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.

Before and After

When photographing live events such as concerts, we like to compose the perfect shot all the time yet the reality is we can’t. Live stages are usually cluttered with lots of stuff like mic stands, amps, lights, monitors and assorted other distractions. When we are learning composition in photography, we learn that items that don’t help the image hurt it. This is often the case in concert photography too.

A friend who also shoots live music recently posted some of her work with before and after shots to illustrate how some of her work is edited. It got me to thinking about my own work and I got looking around at some photos that might be better images if they had a bit of help. After all, photography is art, right?

Some people are purists and feel that photos should never be altered. That subject is often debated in photography circles but my personal feeling is that my work is my art and I can do whatever I wish to make it my own creation. Another factor that I hear a lot is that some people who don’t wish to spend time at a computer processing. I actually enjoy my time processing images, watching them take shape from raw data to art.

The above images are Max Kermen of Arkells with some simple edits that I feel makes it a much stronger image and really, the biggest change is just simply removing a mic stand and a person. Both of these items were a distraction in the frame. The smoke was added just for a bit of interest in the new negative space that I created.

I would love to hear any thoughts you may have. Feel free to leave a message.

Photo of the Week #143

Today has been a bit of a weird day. Spent part of the day playing with images, both landscape and music. I came up with this one for my blog post as it kind of spoke to me. Our weather today was also pretty chilly and gloomy.