If you didn't realize it, it takes a lot of time to take a single product photograph.
Last week I took a photograph of a beer called Tennent's. It is a whisky oak aged beer from Scotland. One look at the bottle and you can see why I decided to take a photograph of it. It looks awesome! The bottles shape and label is reminiscent of old whiskey bottles and it has a great golden color. I wanted to take a photograph and continue that look by placing it on a rustic wood surface.
Prior to photographing the beer bottle I spent about thirty minutes gathering my gear. If I look back at the time stamp on the individual RAW files I can see that I spent a little under an hour setting up the lights for the photograph. I stopped for twenty minutes to prep the bottle. Then another hour photographing the bottle and the beer filled glass. By my usual standards this was fast and at the time I felt a little rushed to finish so I could have a late lunch. I love photography but by that time, 3:30 p.m., I was feeling “a bit peckish.” (I get too involved photographing before I know it I'm hungry.)
The amount of time I spent in Photoshop is a little less exact but I'll try to give the best approximation I can. I know that after I ate lunch (about thirty minutes) I edited the photos down to seven that I could composite together to make the final image. I'm not sure exactly when I started the composite process after eating but I know I had done the bulk of the work and was showing the results to my fiance Angela when I realized I had yet to save it. So, I have the time created 7:07 p.m. If I use my internet browser time stamp I know I didn't open the internet until 7:26 p.m. So I'll call it ruffly three hours and thirty minutes in Photoshop.
Before I went to bed I spent a final thirty more minutes cleaned up all my gear and putting it away.
Total time spent at this point was about six and a half hours.
Over the next three days I poked at toning the picture more before I loaded it to the RGGEDU photography facebook to ask what others thought of the final result.
I couldn't decide if I liked the photograph. The bottle was alright but the foreground glass was a little “bla” and overwhelmed the bottle. After a few facebook friends mentioned some things they would have liked to see changed (The label was a little dark at the bottom, the tilt was a too much, etc.) I was confident no one should ever see this picture.
Here I am six and a half hours of solid work, three days of picking at it and brooding and I'm left with a photo that isn't great and defiantly isn't as strong as other beer photos in my current portfolio. But would I consider it a loss? HELL NO!
Every photo I take I learn something. I take pride in the aspects of this photo I got right and even more pride in the lessons I take away from getting things wrong. I know that a year ago I would have shown everyone I know this photo and been proud of the results. In the last year I have grown as a photographer so much it amazes even me. I have been so fortunate. (Winning the RGGEDU and fstoppers workshop in the Bahamas was huge!) But I know most of what is left to learn is up to me. I have to keep pushing, keep working and keep failing so that a year from now even my worst photographs crush my best photographs of today.
In the end it's all about time!