by EspressoSquirrel » Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:52 pm
some people get a bit funny, when i suggest this, but you shouldn't spend all your time taking photos, give yourself a good bit of time to process, crop and dare i say it manipulate your photos. Shoot only in RAW and don't be afraid of going crazy with altering it. Adobe lightroom or iPhoto/apature are digital darkrooms, and when i did black and white photography I learned how to use all the tricks first, sometimes way over the top but at least I learnt all the tools i needed.
when I start putting gradients and colour shifts all over my photos sometimes people get very worked up as if I am changing reality somehow. But most of the time its all about showing in the image what I could see being there.
in the darkroom i would always burn in the tops of my images to stop the sky from going to white, but i put a gradient on in lightroom people think i'm cheating.
a well cropped photo is very important too, don't be restricted to 6:4 images either.
The other benefit is you spend a lot longer looking at your photos, its easy now to take hundreds of photos and often you just skip through and throw so much away . But you are throwing away learning material, carefully assess what is good and bad about each image, sometimes you find a keeper in something you first thought was a mistake.
silvia and rocky