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Photoshopping

Entry 652, on 2007-12-06 at 00:18:31 (Rating 1, Activities)

Yesterday I blogged about a holiday I had recently and the extensive list of email and phone messages I had to look through when returning. I spent most of yesterday and this morning following up on those messages and reconfiguring servers so things are looking pretty good again, so that wasn't too bad. But the next problem is going through all the photos I took during the 4 and a half days away.

I took about 600 photos and will keep about half of those. Of the keepers I will probably end up with about 100 I will use as a record of the activities. Of the 100 in the collection about 10 will probably rate as good enough to put into the top 2 ratings in my iPhoto collection.

Ten out of 600 may not seem like a great success rate but I am very fussy about what I rate as good or excellent. There are two broad areas I consider: art and science. By art I mean is the content relevant; is the composition, lighting, and perspective interesting; and is the photo sufficiently different from others. By science I mean the technical aspects of the photo: focus, depth of field, colour balance, distortion, etc. Many defects can be improved in Photoshop but all my best photos look good before I start playing with them so I try to get the photo right when I take it.

Of course digital photography has resulted in a huge improvement in my photos. Because it costs nothing to take a photo I tend to take more and be more adventurous with the assumption that most will be discarded. Professionals have always worked this way but with conventional photography there was a cost every time you pressed the shutter which discouraged most amateurs from taking too many shots.

Fast moving and quickly changing scenes are the most demanding. When I took photos of dolphins I used the continuous focus and shooting modes on my camera and took about 3 or 4 at a time (the camera does about 4 per second). After uploading the photos to my computer I choose which ones to keep.

So I have now moved into the next follow up activity I have after being away: sorting through photos. I enjoy the creative process of post-processing in Photoshop because it gives me more creative control, not just to fix defects in photos but to improve framing and use subtle contrast and saturation effects to change the mood a bit. I never over-indulge in this process because I usually want photos to retain their authenticity. So by the time I have this trip sorted out it will probably be about time to think about the photos I'll be taking during our next break: ten days in Australia!

Comment 1 (1016) by PhotoMan on 2008-01-15 at 17:26:22:

I agree that using Photoshop to make photos look better is a good idea. I don't have the patience do work on all my photos that way though. And you need to be careful that you don't do too much and make the photo look strange.

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