Contrasting views

If you were at last nights talk by Andy Beel you may of just noticed a smile appear on my face when just after he started talking he made a massive sweeping statement that nearly made me shout “YES”!.

“With digital it’s not just what you do in the camera.

What you do with the file afterwards is just as, if not more important!”

 

I should imagine that quite a few of you that used to shoot film probably turned off at that point and got all nostalgic about how digital isn’t really photography and there isn’t any skill to it anymore. I’m sorry I just don’t agree with you. Well kind of. Digital photography is a totally different skill set to film photography. But then again it all depends on how you take your pictures. If you shoot JPG and only do a little or no editing on the computer afterwards then you’ll find that it’s more like traditional film photography where you need to get as much, if not all of it right in the camera. Whereas if you shoot in raw then I believe you should be aiming to purposely shoot for a fairly flat image that retains as much detail across the whole of the picture from the darkest shadow to the whitest white. Because your going to edit it on your computer. You are going to choose where the brightest highlights and the deepest, darkest blacks are going to be. Everything in that image is yours to do with as you will. Which is obviously a totally different way of seeing photography. Which is better? I can’t answer that but I know which is best for me. If you haven’t figured out which you prefer yet then just give both ways a go. Experiment & see just how long it takes you to get bored sat in front of the computer. If it’s only a few minutes then maybe you need to re evaluate the way you take your images and go back to shooting JPG. There’s no shame in that. It’s only stuck up self righteous buffoons (there’s a good word I haven’t seen used in ages) that will tell you otherwise.

 

Oh yeah I was talking about Andy wasn’t I. Sorry I get distracted easi………

 

Andy talked quite a bit about curves and custom curves so I thought I would give you a couple of links. That way if you wanted to you could have a bit of a read about them. If you want to discover more about Custom Curves or just find out some background on Curves you can follow either of those links. Yes they both use Lightroom to demonstrate it but you can replicate it in virtually any piece of editing software that has curves.

Practical Night

 

Some interesting talks last night on Lightroom, personal workflow and F stops. We even learnt a new highly technical phrase to use when talking about the built in Light meter on our camera’s; The pointy slidey thing. I for one will be using it as often as possible.

Thanks to Rich Price, Dan Thomas and Kev Spiers for giving the talks. Also thank you to Arthur Belton and Ian Coombs for giving the picture mounting demo’s.

If you have something interesting to say on any aspect of photography or want to demonstrate a technique you like then get in touch. We’re always looking out for people to do this kind of thing on practical night’s. Or if you have something you would like to see explained or want to practice a technique. Let us know.

My pictures shrunk in the wash!

If your on the clubs mailing list you already know that we have a couple of PDF's doing the rounds on how to resize your pictures so they can be entered into the club competitions. I'm basically just going to bore the pants off you now by repeating myself. We've got, not one, not two but THREE! (see surprised you there didn't I) tutorials on the website dealing with resizing your pictures. Two of them you already know about, the one's for Lightroom and Photoshop. The third was created by our very own Steve Hallam (there now he gets the blame if any of it is wrong) and shares the arcane art of resizing in Paint.net. If you've never heard of it then you should check it out. It's totally free and very good. The have a great community on their forums with lots of people regularly posting help and advice to anyone using the software. If you need a good piece of editing software for your photo's the best free option, if your using a windows pc, is probably going to be Paint.net.

To find the tutorials on resizing visit our website and goto the links page. Find the Reflex member downloads part and all of them are listed there. At the moment you only have those three tutorials and the competition rules available but we are planning on adding more soon. So if you want to know how to do something in Photo Editing Software or what settings you should be using to take a particular shot. Basically anything photo related. Get in touch!