River House

Having read a really interesting caption under Dave Coppedge’s photo of a waterfall, it really made a few ideas click about how a photo may require some post processing to get it to match what you saw with your own eyes. For most of my life shooting a photograph was an exercise in documenting my life. Once in a while I might capture something cool and really have little understanding about why it was good. It was pure luck, but your brain knows what looks good and I could see it. That’s the challenge we face as photographers.

My primary goal when I take a shot is to capture what I’m seeing. It’s very easy to see something fantastic, take a shot and find it dull and uninteresting. Reading what Dave explained about how the eye works, it lends a lot of credibility for post processing. A modern digital camera is fantastic, but it still cannot capture the dynamic range your eye can, not even close. Sometimes it’s necessary to take multiple shots exposed at different levels and later blend them together to get a more even exposure. Sometimes the colors caught by the camera are flat and boring and need more saturation and contrast.

I used to be a purist thinking I needed to capture the shot perfectly in camera with little to no post processing. For me it’s about shooting. I would rather be skipping across rocks to shoot a landscape than pinned to a computer screen for hours on end which is the other extreme. Many people will spend hour upon hour tweaking their photos. Recently I’ve found a place comfortably in the middle.

I’ve adopted using Lightroom to process my RAW photos. Its a very streamlined tool which makes it extremely easy to do advanced modifications. 95% of my processing is done there. From time to time, I still need Photoshop. Photoshop is needed to blend multiple exposures together. It also has powerful selection tools to isolation certain portions of your shot to make modifications. In CS5, the content-aware healing tool makes mundane tasks like removing power lines trivial. Keep in mind, post processing will not take a bad photograph and make it good. You cannot correct a bad composition and perspective.

I have learned to love post processing, but my first love is the actual photography. It’s the “being there” and “getting the shot” experience. I’ve been shooting so much this last month that my collection of shots out weighs my time to process them. That’s just how I like it.