Every Tuesday I bring you a tidbit of information meant to better your photography skills or simply enhance your appreciation of photography in general. This week’s tidbit has been inspired by the Ansel Adams exhibit I went to this afternoon at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego: the importance of post-processing.
Ansel Adams worked it
I’ve never been in love with Ansel Adams–I’ve never been in love with landscape work period–but the exhibition today gave me a new found respect for him and his work. Adams is quoted as saying “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance.” Yes, Adams put a lot of sweat and effort into getting to the perfect location, used amazing equipment for the time and then had a ton of patience while waiting for the perfect moment to click the shutter. And sure, he created some good images as a result. But how often have you looked at some of his work and though “I bet I could have taken that picture”? And yet…..creating the print was where Adams shined and where most of us would fall short…very very short. Adams agonized over the creation of his prints, spending countless hours meticulously adjusting the balance of chemicals in the darkroom, dodging and burning (making specific areas in the print darker and lighter) to perfection, making test print after test print until he got the combination of his printing techniques just so. Ansel understood that creating the image was only one half of the puzzle; the other (crucial) half was bringing that image to life on paper through the creation of the print. Clicking the shutter creates the score, creating the “print” is the performance of that score.
Today’s darkroom
In this day and age, most people don’t have darkrooms or even print their photos, but we have an even more powerful tool now called the computer to create our “prints”. And for many of us, your final prints will survive in photo sharing sites, personal websites and blogs, not on paper. And yet the idea still stands: what we do with an image after it’s been taken–during post-processing–can take a good image to a great image, a great image to an outstanding image. Heck, even just a couple simple things like adjusting exposure and increasing the contrast of an image can take it to the next level.
The challenge
Next time you have an image you’d like to print, take a couple extra minutes and do some basic adjustments before printing it–increase contrast, adjust the color so it’s closer to what you saw when you took the image, crop it so the composition is stronger. Picnik.com is a great (free) tool for people that don’t need professional level post-processing tools like Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop but want to give their personal photos that extra umph they deserve. And if you DO want to delve into the world of professional-level post-processing tools, reading books like Scott Kelby’s “The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers” is a great place to start.
Happy shooting from Vantage!
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Do you happen to have an extra copy of that book that could make it’s way to Afghanistan? They don’t have it in our local “Barnes and Najibanajad”.
Barnes and Najibanajad. That’s good. :) I actually saw the quote at an Ansel Adams exhibit here in San Diego. But check out http://www.photoquotes.com. I bet you’ll like it…..