Cottage Roof from "A Change of Pace."
Post production editing never was a huge event for me in the old, old days of film based photography. As a dedicated large format photographer, I and others of my type had an investment in the photograph we were making. We had to lug our gear all over creation, to set up and manipulate the camera to make a photograph. We had the cost of the film (which became increasingly more expensive as time wore on). We then had the investment in our time for processing negatives and prints. This investment of time and money made us old timers very stingy with exposures. We had to do a tremendous amount of real world (before we set the camera up) editing as well as editing in the camera before we committed the scene to film. There were times when I gave up on compositions because what I thought was a good idea did not pan out on the ground glass. If it wasn’t on the ground glass, there was no way to “fix it in photoshop.” That’s what led me to the observation that not everything in front of a camera needs to be photographed.
While it might seem I wax nostalgic on film photography, nothing could be further from the truth. Today’s equipment is so much better and makes it easier to produce a good looking image with much less work than the view camera I used for decades.
This resulting ease of making technically perfect pictures and the perceived notion that all art is wonderful results in the proliferation of really mediocre images. The “top ten” images still number ten, but they have to emerge from an exponentially larger mass of really unworthy images.
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Get ready for the daily blogs from the Annual Brooks and Joe Photo safari starting this Friday at this blog site!
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