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Speed is paramount:


Why speed?

“Cool Prius!” (said nobody)


The funny thing is nowadays, the so-called virtuous say that it is more virtuous to take your time. To do things slowly is better. Slow food, slow living, etc.

However at the same time, ultimately we are more fascinated by speed. For example, we are fascinated by fast cars, fast sprinters, fast technology etc.

Even one of the great downsides of current electric vehicles is the recharge time. It is just too slow. Even with a supercharger; it takes 15 minutes to get to 200 hundred miles. Compare this with gasoline, where you get over 300 miles in less than a minute. Gasoline is still at least 10 times faster, maybe even 100 times faster than recharging your electric vehicle. This is why for ultimate ease and convenience in life, either a hybrid or a plug in hybrid car is still best.

Speed in photography

There are many ways you could integrate speed into your photography. The first one is shooting extra small JPEG. Essentially no buffer time, and it imports into your iPad, iPhone, or laptop insanely fast.

Also upload speeds. Unfortunately even in today’s world, we are limited by upload speeds. Even if you have the fastest Internet connection, uploading takes forever. Therefore the upside of shooting extra small JPEG is that extra small JPEG images (around 2000 pixels wide) is insanely fast.

Promptness

And a few years back, I borrowed a Pentax 645Z, and shot extra small JPEG, with a positive film preset. During lunchtime, I imported all the photos into my iPad, and by the end of the wedding, I already uploaded to Google Drive/dropbox, and sent the files to my friend. This is the ultimate; speed.

Even I have found with communication, whether email or text messaging, better to send a quick bad response, then a slow good response. Or you can always do the funny confirmation of their email, very quickly, and tell them that you’ll get back to them; even though you may never.

Why speed?

I think the main upside and benefit of speed is that it allows you to do more, with less friction.

My ideal is that every single day, you’re constantly shooting photos throughout the day, maybe around 300 to 1000 images a day, and either during the day or in the evening, you are selecting and flagging your favorite images, and exporting them and uploading them concurrently.

For me one of the biggest things was getting rid of post processing. If you shoot extra high contrast black-and-white in camera, let us stay on your RICOH GR digital camera, you literally do not need to touch any of the images, and you do not need to post process them! It is almost like the digital equivalent to shooting film; one of the great things I loved about shooting film, and getting my film processed and scanned by Costco was that after the photos were scanned by Costco, I just used the scanned JPEG images, which already looked great! (FILM NOTES)

RAW is for suckers

In fact, I think in-camera JPEG photos look superior to processed RAW images. I say just experiment shooting in-camera JPEG; experiment with different color presets, for example I really like the “classic chrome” preset on the Fujifilm digital cameras, or use cross-pr