New to PhotographyReview

I am fairly new to digital and I look forward to learning a lot from this site. I have spent many years photographing weddings and portraits with film cameras including 35mm, medium format and 4x5 view cameras. I have been using my Canon 10D mostly for travel and nature photos. So far I have not manipulated or improved my images in any way. I was always taught to crop in the viewfinder but I would like to improve contrast and other small adjustments when I purchase software. I am glad to be a member and I look forward to learning much.

JohnMichael

Welcome to the site. This is a good post, John. There are a lot of people, like you, who follow the "in-camera" aesthetic. And it's a worthy one - especially when it comes to cropping. Doing all of your framing in-camera is an accomplishment - even if you can't print your digital files with a filed-out :)

But you should do some editing to "optimize" your color and contrast. One major difference between digital SLR and shooting film is that the look of your images is your responsibility. With film, you choose a film type for the tone and contrast. With digital, the sensor determines your starting point, but the final look is left up to you. If you make good exposures and shoot RAW, you can pretty much replicate the look of any film type that you want - including any black and white film. That's both the beauty and the burden of digital.

I see a lot of people posting digital images on the Web and proclaiming, "No Photoshop" like it's an aesthetic and moral achievement. I believe this is a fundamental misunderstanding of digital technology and photography in general. Why should we accept what comes out of the camera as an end in itself. Ansel Adams, who most photographers revere, was the greatest photo manipulator of them all. He was the master of interpreting and squeezing the most out of his film. Since digital SLR images really have no particular look, the photographer is freed from the "in-camera" aesthetic trap and actually should be doing some post-processing. To not do some post-processing is to be selling your images short. Most people's cameras are set up so that images come out too flat, undersaturated, and not sharp enough.

All of my images have some post-processing done to them. I consider the original file to just be raw material to work with. I use masked Photoshop adjustment layers to do my optimization. They're just like dodging and burning in the darkroom, but much, much more powerful. I was a custom color printer for years and Photoshop blows away what was ever possible in the darkroom.

Hope my post doesn't come off as condescending. I just think that many people don't quite understand the reality of how the digital SLR captures images. And some photographers are just stuck on an aesthetic that's based on old tools and values. I still think composing in-camera is admirable and valid. But the ideal of not manipulating is silly and wasn't even valid when we were all still shooting film.

Welcome, again. Glad to have you. Sounds like you've got a ton of experience and I hope we get to learn a lot from you. We actually have a few photographers here who are moving in the opposite direction - they're abandoning their digital SLRs for large format. I'm sure they'd like to benefit from your experience. Here's a link to a thread on the ViewFinder forum that you might find interesting and might be able to contribute to: http://forums.photographyreview.com/...ad.php?t=24185

Photo-John I agree with you about post-processing work. One of the first things I learned while starting in b&w photography is dodging and burning in and I loved variable contrast papers. Of course what I am waiting on now is a moden enough computer that can support photoshop. Sad to say I am still using Windows 98 on a 7 year old computer.

I should also mention that what I am doing with the digital camera is for my own enjoyment. I still use film except when I shoot for a local studio and they do some post-processing on my images.

Hi, JohnMichael, and welcome to PR.

Your situation seems eeriely similar to what I experienced with digital. Having jumped into digital with both feet less than a year ago, I found the information and recommendations on this website to be immensely helpful. For example, I did not know the full advantages of shooting RAW and now everything I shoot is in RAW mode. As Photo-John explained, having good post-processing skills and software is absolutely essential to bringing out all the detail, contrast, and colors out of these files. I would never show a straight, out-of-the-camera RAW file (except as a demo).

While I personally still don't agree with "heavy" digital editing (splicing images, cloning out large portions of the image, changing/adding colors of specific areas, etc), post processing is a necessity.

By the way, I too live in Ohio, shoot with the 10D, and used Windows 98 (with Photoshop 5.0) until recently :)