Sunday, January 30, 2011

Utilizing our skillsets

As my visual integrity evolves and I gain more experience and aquire more skills, I always remind myself not to take things overboard. Of course it is acceptable to manipulate images in post production using the thousands of programs available to us. Why wouldn't it be?

For the sternly technical fine art photographer who lives as a caveman beating his chest slandering photoshop users and the one who doesn't appreciate technology, I can see a point of keeping your captures limited to what is available. But in the world of digital photography, we are encouraged to use our resources to fix all sorts of things.

Don't forget that not all of us can afford fancy diffusers, variable output flashes, filters that give you results, or cameras that coincide with the cutting edge. We use what we can to get by and I am grateful we can 'fix' alot of it later. This is one reason we should never sell ourselves short in getting our contracts signed for a fair market value. We spend way more time in the digital darkroom (until our eyes are strained) piling through our huge image banks, retouching, cropping, fixing red eye, color correcting, adding effects...... You get the point.

This particular image was a high key glamour shoot of Karen, who was a fabulous subject to have in the studio. Her makeup was self applied and I was glad she didn't overdo it. Neither one of us could get a makeup artist at the time to volunteer. I didn't mind because I knew it could be fixed later. I concentrated more on getting solid expressions from her which would make the job of editing outtakes easier. Thank you Adobe (they didn't pay me for that) for creating Photoshop and keeping it moving in a good direction for photographers and designers alike. We would be "cavemen" without it. |||JDB-01/30/2011|||

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