Was just reflecting on my photography a bit and noticed that I enjoy taking photos a lot and I enjoy having good photos a lot, but I don’t love editing. I never look forward to editing photos — I enjoy it fine once I’m doing it usually, but it never gets me excited and I never get into that joyful flow state you do with something you really love with it. And even though I’m often happy enough (sometimes very happy!) with what what I get out of editing, it often takes me a loooong time to get to that because I don’t find the process all that engaging. It just feels like work.

I suspect this is a good reason for me to think about moving away from the Sony ecosystem at some point, given that the whole thing with Sony is “incredibly neutral photos” that are very easy to work with in the editing suite. This is why people like Leica and Fuji so much! “Straight out of camera” looking good rather than clinical is quite appealing, even if that “good” is opinionated in ways that may or may not be exactly what you want. The trick, of course, is that changing systems is expensive. Cameras weren’t cheap in the first place and they haven’t gotten cheaper in the midst of the AI-driven hardware crunch we’re in, to say nothing of the impact of tariffs.

Maybe an alternative is to take a little bit of time to build a standard “look” in Lightroom (or Aphera?) — or a small handful of them for different kinds of photos — and then by default do no editing: just apply the look and move on, getting the benefits of shooting RAW but without the hassle of deeply editing everything.

Personal goal: get through my photo edit backlog before the end of the year. Maybe use Aphera. Definitely use it as a way to build up a couple profiles/“looks” to make this faster in the future.