Looking at the World Differently

fine art photograph of a bride

Being an artist means taking risks and pushing yourself and your work to new levels. I never met a good artist who was scared. Fear is such a primordial emotion that if you are afraid, it will override all of your other emotions and activities. Now fear makes sense back in the jungle when a big lions jumps towards you, but with art, and other things in life, you should not let fear immobilize you. One of the nice features that digital photography has brought with it is all of the post production capabilities that the photographer has at their disposal. Every image out of a camera needs some digital processing, just like film needs to be processed before it can be seen or used to make prints. Too many photographers make the mistake of taking their images directly out of the camera and presenting them as done. This is like serving raw bread dough. It does not look or taste very good. Digital cameras have been set up to produce low contrast, not sharp images on purpose. The reason behind this is that the camera is able to gather more information if it is in a comfortable contrast range. I like to think of contrast as the distance between the lightest tones and the darkest tones. So a high contrast image is what you would see outside at noon on a cloudless day. It can be harsh with hard shadows. This type of light tends to be unattractive to photographers because of it’s harsh nature. But it has it’s uses in more formalistic images, usually done in black and white. For more about this see my post ‘Photography Movements – Formalism‘. Film and digital cameras have what is know as latitude. This is how far away the light tones and the dark tones can be from one another and still be captured by the sensor or film. There will be more on this in future posts, but lets just say that the latitude of a digital sensor is about 5 stops. Film varies from 7 stops on black and white to 5 stops on color negative to about 4 stops on color slide material. I like to think about latitude in terms of a paper bag and some apples. You have a certain size paper bag and you can only fit so many apples in there. That would be the latitude of the bag. Sharpening adds contrast to an image. That is why the cameras should not be set to sharpen automatically, because once again information can be lost. To learn how to sharpen your images properly click here. So these low contrast, unsharp camera images need to be processed to get them back to normal levels. If you have been wondering why your images straight out of the camera do not look so great, now you know.

The next level up for post processing is where creativity begins. You can retouch images, combine elements, take add color, add in color, create monotone, combine images, take out unwanted elements, and about a million other things. This new post production capability has really opened up a brave new world to digital photographers. I love the versatility that I get in the digital world. I did similar things in the film world, but now I can get an idea and try it out virtually. Now I do not have to go through a lot of expensive film-based retouching to make new images and to express my ideas. I have reinterpreted the image of Kristi shown above several times.

Some people don’t like all of the post-production involved in photography now. And that is fine. It is just another tool that you can use. Each person has to find their own level of comfort and expression. I have spoken before about ‘The Courage to Stand Out’. We have more tools now. They may not necessarily be better or worse. There is no argument over whether film is better than digital or not. They are two different media. So choose the tools that best suit you.

Gary Miller

Houston Fine Art Wedding Photographer

Houston Wedding Photographer

www.redphotophotography.com

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