This is a curious question that comes up from time to time on the artist’s forums on Fine Art America.
Usually it’s from a new artist getting frustrated by the time it is taking to get their work online and hopefully to start selling.
My answer is simple:
It’s taken me about 50 years to get to this point. Every piece I do pulls from that life experience.
– Edward Fielding
My fine art photography is the sum of years of mistakes, wrong directions, false starts, learning my equipment, studying the medium, learning to create photographs that meet my personal vision and basically just honing my observation skills. It has taken me a lifetime to see.
And since I’ve been selling my work over the past decade, I’ve put in the years learning what has the potential to sell or at least stand out from the pack of so many duplicated images one sees over and over.
Time is never a good measure of quality or even desirability. Will more time spent on a dull subject make it more sell-able? Not likely. That time is wasted when it could have been simply sent to the recycling bin.
Is two hours working on a photograph in post-processing better than someone spending 15 minutes? No.
The two hour photograph might be the result of poor craftsmanship when the photo was taken. Sensor dust to be removed, exposure and white balance to be fixed, telephone poles to be removed because photographer didn’t notice it ruining the landscape or they didn’t step three feet closer to their subject, or fixing the composition with cropping.
Time might be spent trying to save a disaster of a photograph with over the top filters or hideous HDR effects.
Meanwhile the 15 minute photograph might have been carefully composed and exposed, leaving only minor tweaks in post-production.
The begineer is always going to take longer as they are less comfortable with the entire process of image making from idea to capture to post-processing.
The seasoned photographer knows the end result of the image even before they press the shutter button and has streamlined they post-production process. They most likely have a consistent workflow and have saved short cuts like their own custom presents in Adobe Lightroom.
A beginner painter will struggle to capture the light on a mountaintop and try to start over and over. The seasoned painter will get it right the first time or knows how to fix something quickly. So again time is a bad measure of the end result.
Life and experience all come into play to create the final image.
How long is a piece of string? (colloquial, often humorous, rhetorical question) Used as a response to a question such as “How long will it take?” or “How big is it?” when the length or size is unknown, infinite, variable, or relative.