Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2007/02/20
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Eric, No you did not offend me and sorry if I came across harsh...I have quite a few friends who are photoshop mavens and who are always showing off how they "fixed" a technically bad photo in photoshop...after hours of work. It would have been far better to have shot it correctly the first time and not spend so long fixing the image. Digital tends to make one sloppy because there is so much that can be corrected after the image is created. I try to get people to realize being lazy leads to being sloppy which in turn leads to more time on the back end. I know I have gotten more lax in my photography. When I shot chrome for 99 percent of my photography I always used an hand held and my exposures were pretty much always on. Now with digital my cameras stay on Aperture Priority most of the time. I do pay attention to where the meter is falling annd correct as needed, but the knowledge that the RAW file contains enough data to tweak any errors has made me pay less attention to exposure than I used to. What was laziness has now become a crutch and I do not think it is a good thing. Also as photographers we are supposed to know light....too many people who have learned in the digital age do not understand light or the colors of light and how to make that work for them to create interesting photography. In film we all knew tungsten was orange, a full cto made our strobes that color, old florescent were green, the new ones almost tungsten in color. If you know that you can gel your light one color and you lens another and get some nice effects...now too many people do not understand all of this. They just "fix it" at conversion. For example look at: http://www.mcclary.net/cpg148/displayimage.php?album=5&pos=5 I lit the main subject with a 10 degree grid spot with two full CTO gels. I set camera WB to a custom Tungsten setting (the Canon's stock tungsten setting sucks). The background was lit with strobes with 2 full plus blues on them. This made the subject very warm and the background very cold. Since I was shooting tungsten WB even the daylight coming in through the window was blue. I think the effect worked and created a nice photo to illustrate the story. The story was that this singer had written a song about finding her husband in bed with another woman, an actual event in her life, and had a hit from the song. Now if one did not understand color of light such an effect would have been far harder to create. IMHO. Eric wrote: > > > Sounds like I offended you. Sorry. That was not my intent. > > Why use it? Same reason I check the histogram occasionally, even though I > couldn't do that with film. Makes my life easier. Checking the histogram > doesn't degrade image quality. Neither does setting white balance after > the > fact when shooting raw. > > Setting the correct exposure is something that you can't change after the > exposure, so I'd assume that would be pretty important to do correctly up > front. -- Harrison McClary Harrison McClary Photography harrison@mcclary.net http://www.mcclary.net ImageStockSouth - Stock Photography http://www.imagestocksouth.com Tobacco Road: Personal Blog: http://www.mcclary.net/blog