When you are traveling, you will more often than not find yourself at some great locations at the worst possible time. We were on Skye for only the day and having a fair drive back to where we were staying, time didn’t allow me to wait for the light I truly wanted. The original photo in this case had an empty blue sky……I hate plain blue skies. :) I made a lot of photographs that day but none were what I was hoping for. The thing is, you have to make the best of what you get, right? I decided to play with new skies to see if I could make the image look more pleasing to me. I really kind of like this one finally.
Monitor Calibration, Do I need it?
What is meant when someone mentions calibrating a monitor? Your operating system cannot be expected to get colours accurate considering there is an almost infinite combination of hardware available nowadays. Calibration is a process where you use a colour measuring device to measure the colours displayed on your screen. Together with the software, it compares them to established standards and corrects the displayed colours by way of an icc file.
Does this mean everyone needs to calibrate their monitors? That depends, where are your photos going and who is consuming them? If your photos end up floating around Instagram or Facebook, the need for calibration may not be important to you as your photos are being viewed on many different systems and monitors and it’s safe to assume that the majority of them are not calibrated either so you have no control over what your photos look like on those machines.
If you are a person who likes to print your images to hang on your wall, sell, give as gifts or what have you, you likely would benefit from calibrating. When you send your photos to a print house, colour becomes more important. Professional print houses typically take great care to assure their equipment is representing colour accurately so if your files are off due to inaccurate colour handling, it could cause trouble that you won’t like later. Besides colour rendition, most calibration devices also help you to set brightness and contrast of your monitor. This is pretty important also as most monitors are set way too bright, they want to draw attention in the showroom, right? A monitor that is set too bright will produce dark images when printed. If you are experiencing prints that are too dark or too light, I would bet that calibration is your culprit.
Photo of the Week #146
I am not burdened with being a faithful servant of the truth - Mark Littlejohn
There are many different attitudes regarding processing in photography. There are people who don’t believe in cropping for instance, even to the point of not straightening a crooked horizon as this practice is actually removing pixels. There are people who shoot only in jpeg and take great pains to “get it right” in camera and do almost no post processing work at all. In my own opinion, philosophies like this are just restricting your creativity and enjoyment.
I am not here to tell others how they should shoot or process your images, only what I do for my own work. I used to be extremely bad for shooting to make others happy…….shooting for likes and follows if you will. I eventually came to the conclusion that by doing that, I wasn’t making myself happy or being true to my own creativity. My current philosophy is that I need to shoot and process for myself first and if others enjoy whatever I’m doing, that’s fantastic, but if not, that’s ok too.
The photograph below is a shot that I have always loved for the light. There is something about golden hour light that sneaks in under heavy clouds, love it! The problem was that the image just lacked interest, the sky was a solid colour with almost no detail. I went through my sky folder and found one that would be useful for my purposes. I dropped the sky in using the gradient tool and after some blending, made it work. I now love the photo and hope others do too, but if not……………I made it for me.
Photo of the Week #145
The photo below is one that I never really looked that close at before. I love how you can see the crowd holding out hands trying to catch the “money” that Alice was flicking off the tip of the very real sword. He has done this during “Billion Diollar Babies” for many years. as part of his show. I can’t say I listen to a lot of Alice Cooper these days, the whole experience of photographing was a lot of fun. A trip back to my teen years.
Photo of the Week #144
It’s interesting to hear the questions I get asked about shooting live music. It’s a genre of photography that not everyone can just go and do so they seem to have a lot of questions. I know that I am very lucky to have the privilege to practice what I do. Colour related issues are my biggest challenge. No matter what colours are happening on a stage, I still try to get as “normal” skin tones as is possible. Red and that blue/purple light is the worst of all. Not only is there the obvious colour cast but it can sometimes rob you of detail too. I often struggle with this but this Sam Roberts show was especially heavy in the blue/purple range. I was able to get an acceptable skin tone after considerable time.
