Monthly Archives: February 2011
…but post processing a photograph is art, Mr.
I ran into a random photographer in the field awhile back. During our conversation I mentioned I shoot with Photoshop in mind. He claimed he didn’t do any post processing to his images. He seemed to feel it was cheating or not real photography. He felt the artistic skill was lost if you used Photoshop to enhance your photos. The only way for the photo to be authentic was to be the camera capture and perfecting that was the real form of the art of photography. I appreciated his passion and stance, that’s for sure. But at the end of the day, it’s not my job to save the world from “old school” photographers, so I shook my head in disbelief and wished him a good day.
Years ago, when I shot slide film (chromes), I became aware of the importance of Ansel Adams’ place in the world as a photographic artist. I took a one week photo workshop with Rocky Mountain School of Photography. I was fortunate to be instructed by the school’s founder, Neil Chaput de Saintonge. Neil had studied under Ansel Adams and shared many of Ansel’s techniques. Ansel was an artist who used his field work and the photographic negative as his canvas. Most of his time was spent in the darkroom, not the field. He mastered the process of dodging and burning which gave him the ability to better control the viewers eye and stir up an emotion. He is known for this quote; “Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes God made in establishing tonal relationships”. I left the week with a whole new understanding of my interest in photography and where I wanted to go with it. How to get there, however, took a very long time for me. Ansel worked with Black & White film, which allowed a lot of room for manipulation in the darkroom. I shot color slide film. It was extremely difficult to work with slide film in a darkroom and so very few did. Slide film had no room for manipulation due to its extreme limited latitude. We just had to accept what came back from the lab. It wasn’t until I owned a good digital SLR and taught myself Photoshop that I found my way.
Today I shoot all digital and use a variety of software including Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Adobe Lightroom 3. When in the field, I often think with Photoshop and Lightroom in mind. It’s taking an already fantastic scene, framing a great composition and being sure to nail the exposure so that I have a canvas on which I can do my thing. Once in Photoshop or Lightroom I maneuver the sliders and lay down some brush strokes in special select areas of the image. By doing so I can control the eye to land at a particular place in the photo as well as control the time it takes getting there. For me, post processing is as important to a great photograph as is the time of exposure.
Unlike the photographer that I spoke of at the beginning of this post, the image that comes out of my camera is merely the beginning of the process of making my photographs into art. You can see from the samples below that if I took what came out of the camera and considered it finished…welll…you be the judge.
Other than stitching in Photoshop, this image is how it looked coming from my digital camera.
This is the same image but after hours of careful post processing.
Posted in Blah Blah Blah
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Making something out of nothing.
Recently I showed an image I created last fall to a new friend I had just met. When he saw it he said something like, “WOW! You’ve taken something I see as dull and boring and made me want to look at it”. He’s from the mid west and he mentioned he’d seen scenes like this everywhere. He never thought they would be photo worthy. At least not in an artistic way. I started to think about what he said and it reminded me how important it is to spend time looking around at all the angles and options of any scene. From the road this place did look useless and boring. But the windmill and it’s blades still standing is what appealed to me. When I first came across this place it was mid day and the light was terrible. I knew, however, if I came back during the right light I could possibly make something cool out of this scene. I decided to return at sunrise. Actually I camped out on the dirt road near the place. I woke up the following morning and set out to work it. As you can see from the four images below it could of easily been a failed attempt. But I just kept working the angles, constantly wondering around the property, not giving up.
Eventually I shot an image with a wide angle lens and thought, this is it. This is the angle I’ve been looking for. I then realized this angle would make a great panorama. So I attached my 50mm lens, backed off a bit and shot four verticals frames. This is also when I realized in order to bring out the detail on the house and sky I would need to shoot it as a HDR. So what we have is 3 exposures for each of the four frames for a total of 12 images. This is the final result after stitching the four vertical HDRs and post processing in Adobe Lighroom.
Posted in Blah Blah Blah, Things
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