exclusively in black and white and loved the smell of stop bath, you were sending your rolls of 220 to the lab to be processed, color corrected and even retouched if needed. You’d get proofs or contact sheets back and then mount your negs to send back for printing. You could develop color if you had the right machinery but investing in that sort of equipment wasn’t cost-effective for most. No one considered it cheating because that’s how it worked. Yeah, you spent a bit of time mounting negs if you really wanted a great deal of control over crop but otherwise you spent your time shooting and marketing and let the lab do its job. (A dirty secret of mine — I liked messing around with crop cards. Don’t tell!)
Shoot.Edit seems to be picking up where the film lab left off. It’s taking the part of the process that photographers seemed to inherit when converting to digital and taking it back while creating quite a niche for themselves. Now, I know that people will balk because they will insist you’re giving up total creative control. The truth is that you’re only giving up as much as you want and if you’re smart, that would be what’s sucking up most of your time with a job that could safely be outsourced. You can use some services and not others. If you’re spending all your time color correcting and doing RAW conversion and would rather work on the fine art aspect after the spic and span is done, you can have Shoot.Edit do that portion for you. If you capture the magic without dramatic textures or cross-processing effects then go the whole nine. And even if you do have a flavor to your work that’s unique to you, you work with one person every time to ensure consistency with whom you build a custom profile — you let them know what you want and you can tweak that to your liking. It’s like you’ve hired someone to do post for your studio without the overhead. Employees are spendy!
I don’t know if I’ll ever use the service but it’s mildly comforting to know it’s an option. Check it out for yourself.
