The Digital Photographer’s World
I love post processing. In fact, I find it as stimulating and exciting as being out in the field…sometimes more so. Post processing is where the magic comes out, and I have long since lost track of how many flat, lifeless images have come off my data card that I had no hope of salvaging. The way the story goes, I often find myself revisiting a shoot months—sometimes years—after the fact, and suddenly see something that leads me to jump into the Develop panel. There, I will frequently have a vision of a finished image that I simply couldn’t visualize at the time of the shoot. Time has a way of altering our perspectives.
In this blog, I want to explore my fascination with photography, and I hope to have your input along the way. I’ll use this venue as a way to gush over images I find that I love, maybe even my own. Other times, I’ll grouse about some of the trendy trends that blow through the photography world like winter storms that sweep off the Pacific and blast the northwest coast.
I’m sure I’ll repeat myself many times, and one topic I know will come up will over and over will be the blessing and curse that the current state of digital photography presents us. In a world where “everyone is a photographer” (see the 1/19/2021 post), photo curators are swimming in a sea of content, and to my eye, 80% is mediocre at best, and while poor composition is one thing, post processing explains the majority of these images. That’s the curse part; “everyone’s a photographer”, even those who don't know what they’re doing or just have bad taste. It’s a real thing.
The blessing is that we’ve gone way past what film can do. Way past. The film photographer icons of the early and mid 20th century would marvel at what we can do to an image today. A whole new paradigm of art has been unleashed and some of it steals my breath.
So that’s what I want to do with this forum. Until next time…