I’m not good at post processing images.
I’m so bad at it that I recently dumped my Adobe subscription and bought a simple editing tool where I can’t possibly make the final edit much different from what I captured straight out of the camera.
Plop me back in a B&W or color darkroom… that would be a different story.
Back in the day our options with a camera for manipulating an image were limited to choosing a different film type or printing paper to get the scene out of the camera to share.
Changing up developing chemicals or processing temperatures and times could help. Sometimes, particularly in the early days of digital photography, a colored filter on the lens was called for with a matching gel taped over the flash.
At the end of a shoot most prints or images on screen looked similar to what was in front of the camera. Creativity with camera settings, where it was pointed, and when the shutter was pressed was 95 percent of the art, not skill in printing or digital editing.
Now, there were many great photography artists – including Ansel Adams, for instance – who could create scenes on paper that were not exactly what was captured on the negative. He and his printers spent hours and many sheets of paper (and occasionally using multiple negatives) to get the final print he wanted to show or sell. I’m a big fan of his photography artwork.
At the other end of the spectrum, in the fast-paced world of film-and-paper photojournalism, success or joy came after getting the processed film reasonably dry, making one or two good prints of what we saw in the field, typing a typo-free caption, and meeting a deadline before moving on to the next assignment.
Today, I look a hundreds and hundreds of images posted to various online platforms that display colors in the sky, water, forests, landscapes, etc. that I’ve never witnessed with my eyes with or without a camera, nor have I seen those scenes in my archives of hundreds of thousands of images.
I challenge you. Post a few recent shots that look real and, if you dare, include your camera settings.
I’ll start with a few recent images from my camera card. I’m not suggesting that these are art, or even good shots. But these are what I was looking at when I pressed the shutter button.
Oh, wait! Is there even such a thing as a shutter anymore?
