Oh What Have You Done

First off, do yourself a favour and listen to this. It is awesome. My favourite part is from 0:01 to 5:23.

I’ve been feeling a bit down and wussy lately, but after listening to this I feel like I could punch a shark in the face. Then apologise to the shark, explain why I punched it and then hang out with the shark, because sharks are cool.

So, what’s been happening with me lately? Nothing. Which sucks. And which probably explains the almost week gap between this blog post and my last. I’m still in the process of job hunting, though I do it in a rather unique way, which involves firing off a resume’ or two maybe every two weeks. Yeah I think I deserve a job. You’d hire me wouldn’t you?

Yeah you totally would.

 

I guess the only really exciting or noteworthy thing that’s happened to me in the past week is that the book I ordered from Amazon finally came yesterday. It’s a book about using filters with cameras for photography, and it is quite awesome. A lot of the spectacular pictures I’ve seen people take achieve the effect they did via filters. I want to be like them.

That actually brings me to one thing I’ve wanted to get off my chest for a while.

A lot of the pictures I’ve seen also look the way they did due in large part to post processing. Now to me, post processing is all well in good… when used sparingly and in moderation. Again, this is just my view, but I’ve wanted to get it out there for a while. A lot of pictures these days are touched up massively through programs on a computer after they’ve been taken. Colours are tweaked to the point in which they become unnatural (purple skies, anyone?), effects are added, lighting is altered etc, etc. Now at what point does a picture cease to be what the photographer originally took and become just a doctored image? Now that terminology might be a bit harsh, but it honestly irks me.

All people do these days seems to be taking an image, composing it wonderfully, doing everything right, then going home and butchering it with their fancy programs. Now why do they feel the need to do that? I mean sure, sometimes yes a photo can use a bit of a touch up, but I mean just that; a bit of a touch up. Things like some minor cropping of an image, maybe some mild adjusting of the colour curves, adding a vignette, and maybe even some desaturation to create a black and white image. None of this massive colour conversion and over embellishment with digital ‘effects’ and such nonsense.

Even though I’m still relatively new to photography (I bought my DSLR camera a touch under a year ago now), I’ve always held on to the mental view of being – for lack of a better word – a purist. Someone who prefers to capture the image and get everything done right when and where I take the actual picture; the picture is (ideally anyway) the way I want it when I press the shutter. Hell, the camera I bought doesn’t have Live View (what all digital point-and-shoot cameras and most other DSLR cameras have, a live preview of what the camera sees on the rear LCD screen), but you know what? I like that. I like putting my eye to the camera’s diopter and looking through the viewfinder to compose my shot. I’m not a fan of the whole ‘hold the camera at arms-length and shoot’ method. Though of course, for point-and-shoot cameras, this is the method you pretty much have to use, so obviously I’m not faulting anyone there. But yes, I guess I’m a bit of an old soul when it comes to photography, in that I like to keep it all ‘natural’ and old-school.

Now this isn’t to say I’m against post-processing or anything, or programs such as Adobe Photoshop CS5. Quite the opposite in fact, Photoshop is a remarkable and amazing piece of software, and the things it can do are absolutely amazing. I’ve got Photoshop CS5 on my computer, and yes I do use it sometimes to do things that I mentioned before, such as minor cropping, desaturation etc, but I don’t go as far as to wildly alter the image in radical ways to the point where it no longer looks like what I originally took. The most radical change I’ve done is probably to sharpen up an image a bit when it wasn’t properly in focus, and even then, that was the only change I made.

I don’t want it to sound like I think I’m better than people who do choose to use post-processing, or even that the people who use post-processing are ruining their images - not at all. It’s just that I personally think there is a line that is crossed when an image is taken as is from the camera to when it’s changed radically in post-processing. I also think that there are a lot of photographers out there, most of them newer ones, who rely on post processing, who think of it as a magic fix for any image they take. They shoot almost blindly I feel at times, with the mentality of ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t turn out, I’ll just fix it in Photoshop’. And that, admittedly, does get me down a bit. Yes Photoshop can help ‘fix’ an image to an extent, but it is in no way anywhere near as comparable or as good as getting the image done right when you press down on the shutter. I just wish more people could see that. 

Oh What Have You Done

Twisted Wheel

Twisted Wheel, 2009